Meanwhile, most people being fully unaware that the predecessor GTA V has not just been running inside their consoles or computers for years, but also right outside their windows. Fully rendered, always online, with no pause button. A world where the systems are crumbling, the police protects the powerful, celebrities are famous for nothing. And ordinary people grind endlessly just to stay afloat. A beautiful, shallow city full of people going nowhere fast. Some of them spawn on easy mode. Others on nightmare difficulty with no explanation. They start in a hole, begin at a huge disadvantage and told the competition is fair. The other players don’t acknowledge this. The game doesn’t do it, either. For everyone, it’s a fair game. And maybe it all was even already running before you arrived. You just got dropped in and told to figure it out. Yet, having a challenging start is the least of your problems. And you’ll see why.

The Scripted (Dialogue) Loop.

Video games have figures called NPCs — non-playable characters. These are entities designed primarily to occupy the environment, repeat preassigned dialogue, and occasionally direct the player toward tasks of questionable value. The comparison becomes difficult to ignore once you start paying attention to actual people. The same questions recur with industrial consistency. “So what do you do?” appears early, often delivered by individuals who themselves seem only loosely connected to the answer. Entire personalities unfold like dialogue trees that were finalized under time pressure. Gym membership. Productivity podcast. Trip to Thailand. Cheap sex. And — mild dissatisfaction with work presented as evidence of depth.

The conversations themselves rarely survive contact with scrutiny. “How are you?” — “Good, you?” — “Good.” Nothing has been communicated, but the interaction has nonetheless been considered successful. Society appears to have accepted that most verbal exchanges serve no purpose beyond confirming continued biological function. You run through them the way you dismiss mandatory tutorials. Occasionally somebody answers honestly, at which point the atmosphere deteriorates immediately. Or begins to shine. The system was clearly not designed for unscripted input. Most people do not actually want conversation. They want the reassuring sensation that conversation has taken place.

The routines are worse. Every morning, people respawn in the same apartments, walk the same routes and purchase the same coffee from the same places. Each evening, they return with the exhausted satisfaction of someone who has successfully repeated yesterday. Entire cities operate like maps whose inhabitants never discovered travel. Or life. The world itself remains enormous, but most people move through it along paths so narrow that you would suspect invisible barriers outside their field of view. Monday to Friday, they perform repetitive tasks in exchange for abstract numerical rewards. A process modern society refers to as building a career. This is largely because grinding for money sounds insufficiently aspirational. In any actual game, players would describe the experience as repetitive, poorly balanced and aggressively monetized. In life, people photograph their office badges and call it progress.

Everyone Is Famous for Nothing

Reality no longer feels organically developed, but art-directed. People appear to operate under a shared visual preset from which deviation is technically possible, though clearly discouraged. Video games solved this problem. The real world as well. Cities are populated by bodies that have been optimized beyond any practical necessity: surgically adjusted faces and calibrated physiques. Cosmetic interventions stacked on top of one another until the distinction between self-improvement and manufacturing becomes largely administrative. Almost everywhere you go, the same aesthetic logics have since adopted with impressive discipline. The procedures vary slightly. The outcomes converge. Individuality continues to be celebrated publicly while being removed at the same time. And not to alarm anyone.

You notice it especially in places where appearance has ceased to be a personal attribute and become a full-time infrastructure project. Lips are enlarged into approximation errors. Faces are tightened until they acquire the polished immobility of expensive kitchen surfaces. Breasts are adjusted toward proportions, suggesting that gravity has been defeated medically. Teeth glow with such uniform intensity that they could guide commercial aircraft safely through adverse weather conditions. Entire groups of people now resemble the “same character” slider adjusted by different hands with nearly identical intentions. Nobody appears fully satisfied, but everyone seems committed to continuing the process indefinitely. The thinking being that the next minor correction might finally produce a version of themselves capable of surviving public exposure without chemical assistance.

Many metropolitan areas, by now, run on celebrities detached entirely from accomplishment. You encounter large populations of people who are known, followed and photographed despite giving no immediate indication of why this should have occurred. The modern influencer economy has resolved the old inconvenience of requiring talent before attention. Visibility now functions as its own justification. You watch individuals broadcast every hour of their existence with the solemnity of war correspondents, despite contributing nothing beyond ambient narcissism. People become famous first and retroactively search for a reason later. Entire careers consist of documenting the maintenance of careers whose original purpose has already been forgotten. Modern culture has streamlined being stupid by monetizing it directly.

