Like a torrent into a funnel

This is not your perfect life, this is not your American Dream, this is your American life. This is your dystopia, a grizzly future world where technology reigns over ever-deepening chaos and society shrinks and grows in unison, medievally bifurcated. They dreamt it, you consider it, you feign an interest in it... you never realize that you're living it.

You find your small miseries in between the near-magic you take for granted, and you focus on them as if they define you. You cope with a heavy heart, never forgetting or ignoring that you are forced to cope, because that's the human condition - at least, it's the human condition as you've been conditioned to interpret it. You recognize that you don't have it so bad compared to the atrocities you're aware of in distant and unfamiliar places, but that doesn't prevent you from suffering from the poisons life throws at you.

Misery finds a way. As long as it's left the slightest opening, it will reach you. Build a levee.