empirical
Explanation
The comic is a four-panel strip showing a woman visiting what appears to be an ancestral homeland. In the first two panels, she joyfully runs through a beautiful landscape, declaring: "The moment I walked here I felt a connection to my ancestors. I felt home."
In the third panel, her tone shifts dramatically: "However, subsequent double-blind studies showed I couldn't differentiate it from similar landscapes at a rate better than chance, so I've had to abandon the theory that this place is deeply meaningful to me."
In the fourth panel, she is still running through the same beautiful landscape but now says: "God, it sucks being an empiricist."
The joke satirizes the tension between subjective emotional experience and scientific rigor. The woman had a genuine, powerful feeling of ancestral connection to a place -- the kind of moving experience people commonly report when visiting their family's homeland. But because she is committed to empiricism, she subjected her own feelings to a controlled experiment (double-blind studies comparing similar landscapes) and found no statistically significant difference, forcing her to reject her own deeply felt experience as unfounded.
The humor lies in the absurdity of applying rigorous scientific methodology to something as personal and subjective as a feeling of belonging. Most people would simply enjoy the emotional experience, but a truly committed empiricist would feel intellectually obligated to test it -- and then be devastated when the data doesn't support the feeling. The final "it sucks being an empiricist" captures the comic tragedy of someone whose commitment to evidence-based thinking robs them of comforting narratives that most people enjoy uncritically.