The Media Tells You Everything Is Fine

There is a particular kind of reassurance modern society has perfected: the ability to insist that everything is fundamentally stable while being surrounded by increasingly persuasive evidence to the contrary. Video games understood this early. Real life eventually adopted the same production model. You wake up, checks the news and is informed in calm and professional language that housing has become unaffordable, social trust has collapsed, entire generations are chemically sedated, infrastructure is decomposing in real time, the next war is upon us and the population appears to be oscillating between exhaustion and low-grade psychosis. This information is then immediately followed by a cheerful transition into weather, celebrity updates and a limited-time offer on the new smartphone. The tone never changes. That is the important part. Civilization could be visibly liquefying at the edges, and someone with excellent teeth would still appear on television to explain that consumer confidence remains resilient.

The media no longer exists primarily to inform people. Information, where unavoidable, is merely inserted between mood management and product placement. Its actual function is atmospheric regulation. You are not supposed to understand the world. You are supposed to continue operating inside it without alarming the advertisers. Everything is presented with the emotional consistency of airport lighting. Economic decline, war, loneliness, political dysfunction, sexual decline, antidepressant dependency. All flattened into content units of approximately equal emotional weight. The modern citizen moves through a visibly deteriorating society accompanied by the soothing background hum of presenters whose primary qualification is to not care. The message remains remarkably consistent throughout: everything is fine, here is a song, buy something, everything is fine. Everything. Is. Fine.

The limited inventory.

People are not able to retain enough cognitive capacity to reflect on things for more than a few consecutive minutes. But, unfortunately, modern life appears deliberately structured around inventory depletion. Human attention, much like inventory space, is sharply limited, yet most individuals insist on filling it with objects of aggressively low value. Notifications. Meetings. Workplace messaging platforms. Posting shit. Buying shit. Group chats function on reaction images. Endless fragments of information arrive throughout the day with the urgency of incoming quests, though almost none alter the actual direction of the plot. By evening, people discover they have exhausted their available mental slots on administrative debris and possess neither the concentration nor emotional stability required for anything remotely meaningful.

The tragedy is not even that this system exists, but that it has become aspirational. People now speak proudly about being overwhelmed, as though permanent cognitive exhaustion where evidence of relevance. Entire careers consist largely of attending meetings whose primary outcome is the scheduling of further meetings. You watch otherwise intelligent individuals carefully allocating their finite attention toward performance metrics, algorithmic distractions and arguments with strangers they will never meet. And then they’re announcing they never had time to pursue the things which mattered most to them. Wasting one’s life has become such a sleek process, up to the point where it can now occur passively, through synchronization alone.

Side Quests vs. Main Quest

Modern life places enormous importance on the idea of a main quest. People are encouraged to speak about purpose, passion, fulfilment and legacy. And they’re doing it with the seriousness of medieval pilgrims describing divine revelation. In practice, however, most spend their lives trapped inside side missions of exhausting banality. Emails, invoices, scheduling conflicts, mandatory team-building exercises, family obligations involving people they actively avoid the rest of the year. Entire decades disappear into errands. One occasionally encounters individuals in their late thirties who still speak about eventually discovering what they really want to do. But, probably, the games just suffered a minor loading delay.

The structure itself resembles badly organized quest management. Human beings appear to arrive in adulthood with the vague understanding that something important is expected of them, only to spend the remainder of their lives helping other people complete objectives of no lasting consequence. Modern society is full of individuals pursuing someone else’s storyline with the grim determination of temporary side characters. Careers are built this way. Relationships too. You keep moving from marker to marker on the map, collecting minor rewards, unlocking new obligations and assuming the actual plot will surely reveal itself after the next promotion, the next move, the next year. It rarely does. And on the way, people will mostly shit on you, while you helped them.

