In Huxley’s Brave New World, the citizens of the future state take a substance known as “soma” to drown their worries and embark on a holiday of happy thoughts. “A gramme is better than a damn” is a saying seeded deep into their minds, conditioning them to always pick the easy way out and kill off any hint of bad emotions with a gramme of soma, or three.

In some ways much of what we do today is a reflection of soma. Drugs and alcohol are the easy examples of this, but on another level a lot of today’s media is also soma. Look through the pages of a newspaper, or watch a popular news channel and see that most of the stuff being covered is completely irrelevant to your life. […] People consume it for the sake of consumption, not for the sake of acting on the information. It’s a ritual–you read the news because it’s what you do, not because it’s what you choose to do in order to accomplish a goal.

The reason for this is that this media actually acts as soma–it drowns out your thoughts and anxieties. It does it by flooding you with information at a rapid pace, leaving your brain busy trying to process it.[…] A busy mind cannot contemplate, and a mind that cannot contemplate cannot sink into perturbation. In this way, all this consumption of media online and offline is a way to kill off deep thinking–a cause of our anxieties.

Dmitry Fadeyev — Soma