The internet has decided that modern humans are developing zoochosis, the madness of caged animals. The claim is older than TikTok, and the truth underneath it is more uncomfortable than either the believers or the scoffers want it to be. For most of the 1990s, the most famous resident of the Central Park Zoo was a 700-pound polar bear named Gus who spent up to twelve hours a day swimming the same figure eight through the same small pool. Back and forth. The same loop, traced into the water until it wore a groove in the day. Reporters called him neurotic, depressed, flaky, and bipolar, and New Yorkers half-adopted him as a mascot for their own condition. In 1994 the zoo paid an animal behaviorist twenty-five thousand dollars to find out what was wrong, and the verdict passed into legend. Gus, the behaviorist said, was bored and mildly crazy in the way that a lot of people in New York are. The zoo redesigned his habitat, hid his food inside blocks of ice, gave him toys, and made him the first zoo animal in recorded history to be put on Prozac. The swimming eased. It never fully stopped. Until the day he died in 2013, there were afternoons when Gus would throw himself back into the water and trace the loop again, and again, and again.

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