Video games at least possess the courtesy to admit the absurdity openly. A complete stranger may approach you on the street and within thirty seconds you are driving across the city to perform an objectively insane task for reasons that remain deeply unclear. Real employment operates on almost identical mechanics. Your boss is essentially a random NPC with authority accidentally enabled. The assignment makes little conceptual sense, the reward barely offsets the psychological damage incurred during its completion, and yet everyone continues participating because the system has normalized irrationality through repetition. Entire industries now survive by convincing people that constant exhaustion is evidence of importance. Burnouts have been turned into a personality trait, calling it ambition.

The good news!

Of course, the video game world has its advantages. Significant ones. Ones that real life, in its endless bureaucratic timidity, refuses to offer. But wouldn’t it be great if a few could be transitioned from game to reality?

Violence Is Always an Option.

You can spend half an hour doing a mission the right way — or you can just shoot everyone and be done in 90 seconds. Real life could work suspiciously similar. There is no faster conflict resolution tool in existence than a well-placed round from a .50 calibre rifle. Or for smaller, more social inconveniences, the 9mm is the practical choice. No mediation. No HR department. No six-month court process that ends with a fine nobody pays. There are enough rounds to handle an entire queue of people who deserve it. The game allows you to act on this assessment immediately. Real life though has constructed an elaborate social infrastructure entirely designed to prevent this one thing from happening.

Skipping the Conversation Entirely.

In the game, you can walk past anyone without obligation. No small talk. No, “how are you.” No five-minute update on someone’s renovation project you didn’t ask about and cannot escape. Real life has constructed an entire invisible social contract that forces you to stand there, nodding, making the face, while someone tells you about their kitchen tiles. The game understood that most human interaction is optional. Society has not caught up yet.

Eating Whatever You Find.

In the game you pick up food off a counter, off the street, out of a bin if necessary, and your health goes up. No allergies. No intolerances. No one explaining that they’ve cut out gluten, or use tofu as a substitute of meat and feel so much better for it. You eat the thing, you feel better, you move on. Real life has turned the simple act of feeding yourself into a personality, a political position, and a forty-minute conversation at a dinner party. The game has more dignity about the whole thing.

Ignoring Your Phone.

In game, characters routinely decline calls, ignore messages, and go completely off grid without consequence or explanation. In real life, not responding within a reasonable window of time is now considered a personality disorder. Being unreachable for an afternoon raises genuine concern. The expectation of permanent availability has been so completely normalised that the person who simply doesn’t answer is now the strange one.

Conclusion

So here we are. You’re still waiting for the next game while playing the current one on autopilot. You’re still grinding the same missions, still talking to the same NPCs, still circling the same spawn point and calling it a life. The city outside the window keeps running its code. The algorithm curates your reality, the media tells you everything is fine. None of this is new. None of this is subtle.

GTA IV will be amazing. But only in the confined environment of PCs or consoles.

The controller is in your hands. It always has been. Most people just spend their whole life doing side quests, waiting for the main game to begin. Never quite realising that the main game was running the whole time. Never quite realising that they were already in it. Fully loaded. Right from the start. The only question worth asking now is whether you’re playing it or whether it’s playing you. And if you have to think about that for more than one second, you already have your answer.

I thought people were slowly getting more stupid on a weekly basis. How wrong I was.

Weekly? No. Daily!

They believe shit. They talk shit. They spread shit. And they push the ones with brains away, so that being retarded can finally become mainstream.

If you want to stay mentally intact, you might think about those options. But really, it’ll be just one.

1. Escape them.

2. Teach them.

3. Fight them.

4. Enjoy them.

Escape them.

So you’re spending your life surrounded by idiots. Not occasionally inconvenienced by them. Surrounded! So far, they governed meetings, relationships, entire countries. They spoke with confidence where silence would have been an improvement. They made things worse. For you. Your family. Friends. And overcoming this cost always as much energy as almost already losing a battle, every time you tried. You keep asking: How has all this become my environment? How do I get out of it?

You take it to the extreme. Death, you assume, would be the exit. Not necessarily a reward. But certainly a change of company. A thinning of the crowd. At the very least, a noticeable drop in volume.

What then? You arrive in the afterlife. And, there they are!

