This is pure escapism. Numbing yourself to the burden of being. Likely from a stress tolerance so shallow and under-developed that the slightest inconvenience or expectation feels like a crisis.

The truth is that after the brief initial relief of excusing yourself from being anything at all, you'll end up in a deep depression. It's a naive and immature fantasy.

Remove all electronics from your life, they are a constant nervous system stimulator that has prevented you from truly relaxing into a state of repair. Then introduce responsibilities into your life, start small. We are wired to be needed, wanted, useful, accountable, social. You're just stressed out.

To make the most facile counterpoint - the reason the Skyrim blacksmith doesn't care if the main character slays dragons is because they weren't programmed to. There aren't consequences either way.

To the extent that this post is meant to be inspiring, it only works if you're an NPC in a static world that has no real consequences - where you actually can live your life in a static loop because nothing will change.

When the metaphorical dragon comes to burn down your village, are you going to shrug and go back to looping your hammer_nail_03 animation?

This is viable option if you are generally okay with the way the world around you works - if you live in a safe place with a good economy and a fair, well-functioning government. Unfortunately this is not the situation for a lot of people.

In Lathe of Heaven by Le Guin, the main character George is famously frustrating because he doesn't do much. Bad things happen to him and he basically just lets them. He thinks his psychiatrist is totally evil yet keeps going back. He has a pitiful lack of control over his life. He doesn't seem to want control, which is the worst part. He isn't super happy, and you could take that as the main point, but I don't.

even George, perhaps the most boring and least reactive person you've ever read about or met, would just laugh at the goal of being "entirely unfazed by everything happening around you." Even he falls in love, experiences great joy and brutal heartbreak, finds his own small ways of making an impact, makes peace with difficult things. For a character who supposedly does nothing important, he does a hell of a lot.

Good luck, I guess!

I think NPC is the wrong terminology here - everyone should be the main character in their life - to have meaning and agency. But I think the problem arises in how 'main character' is defined and expressed - having the idea that you're supposed to 'do great things' and live this larger-than-life, life.

You don't have to save all the rhinos, defeat every poverty, slay every social cause or overthrow every tyranny. If anything it's arrogance to assume you can, or even should - that your specific brand of saving anything is even correct.

If you look at most people that do well for themselves and have good lives, they live narrow focused lives in domains they care about. They're very much the main characters of their own lives, but also recognize there are other characters running around doing their own things as well.

I think using the term NPC would be more apt if you're referring to someone that's purely on autopilot and not making any effort to ensure that they're leading a life that is meaningful to them.

But then you could be like Greg the Garlic Farmer who had his wife patched out and no one but him remembers her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9BFGlCPS8I

In The Republic, Plato tells a story of a man who briefly died, visited the afterlife, and came back to life. According to the man, people would be reborn after dying, but they got to choose what they would be reincarnated as. Some people chose to be rich kings, some chose to be fierce animals. Odysseus, a legendary king known for his wisdom, chose to be reborn as an ordinary man.

Unambitious Loser With Happy, Fulfilling Life Still Lives In Hometown - The Onion

https://theonion.com/unambitious-loser-with-happy-fulfilling...

That’s the best part! We’re all NPCs in other people’s stories _and_ the main character in ours.

You can do and be absolutely anything or anyone you want. Just gotta bear the consequences and that’s it.

Wanna live a homely life surrounded by loved ones? Go do it! Nobody is stopping you. Wanna galivant around the world having adventures with no roots? You can!

And when you meet a local npc bartender on your adventures, you’re just another rando tourist npc. It’s great

Confusing perspective and doesn’t achieve what I think they were trying to say.

I get from this “you cannot have expectations of me, because I’m an NPC, so stop the judgement because I cannot change what I am. It’s in my programming.”

Like, not really anything else. I cannot handle failing to meet expectations (regardless of where they come from, who is seemingly imposing them, or really anything related to expectations at all) so I just absolve myself from having any.

What do you do when someone else's ambition encroaches on your NPC life?

This post got the definition of NPC entirely backwards. NPC = follows the rules exactly like they’re programmed to. That means not thinking outside the box, ignoring gut feelings, adhering to a routine, consumerism and generally politically unimaginative.

The blacksmith from Skyrim is a great example because along comes a player, puts a bucket on your head and steals all your stuff without any complaints.

