Press Start to Exist
How modern life turned into a game with no save points, but amazing graphics.
On November 19, the biggest entertainment release in human history launches. The development budget in USD is already in the billions. On day one, it is projected that 30 million copies will be sold. GTA VI. The most anticipated video game in history. The hype is enormous. The hunger is real. The self-awareness is not.
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.