There are not fewer. No improvement. Not even a surprise? The same stupid faces, now stripped of urgency but not of character. The man who explained trivialities to you for decades is still explaining. Only now he’s doing it with infinite time and no consequences. The woman who confused insistence with intelligence keeps on going for all eternity. She now declares into a void that offers no challenge, just patient indifference.

As it turns out, death is not a filter. It’s no escape. It’s a relocation! The idiots don’t stay behind as some kind of earthly residue. They transition seamlessly. Whatever made them unbearable survives perfectly. The difference now is that it drifts weightlessly, like debris freed from the burden of gravity.

Meanwhile, Earth continues its production line. Fresh batches of morons, confidently assembled, already rehearsing their empty opinions. You can almost admire the efficiency. They walk, they talk, they misunderstand. And then, inevitably, they arrive at death as well. No delay. No exemption. A seamless process from start to finish!

A sudden clarity dawns, the kind that would have served you better much earlier. Your great lifelong complaint has a structural flaw. You only thought it’s temporary. You thought you were surrounded by fools, but it’s all limited by time rather than permanently coexisting with them. Your joy hinged on the belief that this state was not permanent. But change never arrived. And you stop waiting for improvement. You stop hoping for a better crowd. In the end, death grants exactly one insight. That it was never a question of escape. It was a question of distribution. The idiots were never limited to this world alone.

They are the system! You are in it, eternally, without the faintest illusion that the next room might bring improvement. You are still required to participate in a world that would not improve itself in your absence. There is no outside to move them to. No category they don’t already occupy. Every effort to draw boundaries or distance yourself merely exposes the structure again — indifferent to your preferences.

This cannot be solved by an absolute relocation, not in death and not before it. Escaping them is no option. The distribution is total.

Teach them.

If they cannot be escaped, they can at least be corrected. That’s your thinking. You replace separation with instruction and presume that the deficit is repairable. Because you think that they are not wrong by nature, rather just underexposed to knowledge.

So you begin to explain.

Carefully at first. You adjust a sentence, refine a term, insert a distinction where previously there had only been noise. You do not overwhelm. You improve. The idea is that, given sufficient clarity, recognition will follow. And it does — just not in the way you had in mind. What you said is echoed back to you, but altered slightly, reshaped, and delivered with the quiet confidence of ownership. Your thoughtful corrections resurface as their views, stripped of underlying logic and repackaged as ideas they’ve always held. The misunderstandings are efficient. It discards the reasoning. Because that, from their perspective, is an unnecessary intermediate step.

And, because they haven’t understood a thing, they fall back into old patterns of thinking and behaviour. So you increase precision. Longer explanations, tighter arguments, fewer gaps. You learn to predict their misinterpretations and preemptively address them, shaping sentences that feel like carefully built fortifications. Nothing enters or leaves without inspection. Nothing stays either. Your arguments pass through the conversation and reappear as something flatter, simpler, and entirely unthreatening to whatever was already there.

So you simplify. You translate yourself into something more accessible, more patient, more aligned with what passes for attention. You remove nuance in favour of reach. Now you are understood. Thoroughly, confidently. And incorrectly. Encouraged by this new level of engagement, they apply what they have learned. Not where it could make a difference, but where it feels most convenient: right back into the familiar habits that needed changing from the start.

You want to adjust again. You want to anticipate the misunderstanding and speak around it. But you stop. And you realise: the issue is not that they lack access to your reasoning. The issue is that access does not imply adoption. Understanding happens without consequence. Your effort to educate yields outcomes, just not in the direction you had envisioned.

They remain. Not stubbornly, not defiantly. Just simply as they were. And now equipped with fragments of your language, thinking and reasoning, which they deploy with confidence. And you, having invested in their improvement, discover that the only reliable transformation has occurred on your side: you have become clearer, more precise. It becomes evident that what you face is not a fleeting misunderstanding but a persistent state where comprehension is, at best, optional. Learning is not refused. It is rendered irrelevant.

Which brings this path to the same conclusion as the first. Only with more paperwork. It cannot be solved by teaching anything. Not because you explained poorly, but because they do not learn. Not slowly. Not partially. Not eventually. At all.

Fight them.

If they cannot be escaped, cannot be taught, then perhaps they can be reduced. So you entertain the idea that the problem might be solvable through force. And you do that with some clarity that feels almost like relief.

