Life is not a Video Game

I went out in the dark to bring in some more pecan logs for the fire.  I heard an owl hoot.  I hadn’t heard it before.  It must be newly arrived in the pecan orchard.

I don’t know the word for the emotion I felt.  But I felt something.  The deep texture of reality touched me.

And I thought that modernism tried to simplify and strip down life to a few abstractions and universal principles.  It was the era of “machines for living,” which inevitably means eliminating complexity and texture and variation to make the management task easier.

Which was unsatisfying.

So the next phase was post-modernism, where we added back variation and texture and complexity, but only at the user choice.  Whereas life was supposed to be a machine before, now it was a machine with lots and lots of user options, or as the insanity increased, maybe even without the underlying machine–user options all the way down.

Modernism is simple conceptual games like Pong.  Post-modernism is the modern gamer market, where you can modify your character in innumerable ways, preselect all sorts of options, and download various skins and music to taste.

But postmodernism is all just you.

Which is unsatisfying.

I did not opt for the owl hoot.  The smell of the pecan smoke I did not create and could not have imagined, and neither the chill in the air, or the stars.