I am having a hard time coping with the current simulation. It’s excessively stupid, almost like it’s a joke I’m not in on. It can’t be real but it is. I keep intending to set the dial to another channel when I fall asleep, but every day I wake up in the dumbest timeline again. I’m trying not to take it personally.
For mental health and boredom reasons, I’ve been spending less time on Instagram and more time exploring the cosmos in a video game called No Man’s Sky.
In No Man’s Sky you wake up on a strange planet and you don’t know much about yourself or where you are, but you start to piece things together as you run around the strange landscape, collecting resources to fix up your spaceship so you can get the fuck out of there. (As a child of rural America who ran away as soon as possible, this theme resonates with me.)
And then you set about finding new planets, new lifeforms, new star systems, and eventually new galaxies. You get a better ship that goes faster and farther. You construct better tools that help you extract more complicated resources. You see things that horrify you. You see things that leave you in awe. You accumulate the tiniest slivers of knowledge about the worlds around you and the creative forces making and destroying them.
I’m 80 hours into the game and I still don’t know who I am or why I’m there. All I know is that I feel a compulsion to push forward, to probe the darkness, to move at every moment toward the information that feels just beyond my reach.
This is a simulation I can get behind, unlike the real one I’m living in. There’s beauty and poetry in there, plus plenty of ritual to soothe the overheated brain. One of the best parts is the camera function, where you can freeze frame and move the “eye” around to get the perfect shot. You can even move the sun if you want.
When the camera goes off, the sun goes back to where it belongs.
Leave a Reply