> drive a boring car... have a boring job. do nothing after work...

This just sounds like mental exhaustion as mentioned. The internet exposes us to thousands of opinions on how to live, so those terminally online get information overload and analysis paralysis. I don't think the answer is to give up trying or just settle into a boring life. Then people write these snarky blogs as a coping mechanism. Personally, I think navel gazing and these shocking, screw-the-world articles are just ways to live comfortably inside your head. It's addictive to write shocking, against-the-current stuff and get reactions, and it feels like you are affecting your life. But most of the time I think it's performing for yourself.

Adding the 1001th random opinion and being a hypocrite: go offline more, interact with real people and you'll realize life is actually fine and enjoyable. Natural dopamine and serotonin. It's easy to fall into anhedonia or apathy as a safety response to information overload. Having a boring, soul-crushing job on purpose is not good advice, nobody should intentionally spend huge parts of their years on Earth like that. Making your life enjoyable through effort in the real world is not a bad thing.

i think have a bit of an understanding of where OP is coming from. lately, the grind doesn't stop, and the quality and cost of life are inverting at an alarming pace. and all this time we're being told being the main character means having billions of dollars, be looksmaxxed, have a million friends, and anything less means you're poor and worthless.

this is an incredibly stressful time to be alive. i think i'm moderately ambitious and so i grind at my early stage startup and enjoy the work most days. but sometimes i also think it'd be nice to just have a bakery in a middle-sized town somewhere without thinking too much about politics. and just living my life with its ups and downs, but without the daily / hourly emergencies that come with being on the internet nowadays.

Agency is a reason for me to arise each day and work at my goals. Without goals, or agency, I may head for depression (been there, done that).

If I do not see progress being made, I know that if I do not change what I am doing (or measure in smaller increments) again, I may head for depression.

Even crappy odds are an acceptable challenge, when I compare to what I imagine is an NPC/don't give a hoot outlook.

Heh, I just shared this elsewhere but kinda relevant here too: https://jonnegroni.com/2015/04/15/the-humans-of-wall-e-were-...

I saw two people with NPC tshirts today (Chinese tech scene). This resontaes quite well with the notion of tangping or laying flat: https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1007589

Why try hard when you can just skate by?”

be neither the pc nor the npc

reject game metaphors

accept that your life is what you make of it

reject every possible demand on your energy that does not bring you joy (there will be compromises; weigh them)

eat the rich

Living is not the same thing as filling an empty space in a game. An NPC is just that - add some extra background staff so that a city feels live-like. You are alive. Go live.

NPCs immitate life, but very pourly. Do not take them as an inspiration.

Don't try to ignore the world around you as it is the direct opposite of a game world which is static.

Real life is dynamic, changing and if you behave as an NPC for a long time, you are going to have a bad time eventually

Dated someone who said this early on, talking about how they wanted to be kept like a housecat and grow plants. I don't like saying things gave me "the ick" but... wow.

As the type of person with a more "life is like playing pokemon, if you make an effort to talk to everyone, you'll have more fun and they'll help in unexpected ways" vibe, I just don't get it.

That's not a life lived, I'd sooner log out.

The Bhagavad Gita 18.47: "It is better to do one’s own dharma, even though imperfectly, than to do another’s dharma, even though perfectly."

Its pretty common in Japanese and Chinese culture to want to live an NPC life -- characterized mainly by being completely ordinary and living a relatively simple life without much excitement, and finding joy in small pleasures.

This was always my biggest nightmare: to become an NPC. I always feel like I am capable of more than what I am currently doing, and I am trying to do more. Life is short. I want to die knowing I had a great impact on the world and I did what I could, not as an NPC.

I do agree with this attitude, but the epithet of "being an NPC" is about having someone else--the media, your tribe, your church--governing your behavior without you thinking about it.

It's not about being a main character in the world--it's about being a main character in your own life.

>when you stop caring about being the main character, you finally get to just live your life. I am not sure there is a standard definition of "main character." In literature, at least, there are countless main characters who lead very introspective lives.

