[Solid Snake]

Lately I've been exploring an intriguing sort of philosophical phenomenon that simultaneously is engaging and more than a little frightening: Namely, our ability as human beings to actively deceive ourselves into believing our lives are headed in a positive direction or that hope still exists in the universe in the wake of all evidence to the contrary.

The video game series Danganronpa explores this through the competing influences of the emotions of 'hope' and 'despair.' It's simplified, as it tends to be in most videogames, into a dichotomy of good and evil. Even still, thematically speaking, Danganronpa explores the necessity to feel 'hope' even in hopeless, despair-inducing situations; when characters are objectively in life-or-death situations, to succeed in even a limited capacity they need to essentially lie to themselves regarding their own dire circumstances. The characters that do comparatively well are the ones who are able to find some silver lining in their predicaments, while those who panic through a sheer acknowledgment of reality struggle and ultimately tend to be disproportionately killed off regardless of their talents or strengths.

Here's the unrelenting, inescapable reality, though: Things are bad and are only decaying in every possible aspect of life. We can talk about this in the macro or the micro, by looking at gradual changes or sudden ones, by looking at the personal or the global.

Climate change is the obvious example that I know only too well, but it's worth reiterating here if for no other reason than its sheer importance in the scheme of...everything. We are doing absolutely nothing of substance or value to combat rising global temperatures over the aggregate and changing climate patterns as a result of increased emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. In the wake of all this our climate is slowly deteriorating as we speak. It is only getting worse. It will never, ever get better. The minimal degree of action we are capable of taking is insufficient to combat the enormity of the problem. We have already crossed a threshold in which our planet -- the only planet we've ever known to be hospitable to human civilization -- has been diseased and the damage is insurmountable. Life itself will likely adapt and survive, but our infrastructure and our socioeconomic systems are far too fragile to cope. A series of natural disasters in the form of droughts and floods, heat waves and earthquakes (fracking will only exacerbate the latter), and rising ocean tides will cause untold economic damage first, and eventually incredible losses of human lives as our ozone layer evaporates at a rate that exposes us to dangerous rays of sunlight. We'll end up living fucking underground if we're lucky. And nobody cares. Even Democrats don't seem to care. Do you think Hillary Clinton even slightly cares? I do not get the impression that she cares.

It isn't just climate change. You need only to see Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton's respective rises to power to see similar trends of anti-intellectualism, media soundbites and valuing personality over substance slowly eroding our system of governance; corporatism is encroaching upon our civic spaces at such a rate that the profit motive increasingly is the only value left in our socioeconomic relationships; Facebook and Twitter are reducing and simplifying communication to such an extent that pretty soon none of us will bother to read literature or understand language anymore, lest we invest in anything worth more than 140 characters of our time; discourse in general is being reduced to a series of emoticons and abbreviations that are at best easy to misunderstand and at worst destroying the intrinsic value of interpersonal communication; the reduction of discourse to soundbites has enabled anti-intellectual movements among conspiracy theorists and confident con men to take off, equipping movements against vaccines and only empowering the loudest and most bigoted voices on the internet at the expense of the most well-reasoned and substantive counterpoints; our awful and destructive foreign policy initiatives in the Middle East has indirectly led to an influx of refugees and migrants that has led Europe and America to only harden its bigotry against them and has strengthened right-wing racism across the west; Russia's devastating war in Ukraine has emboldened it and Putin and his cronies exert more influence than ever in a corrupt despotic society; the United States is a democracy only in name, and a hegemonic corporate oligarchy in reality; China's monolithic capitalist-communist hybrid strangles its citizens and denies them basic human rights, and together, China, Europe, the U.S. and Russia are the leading nation-states corrupting the world; in spite of material excesses even the wealthy among our societies report they're more unhappy than ever; all our institutions are mired in such complex self-perpetuating legal systems that any kind of systemic change is functionally impossible; the historic oppression of ethnic minorities, women, and the LGBT community sees nominal improvements but faces inexplicable and vitriolic opposition from assholes who find loopholes and pass local and state legislation to erode any true progression.

It isn't just global, either; in the past several years NPF has been transformed from a bustling little community of great importance to me to a virtual wasteland of comparatively small importance. I think about what NPF meant to me years ago, and what it means to me now, and I shudder at the implicit consequences of growing more and more apathetic. Similar degradation has infested just about every social sphere in my life, as my circle of friends and acquaintances gradually narrows. Friends are vanishing from my life at a rate far quicker than they are being replaced, and this only seems to be going faster and faster as my energy and enthusiasm to invest in new friendships fades with every lost cause. Confidence in a flourishing legal career or in any kind of meaningful romantic relationship vanish with every job application and every date that inevitably leads to failure. In fact, my dating life only seems to function when I adopt a perspective of total apathy; to care is to put myself in a position to be hurt, and to be hurt is in inevitability when the opportunity arises. It'd be one thing if this was a trend over weeks or months, but this has been an ongoing narrative of existential despair for years now, soon to be decades.

What little is left, constantly eroding like a cliffside falling into the waters beneath it with every passing year, grows older every year, and with every passing year more and more is lost; my extended family shrinks, soon my immediate family will shrink, and the only inevitability I can depend upon with any satisfaction is that everything and everyone will die.

In the wake of all this, the only coping mechanism is found through false narratives to retreat to; increasing permanence of entertainment options only gives us the opportunity to waste more and more time escaping our reality and retreating to the artificial hospitality of narratives crafted and created to coddle us and reassure us that our lives, insignificant in the broader cosmic reality of existence, have some greater 'meaning' and 'purpose.' And so I invest time and thought and energy into stories like Danganronpa and Uncharted and the latest anime I'm watching and the latest Marvel movie, feeling some degree of kinship with superheroes and protagonists who do not exist and who have no objective value beyond what I assign to them. I spend spare time obsessing over fan theories and losing myself in fictional What If's...what if I lived in Westeros? What would I do as Persona's protagonist in this situation? What choices do I make in Dragon Age? What kind of superpower would I wield if I fought alongside Captain America? Who does this character love, and who does he hate, and who's a good match for him, and who'd be a good match for me if I lived in that universe? What solution would I reach in this situation, and does this conclusion satisfy me or leave me wanting? How would I rate this videogame or this television show, how would I compare it to others I've played and seen, what would my Top Ten list be, who's my favorite, what aspects were written well or written poorly? What does this plotline say about our current sociopolitical situation, or what does this story borrow from real-world tragedies, why do I find her so pretty, why do I relate with her or what do I see in him? How would I solve all the aforementioned conflicts, personally or professionally, if I wielded any sort of power? What kind of story would I write for myself if I have the capacity to influence my own life in any meaningful way? How would I change the past? Where would I travel back to in time or travel forward to if the rules simply didn't apply to me?

This is all that's left...the false narratives concocted to provide some degree of useless, meaningless comfort and security when confronted with the void. Is that right? Is that ethical? Is that practical? Should I hate myself for investing so much in the fictitious, in finding personal value in worlds that exist only in my mind, in retreating and isolating myself from the 'real world' which has proven only to be so cold and callous through countless experiences? Are these narratives necessary to cope with the despair of living a life that is ultimately useless and lacks any intrinsic value or merit beyond the subjective values I assign to it? Is there any continued meaning in continuing to exist if only to see all that I care about continue to erode, continue to degrade, continue to die off, like a tree shedding all its color and vitality as winter arrives? Is there any such thing as a community that eternally thrives, as a nation eternally at peace, as people progressively growing and maturing and moving forward instead of dying off and failing in every passing moment?

...Forgive me, I'm just in this kind of mood today.