bottling
Explanation
This comic takes the common therapeutic advice about not "bottling up your feelings" and subjects it to absurd literalism. A therapist-like figure tells someone they need to stop bottling up their feelings and release them or they'll "explode under pressure." The patient objects: "But that's just a metaphor!"
The therapist doubles down, explaining that the patient has "decoded your entire existence into discrete quanta of experience," compressed it with "a grid," and stored it in a "cask in the cellar of reality" -- an increasingly elaborate and ridiculous extension of the bottling metaphor treated as literal truth. The patient protests: "Yeah, that's dumb."
Then, in the final panel, the therapist appears to actually uncork something, and the patient explodes in a "glorious burst of light and energy" -- proving the metaphor was literal after all.
The humor comes from the escalating commitment to treating a dead metaphor as physical reality. The comic satirizes self-help and therapy culture's tendency to use metaphors so frequently that they begin to substitute for actual understanding. The reversal at the end -- where the absurd literal interpretation turns out to be correct -- is a classic SMBC move, rewarding the ridiculous premise with an even more ridiculous payoff. It also pokes fun at how "bottling up emotions" has become such a cliche that we've stopped questioning whether it actually means anything.