Living in a Simulation

Friday, January 4, 2019

I’m a chronic over-thinker. My brain muscle is strong and I exercise it constantly for everything. It’s the only way I learned to deal with the world. Research past events, analyze and ask questions, make predictions, repeat. This way of looking at the world definitely has its merits. It’s practical, generally open-minded, and at the very least has its own internal logic to it. It excels at problem solving and productivity. Where it fails, however, is that I’ve been so busy researching the past and trying to predict the future that most of the time I forget to experience the life that is happening right now.

The way I’ve come to visualize this is that there are two large rooms next to each other in my mind. One is an archive manned by a historian. The other is for analytics manned by an analyst. A third person is a sort of creative director. They ask the questions, come up with narratives from the data, and present them to me via a virtual reality simulation.

There are a million different things you can do with this setup. It’s a dream team for creative problem solving and visualization. But, when used improperly, things can be less than productive. For instance, Helen, the historian can dig up a conversation you had last week and hand it to Christine, the creative director, who in turn asks a bunch of what if questions to Alexis the analyst. Alexis sends the data back to Christine to apply a narrative. Now, depending on how that conversation went and what mood Christine is in, this narrative can go a lot of different ways. But most of the time, for me at least, the story is one that tells me how badly I handled it and how it could and should have gone so much better if I had only done things any number of ways differently. Any way but the way that I did. And Christine likes tell these stories on loop adding different endings or asking different questions just to keep it interesting.

I’ve used this system for pretty much everything in my life. Work, relationships, creative endeavors, etc. So it’s no wonder that I have an inherent trust in it and that I can get stuck in these virtual reality presentations for hours at a time. When I finally come out, I feel as if I had just come out of a movie. Whatever emotional tone that story had still lingers for a while. Sometimes I immediately put the VR gear back on and start the loop over. If for no other reason than to see if the story is different this time through. Maybe this time it’ll have a happy ending.

Until recently, I never knew that there was any other way to go through my life. I now know that although my team is amazing at certain things, I can’t be present in my life and experiencing one of these simulations at the same time. I can’t be there for a friend as they’re telling me about something difficult in their life while my team is running a predictive simulation on what my friend is going to say and the different things that I can say back that would make me feel like a good friend.

I’m learning to simultaneously appreciate this system for it’s amazing potential, but also, give it a break. Only use it once in a while. For the rest of the time, I turn around walk out of that building and choose to experience reality instead of the simulation.