You picture distance first. Elevation. A quiet vantage point and a rifle with a scope and high calibre that turns noise into geometry. The crowd below rearranged into manageable units. You inhale, align, remove. Clean, decisive, almost administrative. The appeal is not rage, but order. You think about a world briefly edited into calmness.

Or, if distance does not work, how about proximity? A blade? Something precise, sharp and shiny. Something that answers immediately. No debate, no explanation, no misinterpretation. Action as a form of clarity. You move through the scene with a kind of efficiency you were never granted in conversation. Every gesture resolves something. Every motion concludes. And for a moment it works.

Silence replaces commentary. Space opens where there had been density. The constant explanations, the confident misunderstandings, the petty collisions of their tiresome presence, all of it drops away. You experience, perhaps for the first time, what you had previously mistaken for a fantasy: no argument is better than an endless argument.

And then, abrupt and intensely, they return.

Not individually, structurally. The voids refill, the gaps close once more. Where one stood, another appears, indistinguishable in function if not in face. The removal changes nothing. You have not been dealing with a set of people. You have been dealing with a system. Still, you press on. At first out of momentum, then out of principle. If reduction works locally, perhaps it would scale up? Perhaps persistence will accomplish what initial attempts could not. You increase the pace. You accelerate your efforts, throwing yourself into the process with a resolve that would have been admirable in any other battlefield. You can measure results. But you also become tired. The repetition reveals itself. Every action produces the same temporary clearing, followed by the same immediate replacement.

There’s not organising against you. They don’t adapt. They continue, because continuation is the only property that matters. The system simply persists. You begin to calculate effort against outcome. The numbers do not improve. They remain constant in the most unhelpful way possible. Which leads, again, to a conclusion that sounds familiar now: You can’t overcome them. This is not a solvable problem through force. Not because it’s insufficiently applied, but because there’s nothing to defeat. There’s no opponent. You are only exhausting yourself against a massive distribution of fools.

The appeal of confrontation had been its simplicity. Remove. And the remainder will either progress or also be removed. But they keep coming. The same scene, reset, which leaves you slightly more depleted every time. And you, eventually, run out of yourself before you run out of them.

Enjoy them.

So, we end up here. The only real option. If they cannot be escaped, taught, or fought, maybe they can be … reframed? Not as a problem to solve, but as a phenomenon to observe. You just retire in a gesture that resembles strategy. Look at it from a sufficient distance! You will go to some quiet, little corner of this world. Nothing fancy. Just a hill, a coastline, a boat with enough distance to produce the illusion of separation. You establish a perimeter to reduce their density to a tolerable level. A private geometry: table, chairs, books, animals, family, friends, sane people, good food. And horizon. Lots of it.

From here, the idiots are still visible. But they are no participants of your day any more. They have become the background. You see them assemble dull opinions. You watch them misread situations. They hurry, they argue, they correct one another into worse positions. And, with time, distance will improve them. Eventually, it all takes on an almost decorative quality. When their actions are no longer directed at you, the irritation diminishes. One might even call it amusement, provided one is not required to intervene. Gradually, resentment shifts to amusement, and before long, it grows into genuine fun.

And your space holds! You maintain it with a quiet discipline. Fewer conversations with them and a controlled intake of their presence. Your perimeter is selective. What enters and who enters does so under terms quietly established beforehand. You safeguard a small sphere of order, permitting the rest to unfold as it inevitably must. There is no victory in this. It is actually something cleaner. A local order that does not pretend to scale. You don’t scream for attention. You have learned to be yourself. Their world still intersects with yours. But it has pushed beyond the shores of insanity and drifts into the depths of chaos. You stopped asking how to change them. You stopped asking how to avoid them. There’s no need for that. They simply continue. Because you will see, there is relief in no longer being addressed by the wrong people. There is peace in no longer responding to those unwilling or unable to truly listen.

Sometimes they will approach, though. They will make it to your shores. Not aggressively, not intentionally. This background wants to move into the foreground again. You notice it in small ways. But you don’t adjust down to them. You will turn it into a form of entertainment that does not require applause.

It is not a solution. It is a way of life.