The self-identity loves to play the Management Game - keeping us in Overthinking life decisions, resentment and exhaustion by maintaining a life that we actually don’t want.
But there is another game that’s available - the Procedural Game - and it changes completely how you relate to yourself and the world. Not as a metaphor, not as a philosophy, but as a piece of technology that quietly changed how games are made—and, without most people realizing it, exposed a completely different logic of how worlds can exist.
Okay, so here’s the thing most people don’t know, and once you see it you genuinely can’t unsee it: not all games are built the way you think they are. In fact, the way most people imagine games working—where the digital world already exists and your avatar just moves around inside it—is only one very specific design choice, and not even the most interesting one. The alternative is so counterintuitive that even some hard core gamers often don’t realize it’s happening. Those two ways of perceiving the world have direct impact on how we navigate our daily life decisions.
The World of overthinking life decisions
Most people assume a game world is just… there. Like a movie set. Someone builds it, fills it with stuff, presses save, and then you walk around inside it. Roads exist whether you drive on them or not. Buildings are standing there long before you enter them. Enemies are waiting behind doors whether you open those doors or not. The world is finished before you ever touch it, and there are just different scenarios you’re entering and uncovering what’s already been made.
For a long time, that’s exactly how games worked. And that model trained people, because it carries a specific logic: the world exists first, action comes second. Learn the map, then move. Understand the terrain, then commit. If you gather enough information, you can reduce risk. Safety comes from knowledge. In life, this is the normal life, life where you need clarity before acting and so overthinking life decisions - big or small - is a default. Even when you act instead of thinking, the overthinking can get feral right after. See the exact mechanism here because maybe 'just take action' is also not the answer. Not in this world.
Now, the second option.
The World where overthinking life decisions loses utility
Then developers ran into a wall. A very boring, very technical wall. Storage limits. Memory limits. File sizes getting absurd. You couldn’t just keep building bigger and bigger worlds by hand forever. And this is where someone had a completely unhinged idea that turned out to be brilliant: what if we didn’t store the world at all?
What if, instead of shipping a map, we shipped a machine that makes maps?
That’s where procedural generation comes from, and games like Minecraft, No Man’s Sky, and Diablo are built exactly like this: nothing exists in advance, nothing is revealed by thinking harder, and the world only appears when you move.
And this is the part that people really struggle to grasp the first time, because it breaks a basic assumption about how reality is supposed to work: in a procedural game, the world does not exist in advance. Not hidden. Not offscreen. Not waiting. It genuinely is not there. What exists instead is a set of rules—algorithms, probabilities, constraints—that can produce a new scenes, but only when they are triggered.
Even the game or whoever created the game does not know what’s ahead of you until you move. It can’t know, because there is nothing to know.
The moment you take a step, the system is forced to decide what should exist there, and it generates it in real time. Terrain, structures, encounters, rewards—whatever the game uses—are calculated on the spot. Before that step, there is no unfinished version of the world sitting somewhere in storage. There is just absence.
And the system is ruthless about this. It will not generate anything “just in case.” It will not reassure you. It will not preview outcomes to make you feel safer. It’s lazy in the best possible way. No input, no output. No movement, no world. You can stand there forever—perfectly calm, perfectly prepared, perfectly optimized—and the game will give you absolutely nothing, not as a punishment, but because there is nothing for it to respond to.
This is why procedural games feel so strange if you expect the old model. You keep trying to look ahead, and there’s nothing to see. You keep waiting for clarity, and the system just doesn’t care. Not because it’s mysterious or testing you, but because the clarity you’re waiting for hasn’t been computed yet. It literally does not exist.
And here’s the flip that really messes with people once they see it: in this kind of system, understanding comes after action, not before. You don’t move because you understand what will happen. You understand what happens because you moved and saw what the system generated in response.
You want clarity, you have to trigger it. You want feedback, you have to act. You want the world to reveal itself, you have to force it to exist.
Otherwise you’re just spinning in your head and reacting to a world which is just a mental representation of the world - completely made up of the past interpretation of happened: simulation.
The actual world stops being an object and becomes a process. It’s not something you enter; it’s something that starts running when you do. Overthinking loses it’s benefits because you don’t need to decide before you make a move - even when it’s a tiny action. As long as you move, then you respond to reality, not to the representation of it.
It’s no longer you vs. the world. But you as the world.
And here’s the part most people miss completely: procedural games do not reward waiting. Waiting doesn’t make you safer. Waiting doesn’t reveal more information. Waiting doesn’t preserve options. Waiting just freezes the system. Nothing updates. Nothing clarifies.
The game only starts when you move.
Not when you’re ready. Not when you feel confident. Not when you’ve figured it out. When the system is forced to generate something because you acted.
Until then, there is no map. No overview. No “ahead.” Nothing.
The rules of the game and access to desire without identity is mapped out in Wanting Illusion: How To Find Direction In Life Without Losing Yourself To Identity, Fantasy, Or Fear.
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