Mores

So you grow up with a screen in front of you that entertains but tells you nothing about real life, and when you turn it off it remains in your vision without you even realizing it and it reduces the world before you to a collection of stereotypes and stock situations, so you're never actually listening, you're just fitting everything to those stock situations like a trained parrot. You're overlaying certain patterns—love at first sight, clarity of purpose, the underdog is always right, effort begets reward—and ignoring reality—ambiguity, cognitive dissonance, working against your own interests, not knowing your own motives, nuance, etc.—because it doesn't fit the narrative.

—Winston Rowntree, Subnormality.

Dear old Rocky makes me look like a publicity agent for the barmy metrop.

To have to come and live in New York! To have to leave my little cottage and take a stuffy, smelly, over-heated hole of an apartment in this Heaven-forsaken, festering Gehenna. To have to mix night after night with a mob who think that life is a sort of St. Vitus's dance, and imagine that they're having a good time because they're making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten. I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn't come near the place if I hadn't got to. There's a blight on it. It's got moral delirium tremens. It's the limit. The very thought of staying more than a day in it makes me sick.

—Rocky, in Carry On, Jeeves, by P.G. Wodehouse.