Marlette embedded this advice in his section on drugs, but the point went far beyond substance abuse. He was arguing against all forms of emotional anesthesia — not just chemicals, but the psychological defenses people build to avoid feeling the full intensity of being alive. The dark humor of 'there's plenty of time to be comatose, like for the rest of eternity' was vintage Marlette — a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who had spent his career finding the joke inside the most serious subjects. The reference to eternity wasn't flippant; it was a genuine memento mori, a reminder that the capacity to feel anything at all is temporary and precious. Marlette worried especially about 'children of privilege' who might drug themselves 'to level the playing field, to dumb yourselves down' out of guilt about their advantages. But the broader message applied to anyone who was tempted to numb themselves to life's difficulty. Pain and joy, Marlette insisted, are not opposites but partners — you cannot have one without the other. The price of avoiding pain is the loss of joy.