You can write a good story about anything. Slice of life stories are great. A peaceful zen character can be a main character. A hard working craftman could be a main character. A man or woman taking care of their sick partner or child and barely having time for anything else is a main character. The whole trend of using the term NPC is a very egotistical framing in the first place, but if you care you can be living any type of lifestyle and be a main character. Culture is very relative, people think they're the main character because they act like a dip shit on a live stream and people watch them. In a lot of cultures people like that would not be seen as enviable at all. Its all pretty arbitrary.

Agreed. Life as NPC is great.

I feel like this take is for a more passive form of stoicism. No you don't have to care about what is going on around you, but you do need to somewhat engage with your life to solve problems, pay bills and take care of loved ones.

I have ADHD. Every once in a while I surface and realize I have been living on autopilot and we're now 7 months further.

Don't worry, you likely already are.

1 Thessalonians 4:11

Doing the things you care about instead of the things you are induced to care about, that is something I agree with. However, what is there to live for, if I am strictly unaffected by the world around me?

I thought hearing about The Cave on repeat for 30+ years was nauseating until video game metaphor took over for all of philosophy in common media.

you don't know what you got (til it's gone)

I think the fact that this post is marked as #long is the most salient detail in the entire thing.

He loved the steak even when he'd known it wasn't real

>be an npc. drive a boring car—who gives a fuck? have a boring job. do nothing after work. why do you have to do something after work? do something because you feel like doing it, not because you feel like you have to.

Obviously. People have reasons for buying cool cars or socializing after work. But if you don't have a reason to do something aside from a vague idea of "this is just what people do", then doing it anyway would be considered NPC behavior. You're just blindly following programming without even understanding the purpose of that behavior.

Instead of striving to shut your brain off, you should strive to actually use it. Think about what desires people have that cause them to take those actions. List them out. Do any of those desires apply to you? If not, then go ahead and stay home.

> I want to live in a skyrim house

https://youtube.com/watch?v=z_h8NNQ842I

Reading Dungeon Crawler Carl series... I would not like to be an NPC from that series :D

Gervais Principle strikes again.

I think this stretches the "NPC" term beyond its utility. It’s a cute little insult, but once you redefine it to mean “ignore status games, stop worrying about what other people are doing, and live according to your own priorities,” you’re basically just restating advice that’s been around for millennia. That’s Stoicism, Buddhism, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, etc. I’m not sure this new metaphor is adding anything.

“One needs to imagine Sysiphus happy”

Albert Camus.

That sounds like burn out tbh

The whole ‘NPC’ thing is so juvenile and solipsistic. Believing other people have less mental agency than you doesn’t make you cool and edgy, it makes you come off as an idiot that needs to grow up

(Note I’m not directing this at the author necessarily, just people who do actually engage with this concept as if it is serious/real)

weird flex but okay

Did an NPC write this?

This is called getting a job. being a corporate drone in the USA.

In the US, if you are not part of the Epstein class. You are the help. Or in this author’s pose, "an NPC."

be an npc. drive a boring car—who gives a fuck? have a boring job. do nothing after work. why do you have to do something after work? do something because you feel like doing it, not because you feel like you have to.

That's just being an adult.

I want to live like an NPC too, but preferably one that can't be attacked. I'd absolutely hate being an NPC in the Dark Souls series.

nihilism

I hate the emdash proliferation. We don't need to bring youtube jump cut editing to text.

We are all someone else's NPC. Even the worldwide famous movie stars. Even the billionaires.

My 11 y/o daughter loves the concept: there's this guy, he always walk his dog at the same hours. We always see him in the neighborhood: same route, same hours, same dog (obviously). And we just call him "the NPC". And seeing the NPC is something for us: if one of us sees it, we mention it to the others. But we always keep in mind that every single one of us are someone else's NPC.

Just to be clear: we're not making fun of the NPC. And we're totally okay with others calling us NPCs.

> be an npc. drive a boring car—who gives a fuck?

Or, you know, don't give a fuck and drive the car you want to drive: a boring car, or an old wreck (which can be either boring or not), a 2CV [1] (a friend drives one --and the same one-- daily since... 35 years), a Toyota Corolla, a Porsche 911... Whatever the heck you feel like owning. For you, not for what the others think.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_2CV

Live an NPC life, die by the ecocide/genocides of NPC life.

One day, NPCs will wake up and give a fuck about other people and the environments that allow for the NPC life to begin with.

Until then, they're just here to keep feeding the oppression machines.