#but that’s what the game means for me and when TTP2 started talking more explicitly about death

[shiroikabocha]

favorite part of talos principle??????

I procrastinated forever on this ask, sorry. The answer’s kinda sad. But it’s also, like, deeply true and important to me as a person, so.

My mom died at the end of 2013, concluding a truly impressive any% cancer speedrun. Less than 90 days from first symptoms to last. I loved her a lot. It was a bad time.

2014 was the worst year of my life. I became convinced that human consciousness (or at least, my own human consciousness) was not an inherent good. Not an inherent bad, either, just… the nature of the human brain is to want to continue existing, and to be incapable of continuing to exist. It’s not a system that’s designed to function without pain. It’s not a system that’s designed. Consciousness hurts. Being a conscious, physical creature in an unpredictable physical world that has no obligation to make coherent narrative sense hurts.

(I miss my mom. It’s a problem with no solution.)

And then there was this video game. And it had this guy (gender neutral) in it. And this guy was like: you’re so right, bestie. Making sense of existence? That’s a loser’s game. Can’t even get to I think, therefore I am without coming up against some truly gnarly logical conundrums—almost enough to make you wanna invent a big invisible sky-friend who gives you all the answers and reassures you that you’re important and good, right? But that’s stupid. You don’t want to be stupid, do you? You want to be smart. Like me. Smart means you’re better than the people who need happy little answers to all their silly little questions. You don’t need them. You don’t need anybody. That’s the great thing about nothing—it’s so beautifully consistent! When nothing means anything, there are no contradictions. Trying to understand your place in the cosmos—asking the question “I exist; what should I do with that fact?” and expecting to arrive at an actual, functional answer—is a sucker’s game. The only winning move is not to play.

I can’t really explain what it felt like to see my own feelings repeated back to me so clearly, so accurately, and at such length—and for my reaction to my own worldview to be seething fucking hatred. When I started playing The Talos Principle, I was a pessimistic nihilist. I did not perceive myself changing into something different until I was screaming at my keyboard FUCK YOU, my existence has meaning because I CHOOSE to imbue it with meaning and I do not FUCKING CARE if it doesn’t make sense, some things are more important than being flawlessly logically correct and ME HAVING A REASON TO LIVE is ONE OF THEM

(when your internal logic answer to Why should I stay alive? starts out as My life is a precious gift given to me by God and it is not mine to throw away, and then your understanding of the world changes in a way that no longer incorporates an ontologically-existent God, sometimes you wind up with: Why should I stay alive? Answer: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And that answer really only works as long as nothing terrible happens. It does not hold up well under stress. When you take god away you do have to put something else in its place, and it’s not easy to find something else that can hold up under the weight.)

Like… it would be an oversimplification to say that The Talos Principle made me want to live again. But it wouldn’t be too much of an oversimplification to say TTP forced me to acknowledge that I didn’t currently have a good reason to want to live, and that felt bad, and I owed it to myself to fix it. And that if I could hate this fucking asshole librarian so so much (because he was me), and still feel so much compassion for him by the end of the game, then maybe I could figure out how to feel compassion for myself, too.

Also I really like the puzzles where the solution is to zwoop around all over the place with fans, those are my favorite