Don’t Become an NPC
Growing up, there was this MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) that I enjoyed playing called MapleStory!
At the time, I really didn’t think too much about the game. It was just a fun way to pass the time. During my adolescent years, many of my friends and people in my circle enjoyed playing the game. It involved picking a class, fighting monsters, and levelling up. You could do quests (individually or with a party) become a capitalist tycoon in the “FM” (Free Market), or just form guilds and hunt — and you could even get married ‘in game’. In the game, there were also characters that were created by the GM (“Game Master”) that were called NPCs (Non-Player Characters), and these NPCs were there to perform their pre-ordained roles — mainly to repeat some scripted lines at you and guide you through some task. NPCs were everywhere — they operated the store fronts, taught your characters more skills and abilities, or even told you stories so you could embark on new quests and adventures! MapleStory was different from other games for me, because it allowed the player the freedom to choose how they wanted their game experience to be like. It wasn’t as if you needed to ‘beat’ the game by defeating some boss like rescuing Princess Peach from Bowser in Mario games — instead, there was so much flexibility and freedom in how people chose to play the game. Some people really enjoyed optimizing their skill build for the strongest stats and attacking prowess and focussed on levelling up quickly, whereas others just liked to log on to chat and connect with friends and be part of an online community. In all respects, there was no wrong way to play the game.
For the most part, it was all enjoyable. And it wasn’t until very recently that I thought about MapleStory again.
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this was the first time I felt my world begin to close in on itself. As an internal auditor working with a multi-national company, one of the best perks about the job I had was the travel aspect — I was able to fly to different places around the world on the company’s dollar, and although the work may not have been as meaningful as I hoped, the thrill of being somewhere new to work and explore was always exciting, and having that aspect be part of my work made it feel like it would enough. I was able to travel to Japan and China in 2019, and I was looking forward to seeing Sweden in the spring of 2020.
However, once all borders closed down, I realized that all there was to my job (for the foreseeable future) would be the work itself. And as the months of COVID wore on, and as 2021 approached and I really sat with the work, I began to realize that it didn’t spark joy for me. Every morning, I would find myself more exhausted and less motivated. I could no longer incentivize myself to do my job in ways that I had so easily been able to do in the past. I began to feel my performance deteriorating, and I began to enter into each workday with a sense of dread. With the pandemic ongoing, many of the activities that I used to participate in on the evenings and weekends disappeared. I could no longer go to the gym, play in local recreational sport teams nor could I even round up a group of friends for a night out. As I realized that I could no longer distract myself by channelling my energy towards activities that previously had brought me joy, I knew a breaking point was approaching.
It was this forced slow down in my life that sparked in me a desire to deeply question what I was doing and why. I found my curiosity returning, and surprising even myself — I found philosophy. I spent countless hours listening to a philosophy podcast and inside of me, I realized that I was starting to really pick at this knot that had been buried so deep in my heart. Upon discovering the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, I binged all three episodes in a day (I would HIGHLY recommend for anyone interested!) and stayed up the whole night, recounting my learnings. By 6AM the following morning, I found myself covered in my own tears, as I realized that along my journey, I had not been true to who I was. I was too busy being rational and optimizing for safety and stability, and I was crying, because I realized that the person that I was now, was not the person that I wanted to be.
I knew that if I continued on the life I was leading, that I would become an NPC. Every day was scripted and monotonous and I no longer felt like I had any agency. I felt that every day, I needed to show up and work and make money. And then with that money, I needed to save for large expensive purchases like a home. And then once I got that home, I would need to continue to make more money, to buy a bigger home, and to buy more things to furnish my big home, and to get married and have kids and continue to work and work and work and watch TV in the evenings and go on two or three paltry vacations a year and then one day I would die and — THAT’S IT. That would be my life. As a dear friend of mine put it — I felt as if I was becoming a scared, comfort-seeking, gluttonous pig. If I continued on this route, all I could see myself doing was living this boring safe life like an NPC, doing the same thing over and over again, for the sake of continued comfort so that I could keep accumulating more and more things, in this BDE measuring competition with my yuppie peers.
Above all else, I implore you — to not let yourself become an NPC. You must remember that you are always a player character in your own life. You have more agency than you know. Do not let your actions be guided by mimicking those that you see around you. You are not some magpie — do not instantly become enraptured by the next shiny thing and foolishly chase after it, just because those around you may be doing so. Be true to yourself, and be brave enough to exert your own will to power.
Some time after this realization, I took a leave of absence from work and have been unemployed for almost the past month. I have been dappling in learning to be a software engineer, but perhaps I may consider going back to school, and I’m eyeing some institutions in Asia. I obviously cannot know what the future holds, and every other day — I find myself grappling with the fear and uncertainty, and it is an absolutely agonizing torment. But it is only through pain that we grow — it is only through pain and suffering that we are able to become new and better versions of ourselves. Even if life is a meaningless simulated game of MapleStory, always remember that you are a player character, and that you can choose your own adventure.
Don’t become an NPC.
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering
— Friedrich Nietzsche
