What's Ben Most Anxious About Today?

It's the first rule of the internet, isn't it? Be careful what you put out there: once online, it's there for everyone to see, for the rest of eternity.

Yet here we all are, spaffing our thoughts all over social media, distributing our photographs whether mundane or indecorous, and generally putting every last bit of our personal lives out there on blogs, vlogs, tweets, tiktoks, snapchats, instas and, er, podcasts.

(This is entirely a work of fiction, by the way. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. And that goes for all of the other stories on Neurotic Literature, got it?)

Probably, too many of us have woken up to discover that the brave, bold post of yesterday evening is the huge error of judgement of the here and now. But for Ben, who perhaps should found a more conventional way to deal with his anxiety (say, counselling, prayer, or good old fashioned repression), an unwise video turns out to be just the first step into an uncertain new world of online celebrity...

A story about how one man's therapy turns out to be everyone else's entertainment.