One of my favourite drugs is television. Its consistent delivery of inane catharsis has often helped me escape the rough patches in my life.

And, at times, it transcends that.

I suppose Person of Interest represents one of those times. Not in a way that makes the show worth watching on any kind of an ongoing basis, but its premise bellows an unacknowledgeable truth about our lives from high atop Mount Primetime.

The irrelevant list.

One of the show’s central characters constructed an ethereal surveillance contraption for the US government, so that it could prevent—you guessed it—terrorist attacks. The problem is that his machine was so good it saw all types of misfortune and murder, mostly concerning individuals of little or no consequence to national security. He had to teach it to separate the information it collected into relevant and irrelevant lists. The relevant list is undoubtedly passed directly to SEAL Team 6. The irrelevant list is simply deleted.

Most of us will never have our suspicious compounds raided in a daring nighttime assault. Yet we cling to the belief that we are on that relevant list. That whether or not Google or Facebook tracks the way we browse the internet matters much beyond their interest in selling us products.

These interests are not the men in the shadows with a pipe and a burlap sack. And they’re also not the mysterious stranger ready to blow apart the bad guys’ kneecaps.

Most of us will know these archetypes only ever through television, with the machinery of our world watching us watch them.

Sorting us out.