I think lately, as in, the past four to six weeks, the routine and jejune and seemingly trivial ardours of everyday life have really started getting to me, and they’re like, triply sinister, because they really get to me but everyone goes through them, so I sound weak if I complain, but also I feel like I can see that everyone else is going through them and hating it as well, but they won’t say anything about them either for the same reason, as in, concerns about sounding weak. It’s seriously excruciating. There’s a reason all those generic, stock HD 4K wallpapers you can get are vistas of lakes or valleys or cornfields, and why all that Instagram/Twitter/Facebook inspirational pabulum is set against images of the night sky or the ocean or maybe a tent with a light on inside. Everyone wants to get away. I don’t mean go on holiday and replenish and come back afterwards. I mean get away, from every obligation and responsibility, and also, tragically, at various points, and probably much more often than I would like to admit, fancying myself a humanist and a person who cares about people and all, also away from everybody. It’s like, just get me out of here. I don’t care any how feeble, absurd, or entitled it sounds, that I can’t stand to put away the laundry or cook something to eat or correctly and routinely clean and deterge myself any longer—I am desperate, like existentially frantic, to get out of here, of life, and find some authentic and personal and really like hermetic state of true serenity, what Eastern religions might call enlightenment, or in Christianity was called kenosis, self emptying. I am no longer able to coexist with the routine and jejune, the seemingly trivial ardours of everyday life. 

I can’t help noticing a kind of allegory for the way I’m feeling lately in Death Stranding, which I’ve been playing semi-consistently throughout this whole period. I’m almost certainly projecting—I think Death Stranding is basically much more of a bad game than a good one—but what I’m projecting, and interpreting as being projected back at me, is, Sam, Death Stranding’s protagonist, being equally desperate to—as it were—get out of here as I am, but that we differ in the sense that he isn’t as willing or perhaps as capable of articulating the feeling – the world of Death Stranding, like my world as I currently, neurotically, borderline delusionally envision it, is a kind of sentient quicksand of obligations and demands that wants Sam, wants to envelop and devour him, like the grasping, edacious, crude-oil hands of the BTs, and he is a hero of this world principally owing to his ability to not only navigate and survive this threat of devourment, but escape from it entirely into the serenity of nature and solitude. Subject to constant pressure, in the form of the mortal threat from the BTs, to the unremitting phone calls, mission briefings, and email notifications he is expected to absorb—a constant pressure, the mounting and impossible nature of which is emblematised by the impossibly, comically heavy and tall loads of packages he carries on his back—Sam regardless maintains distance, control, even levity. He doesn’t complain about the weight of his deliveries. He doesn’t lose his patience with Heartman, Die Hardman, or any of the other blowhards that regularly patronise him (and the player) with their turgid briefings. When he looks in the mirror in his private room, he pulls faces, yanks his tongue, playfully jumps on the sink to see if it will take his weight—he practically dances out of the shower and back into his clothes. Despite everything, Sam is basically okay. He is simple or stupid or oblivious, but he’s psychologically, somehow, unburdened, the strong, silent type of man we’re led to believe is the fundamental ingredient in formulating powerful countries. I think this is why I find him appealing as a hero. Solid Snake has things that I don’t have—zero body fat, proficiency with weapons and martial arts, esteem as a soldier—but these are not things that I especially identify with, or feel a regular, urgent desire to obtain. The virtues of Snake, and almost all other videogame heroes, are so grossly proportioned that they’re simply not recognisable as human. Sam’s temperament and ability to sustain pressure, however, seem familiar and desirable—like things that an actual, good person might have, and that I might observe in an actual, real person who I meet. But also at the same time, they seem better than what I could be or have for myself—unattainable, and enviable. Not since I was a child, and naturally full of childish fantasy, have I wanted to be a videogame character, but there is an aspect of Sam, his calm and—not imperviousness or dispassion towards pressure and the world, but natural, instinctive ability to just basically handle it all—that I feel like I would be a better person if I had it as well. I think I’ve been playing Death Stranding at the exactly right time for it to highlight a certain deficit I feel like I have in my personality. 

All the emails and briefings and talking, they start to feel like a challenge, set by the game, to see what you personally, emotionally, and intellectually value. Are you the kind of person who wants to listen to everything and try to control everything, and gets frustrated and exhausted when you feel like you can’t, or are you able to find some kind of peace and parity, where you don’t become consumed by life’s insatiable responsibilities and trivialities, but still manage to do what you need to do, and keep going, and deliver? Every time I ignore a notification, or a pop-up readable, or one of the myriad blinking bits of lost luggage that hatch another side mission, it feels like a victory in Death Stranding—when I reach the crest of the hill overlooking Port Knot City, and look at the ocean a moment before continuing a delivery, it seems to represent a special and rare kind of balance, between doing what life obligates of you without ending your soul. 

A balance I’m not convinced I can achieve in reality. 

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Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Twitter handle is @esmithwriter.