Life Really Is a Simulation

Has life ever felt like a simulation to you?

In honor of spooky season, I want to bring light to these inexplicable moments where you feel the sudden urge to drop all other worries and simply wonder: “Am I even living right now?” Before you give yourself a glimmer of rationality, you sit in the poison of thought that consumes you. “What if everyone around me isn’t real?” you ask yourself again. Once you convince yourself that the whole matter is stupid because you'll come to only feel alone and in despair, because even if life wasn’t real, you simply would never know.

My story brings us back to the time of New Year's. And the one before that. And the one before that. See, my friends and I have built a tradition of watching the fireworks along the Santa Monica Bay. We walk along from my house to the cliffs that offer us the best possible view of the magical night. Yet, as we dance along the serene streets of LA, I notice a family sitting on their front porch. And as I stare a little harder, it reminds me of a time, exactly a year before, and a year before then, where the same family sat in the same position, the same night, for 3 years in a row.

One can think of this as simply coincidental. Or simply that it is their own home and that they are

traditionally celebrating the new year, but to me this means so much more. What fun is there in

celebrating the exact same way 3 years straight? Would bringing yourself to the exact same

position a year later not make you feel like you wasted the past year of your life? We think we

change but every year we meet in the same spot. Same friends, same family, same house, same

conversations, same ambitions.

I often fear that our lives are insignificant, as we live, flowing through the motions

unconsciously. We aren’t living, we’re just surviving. So perhaps it is my pessimistic way of

seeing life, but observing this family reunite in the same manner for 3 years straight only made

me fear that we truly do live in a simulation. A simulation that could mean more than the

standard technological universe replication, but that is actually a world where we continue to let the years flow by without really taking ahold of our destiny.