[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about--was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia. Adam Gopnik
About This Quote

The author of this quote, Tom Junod, is a journalist who has been writing for Esquire magazine. He is a writer that will always look at things from a different perspective. In this quote he talks about the sounds that the human mind makes when it thinks of a disaster. He says that we have been hearing audio of disaster since the beginning of time and we have been imagining these disasters since the beginning of time.

This audio, which is called “the soundtrack of our time” is not really a soundtrack at all but rather a series of noises that go on in our subconscious mind, causing anxiety and panic. These noises are often created by ourselves when we imagine ourselves in a situation where everything around us has gone wrong and we have no way out. The author then goes on to talk about how this audio leads to paranoia and fear, creating a delusion that all around us is going wrong and it is up to other people to save us from this catastrophe.

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