After an exhaustive and comprehensive study, doctors have finally been able to pin down the vague but persistent set of symptoms plaguing everyone and come to the surprising conclusion that every single American human suffers from seasonal depression.

“It’s true,” Dr. Kim Bass, the lead scientist in the study announced dully from a podium, “not that it does anyone much good to know it. But now you know it. Everyone has it. That sinking feeling in your heart when you start to notice the sun setting at four in the afternoon? The early-morning nausea that keeps you from getting out of bed? The seizing, flushing, frenzied attacks that grip you alone in the car as you barrel down the road in the dark to your windowless office building; that’s seasonal depression, and you have it, and everyone has it, even the people in Hawaii have it, they just don’t know it yet.”

“Everybody has it and nothing’s any good.”

Scientists were at a loss when it came to practical treatments. “I guess we could just move,” Dr. Bass said quietly, as if only to herself, hunched over a chair mechanically eating a peanut butter and Fluff sandwich, “but where would we go?” She burst into tears. “Our whole lives are here.”

“Those stupid lamps don’t do anything,” she added, folding the rest of the sandwich into her mouth and gesturing furiously at a very expensive, carefully calibrated light therapy chamber. “It’s a stupid fucking lamp. It’s not the sun. It’s not summer. It’s not anything.”

“It’s not anything,” she concluded, before burning the rest of her lab notes for warmth.