I’m finding it hard to reply because this feels like one of those posts where nothing I say will do it justice—whether to the post itself, the world, or even my own thoughts. The more I reflect on agency, the assassination, my similar tendency to see most people as NPCs, and the term NPC itself and what it does to us when we use it, the more I realize I am just treading water.

It feels like I’m trying to say some things, but I don’t know what they are. I only know that when I say something else, that’s not it. What if we quite literally don't have the words for certain modern feelings, and all we can do is to circle around them without ever explicitly stating them? Maybe that sounds overly dramatic, but that is how I feel. Do others ever feel this way? Is there a specific term for it? Or is it just an intrinsic part of the human condition—so universal that we never even bothered to invent a word for it? I must admit, that would be terrifying. It reminds me of George Orwell's 1984, but instead of eliminating words to limit human thought, we created societies with bigger problems than a single human mind can ever comprehend in full.

Anyway, with this disclaimer out of the way, I want to say that this post reminded me that I dismissed the news about the assassination as "just an American thing." However, I am usually pretty aware that the US basically defines Western culture and whatever happens there, usually also starts happening here in Europe not too long after, at least to some degree. So there is the first conflict. Why did I not really care? I think partly it was because I perceived most reactions as noise: some people were shocked, some were cheering, some people were shocked that others were cheering, but none of them struck me as original, thoughtful or unbiased. I don't blame them though. If someone asked me what I am thinking about the assassination I would probably just have replied: "that's probably not good." Not very thoughtful myself.

But I also didn't care about the assassination because I didn't think that it matters that I do:

I think this brings us back to the question of agency. It's pretty hard to be agentic when in 99.99% of the things that happen in the world, what you did or didn't do didn't matter. So much is beyond our control, it's very tempting to just lean into that realization.¹

In that sense, I can understand why we take mental shortcuts and dismiss the fact that every single person has an experience as complex as our own by labeling them as NPCs. But it’s also somewhat ironic since thinking of others as NPCs is itself kind of NPC'ish. After all, it’s a mental shortcut, not so different from the mental shortcuts we see in others that lead us to think of them as NPCs.

So perhaps the key difference is that some people are more aware of them than others, as mentioned in the article:

But I’m also increasingly worried that people like me, who try to remain neutral observers, will also end up in the crossfire eventually anyway.

I think that was most of what I wanted to say. I hope there was at least a shimmer of original thoughts in there.

Oh, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to force myself to listen to my thoughts, as the author of the article described it here: