[ WP ] A new antidepressant is launched . It does the job , but it radically changes who you are and what you like to do . People who take it like their new personality and who they 've become . Their ( former ) friends miss the original person .

“ To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was harder for him than any fasting or prayer, and it was his constant failure to do this to his own satisfaction which caused in his soul at last a sensation of spiritual dryness together with a growth of doubts and scruples. ” 
 
 He had long before written these lines on the paper over which he now fixed his gaze. The words echoed through his head as he considered the pill before him. To merge his life in the common tide. To drown his pride in the pursuit of happiness. It was a consideration that he could not fully contend. He here was, better than them, better than those uncouth masses that constituted the world. And yet unhappy. It was not amour-propre which drove him here, was not the opinion of others that he neither sought nor cherished. He often mused that they were still so willing and eager to bestow it upon him. He was by all outside accounts intelligent and likable. Yet he remained unhappy. And so once more he turned his attention to what lay before him. 
 
 He gazed upon the minuscule tablet. To give up his personality, his intelligence, the essence of his being! What would he become? He was not worried about the success of his other self. The pill had bestowed without fail an unequaled personal happiness and drive to succeed. It had made its imbibers the most successful among the average, the most equal among equals. His spiritual essence would be gone, his mortal essence would remain, changed, inhabited by a new beast, evolved. The next level of the common man. He imagined it thus. 
 
 He thought once more of his contempt for those he considered so far beneath him. In a fit of passion he declared that he would brave a thousand miseries rather than join them in their ignorance. Yet still he recalled the love that he felt for them. Those pitiable creatures! They mulled in their irrelevance! They were empirical at best, the products of a creator that had left them incomplete in some sort of detestable farce. They could not seek enlightenment, could not seek to merge their souls with the divine in a way that he had sought with such zeal. To deprive them of his guidance would be to betray their protection, a duty which he had bestowed upon himself in an act of guardianship. 
 
 Yet what tutelage had he brought forth for them so far? He had too often wallowed in his misery, fallen prey to the same debilitating effects which so often crippled them from even attempting to reach the divine elements of humanity for which he sought valiantly pursued. Cut him and did he not bleed? Give him drink and watch his actions fall so removed from his intellectual aspirations as to inspire doubts as to their propensity in general. No, he was not better than them. He knew it in his heart. He could wish, could strive, could struggle to attain the eternal, but he would never transcend those mortal bounds so pervasive amongst the virus of humanity. 
 
 He sighed. It was these fluctuations in character which had originally influenced him to consider the pill. At the height of his pride he was Alexander, nay Hercules himself, a son of gods placed among men for their benefit and guiding. At the depth of his self-loathing he was the basest of men, not worthy among their presence, his failings enough to condemn him to the lowest and most foul regions of the hell within his mind. The two could not be adequately reconciled except in a countenance that he kept carefully tailored. In his mind he was never but an extreme. The pill was a way to end that, to dethrone Olympus and bar Tartarus. He would never again taste the clouds of prideful ecstasy. He would never again suffer the pains of his darkest moments. Was this not humanity itself? The suffering, the triumph, laid bare in his mind if not in his life? Or was humanity the painless, yet inconsequential trudge through the muddied waters of thought and feeling that composed the mass of his genetic peers. 
 
 He reached for the pill, withdrew his hand as though it had been burned. He knew the battle for his soul would rage for many days. He might only guess at the victor now. His soul, his essence, his humanity, was it to be relinquished or realized? 

