I’ve become fixated on a dangerous idea. Whether its true or not doesn’t diminish its danger, it couldn’t possibly be true and yet it could make itself true. It’s a wider idea than I can think about at all at once. A little bit like the sun, but instead of hurting your eyes if you try to look at it isn’t there, because it covers everything. So here it is: the entire world is a video game or a simulation/, and I am the player, in a sense, even though the world is me, and I am trying to defeat my ‘self’ and graduate to the next level. Now you of course immediately summon a dozens iterations of this idea, The Matrix, Baudrillard, Plato’s Cave, Second Life, and I, we, should applaud ourselves for you thinking that so quickly. I never claimed to originate this idea, only obsess over it, and that response strengthens my argument. In this conception of being, everything that is noticed is significant, either as a clue or a red herring. The whole existence is working together to defeat itself by forcing the realization/ upon this selected sliver designated as me that ‘I’ have never existed and will never exist, just like the rest of everything. So every possible detail of anything I have ever noticed is either the world trying to suggest this to itself or deny it. Now you say this is solipsistic, which I can’t deny, but if everything is working in tandem like I say, you are I speaking through me trying to convince yourself this is either so or otherwise. You’ve already had every idea and every idea has already had you, with each one loosening or tightening me and you’s ‘I’, but we could be anyone, our identity will fade at the designated moment. Sometimes I think of the mechanical aspect of this idea, and what we actually or will be when this game is completed. I have nothing to go by other than how forcefully an idea has presented itself in the world and what I think of when I concentrate. The idea of the soul and how I feel it has never been adequately explained- because my true form cannot be reduced to the comparatively low resolution/ of this universe which can only display three dimensions in most situations. Or the concept of religion is actually keeping us here, with the subtle suggestion of the afterlife meaning that the rules that apply here carry over and are actually all that exists, and your personal skepticism coupled with a periodic strong attraction to religion that always fades just as quickly is a possible proof of falsity. That clause illustrates the danger nicely, you must only believe in something for it to be true, an idea you’ve always hated but could never stop from indulging. Speculation that the great figures of history, especially the ones that promoted transcendence, Buddha, Jesus, Zoroaster, L. Ron Hubbard, they are either you but your clock ran out, the high score board of this game, or a distraction from the true winners, the ones who faded away nameless and were not reincarnated. Also unclear if the player from outside the world that we are is is playing by choice or if they even have choice, if others of their kind have tried iterations of this universe that we have memory of or can never access, or if there is only one doing this over and over, perhaps in search of a purpose. Sometimes when I get in a delirious state of giving my idea for the world a lot of power, I can imagine where all the shapes, colors, sounds, tastes, sensations. ways of time that are relevant to solving the puzzle are displayed for an infinitesimal instant, the big band before the booting up of the universe. Why all the computer terminology? It’s only been getting more popular, so it’s an avenue worth pursuing. How to conceive of pain is different, haven’t you noticed your tendency to deny it though it clearly exists? The totality of suffering explained by a few splotches of color, the sound of screaming which can be dissociated from its emotion and become just another thing. Perhaps we are actually doing more poorly than any previous player, no one ever took longer than an organism with a few cells lumped together and the game is trying to end itself through increasingly elaborate means, maybe we are a criminal that is hiding here, the outside beings can’t end it because we are a master manipulator and they can’t enter the game because every time it gets close to the end we have a mechanism rigged to lie to ourself again to stay safe. This could explain the prevalence of ideas of sin, guilt, boredom, how negativity seems to win out. How pleasure is always assumed and often proven to have a foundation that is false or incomplete. Or even on a simpler level, the importance of shapes like the circle, triangle and square... but you see how this philosophy promotes the indulgence of itself by neatly explaining anything that every happened without having to catalog or even be aware of the pull toward the other side of an opening in brimming-with-flavor TMI Doritos