Are You Sentient or an NPC?
A buddy of mine, who I’ll call “Chris” because that’s his name, did an incredible thing. Something I literally never would have imagined, and probably couldn’t have imagined.
You might be thinking, “What did he do? Climb K2 on a unicycle? Played fiddle with a carp?” Well, no. He simply installed a motorized TV mount in a discrete place he could hide or reveal with a remote control.
He shared the video:
Two things amazed me:
First, that he could even think of such a thing.
Second: the way he imposed his will over a Thing That Enslaves. He’s no Luddite, but he knows that making the TV the focus of a room is bad for his family’s soul. So, he literally put it in its place.
Chris saw a possibility where most of us would have just accepted the limitations of the environment and “made do.”
I asked him if he’d always been a happy and positive person, because I figured that was a prerequisite for creative solutions. I expected him to tell a story about how he’d had to overcome some darkness. But no. He said, “I’ve always been almost annoyingly happy. My base state is happy.” He did concede that he gets depressed like anyone else, but for the most part he’s blessed with happiness and “high energy levels.”
In other words, he’s clearly a psychopath.
Seriously, though, I’m happy for freaks like him. What a blessing - or a curse, if you believe such natural gifts carry fearsome responsibilities with them. Many (most?) of us fall into a different category. We’re either embittered by our imprisonment of our circumstances, or worse, we’re NPCs that lack enough self-awareness to even know to be bitter.
NPC’s: “Non-Player Characters.” If you haven’t heard that term, it comes from video games. They’re machine characters - no human being drives them. They’re used for plot movement, tasks, texture, etc. They have no will, no desire, no thought whatsoever because they’re just subroutines. Not even AIs. However, as game technology has developed, they’ve leapt right over the Uncanny Vally (LINK) to mimic people pretty well.
You can see where this is going. For awhile, the right wing in particular used the term to describe the disciples of CNNMSNBCBBC and the rest of the cultural commissars who zealously evangelized for the Thing du jour. Not to equivocate, but that same right wing has some trouble with playing to type as well…
At the time, I thought it was a demeaning term. De-humanizing. “Othering,” to use the all-purpose cudgel of the liberal arts jackboots. But now I think it’s the perfect term. “NPCs” faithfully execute their programming to the last curly bracket.
But then, we all start our turn in the Matrix, don’t we? Marinating in a vat of cultural goo, jacked in to a system that gives us everything we need… And oftentimes it’s only another someone or something that can break us out. For me it was the company I started by accident. More specifically, it was the eighteen hours per day of the most exhausting physical and mental labor I’d ever experienced, spread out over a decade, while building a family. To keep it interesting, somebody welded the escape hatch shut, and, just for giggles, shut the lights off and threw in a pack of honey badgers sexually attracted to insecurity.
It was literally do or die. And when I did, my assumptions died, or started to. I began to see that I could do anything. It cost a lot - comfort, time, and damn near my marriage (final word on that: TBD). But the massive upshot was this: awareness. Not necessarily wisdom, and certainly not sainthood, but…awareness. “Waaaaaaait a minute,” came the revolutionary thought. “What if I’m able to do something else?”
Or better yet, what if I could be something else?
I’ve re-written this section several times. It is so easy to use words like, “awake,” or “arrived.” That’s sentimental BS I never want to actually believe. Hell, I was writing trash like that in paper journals long before I even had this thing called a “word processor.” It’s the self-aggrandizing garbage of people always trying to “find themselves.”
That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about simple awareness; the realization that we have the power to write our own scripts.
So, what do you do when you finally realize you can choose your own path? Well, step one is to have a stiff drink. The horrible lightness of freedom can drive you crazy. The rest of it? That’s up to you. Whatever your Thing is, it’s going to take psychotic levels of courage and persistence. Chances are, it’ll be a lonely path that makes sense to nobody. Every single thing you do will be in a lonely void where even you doubt your sanity.
It’s all good, though. You’ll be sentient.
PS: Of course, there are massive limits to all this “follow your own path” shtuff: there may very well be a Plan for our lives that most likely runs counter to the tidy little plans we have for ourselves; a mile-high, obsidian-walled maze that laughs at our intentions, but I’ll have to think about one later. Paradoxes are fun for strip mall sophists like me.