It all starts when something inside my head explodes, a big bang, the effect of which wakes me up with a jolt. I’m in a strange place, in an unfamiliar bed with someone performing a lobotomy on my brain. What? Help! An abduction by aliens? The thoughts pass by in a nanosecond before I work out that I am actually in my mate’s bed, fully clothed, with a beer mat stuffed in my mouth and a headache that contains the power of a nuclear bomb. What’s a beer mat doing in my mouth? Oh it’s my tongue. But, more to the point, what am I doing here? The existential question. I look for evidence, and see a purse lying on the floor, my purse, thank you God, but nothing else. So where the fuck is my bag, my keys! I scan the room again and again, but they don’t materialise.
At that moment I realise that this isn’t actually where it all starts. Something definitely happened before to create all this…this mess. But at the moment, it’s all a mystery. My mate appears to fill in the holes. Shoreditch, wine, shots of sambuca, Red Church bar, leaving my bag in a corner so I could dance. Oh yes, the memory’s coming back to me very clearly now, God it’s almost like I’m there again. No more, please. So I’ve lost my keys, which means I can’t get into my flat as my flat mate’s away. And shit, the only people with spare keys are my parents.
Why does this keep happening to me? I mean, just recently I had my 35th birthday, so surely I should’ve stopped acting like a kid? I can’t believe I need my Mum to get me out of this one. The shame. So I work out that to get into my flat, which is geographically just down the road, I need to travel over 20 miles. Because it’s not simply geography that’s in the equation now. You have to factor in the effect of my childish behaviour and uselessness, which means I now need to travel to my parent’s house to pick up the spare keys and then come back again. I think it’s about time I grew up.
I’m punishing myself by embarking on this journey with no pleasures. No food or drink or music. I’m hoping it’ll cleanse my soul and somehow turn me into an adult. Well, age hasn’t done anything for me, so more drastic action is obviously necessary. I’ll be like a pilgrim on a pilgrimage to the shrine of adulthood and maturity, with nothing to distract me except my thoughts of how to become a grown up.
It’s hard to focus when you’re on the bus though. All around me people are giggling, chattering, eating, drinking or playing annoying games on their phones. There’s a row of people, adults, who’re sat there pressing buttons on their mobiles, their mouths hanging open. Then I spot this woman sat next to them as she strips the skin off a leg of ‘Kennedy Fried Chicken’, and lets the clear fat run down the sides of her mouth. She doesn’t even wipe it off with the handy wipe. Next to her is a guy gazing at a nubile teen posing topless in a national newspaper. Another woman stares into the magazine she’s holding up, captivated by the bright colours and pretty faces. The bloke nearest me then slurps hard through the straw in his carton of drink. To my hungover brain it’s worse than nails down a blackboard. My eyes start to water.
But it all gets me thinking. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. I mean, by the look of it, it’s actually not just me who acts like a kid. If you think about it, people in general still behave like children. We’re not really that civilised. Look how here everyone’s still going by their basic instincts. Driven by food, drink and boobs. How easily they’re distracted, manipulated, dominated. It’s like everyone just got older but didn’t grow up. Fuck it, you may as well say the whole of freakin’ humanity acts like a kid.
Let’s list the behavioural similarities. I picture a Venn diagram in my head (as this is serious scientific stuff), with one circle containing the word ‘kid’ and the other ‘adult’. I fill the crossover bit with the shared behaviours. Possessiveness, naivety, impulsiveness, tantrums, reactive, self-centered, controlled by fear and pleasure. Ok, I know there are good versions of the similarities too. The desire to explore and inquisitiveness being the main ones.
My Venn diagram is then erased from my mind by a poke in the ribs from the woman behind me. From that signal I gather that it’s time to get off the bus and head for the tube. I step into a carriage and onto the nearest seat, finding myself opposite a little girl playing with her Barbie. She’s really working that doll, making her perform all kinds of elaborate gymnastics. Then she uses the handrail as a prop for Barbie to dance around, and suddenly there’s Barbie pole dancing right before my eyes. Her younger brother sits and stares, transfixed by ‘Pole Dancer Barbie’, now holding his toy soldier limply in his hand. I stare at the lifeless, plastic soldier. If we go along with my theory that we’re all kids, it means that kids are in charge. And if you think about it, there’s a great deal of truth in that. From the Romans to George W Bush, those in power have acted like kids playing a game.
You know that kid’s game, ‘I’m the King of the Castle, and you’re the dirty rascals’, where a group of kids run to the top of a hill or climbing frame and the one who gets there first shouts out that little rhyme? Well, it’s like the people in power are the ones who got to the top first and then bagsied it. And you remember what it’s like to ‘bagsy’ something. It becomes your prized possession, and no bastard is going to take it away from you. Well, that’s what happened with the people in power. Or should I say kids? They created the hierarchical structure of power that still exists today and did anything to safeguard it. The territory of power. The bully’s territory. “Hey, get lost, this is my patch.” And they’ll go to war with anyone who tries to bagsie it off them.
It’s all in the game, as they say in the TV show The Wire. The system those in power created is basically a game. And of course it's a game. What else would kids do but play games? And, you know, we always want to change the rules and play it our way, because we complain that the game is rigged. But then we still want to win, and get our own way. And it’s our competitiveness that perpetuates the game. Either that or our childish desires and want, want, wants. Be it a chocolate bar or a Nintendo DS. We’ve gone and trapped ourselves in this darned game. And with each new kid in power (King of The Castle), the rules get interpreted slightly differently to suit themselves. “Ok, now we go anti-clockwise around the board, and a 6 is the lowest score on the dice.”
The little girl is now handing a plastic oven over to her brother. It looks like the soldier has been given orders to cook Pole Dancer Barbie dinner. Isn’t it only kids who cheat in games? ‘Adults’ teach them that cheating’s wrong, but then our whole system is based on cheating people. Hey, it relies on it for christ’s sake. Those who don’t know the rules properly are taken advantage of. And don’t you find that these rules aren’t really properly explained anyway? It’s like they’re made as complicated as possible, with all the jargon and gibberish, so only the gang in charge can understand them. Like those kids at school who created their own language by putting the last letter of every word at the front instead. Take the economy for instance. Yeah, there are basic rules. But then the latest gang in power adds their own secret stuff on top, rewriting the rules so they get most of the money. It’s like they’re holding all the Community Chest cards in Monopoly, right under our noses chanting, “Na-na-na-naaa-naaaaa!” Just kids messing around playing a game.
There are either delays or engineering works happening on almost every underground line, so my pilgrimage is taking twice as long. But I finally get to Waterloo, and head up to the overground trains. The stupid system doesn’t let me use the same ticket underground as overground, so I have to queue up for another ticket to take the train to my parent’s house. And there are only 2 ticket booths open, so the queue from where I’m standing appears to go into infinity. I mean, who’s running this transport system. You’d think a kid was in charge or something. Hmmm.
It’s unbelievable really, I think as I stand in the endless queue, watching train after train disappear off the information matrix, while I’m left here, stationary. So my mind starts wandering instead. At least a part of me feels like it's getting somewhere. Yeah, so humanity is just a load of overgrown kids playing an elaborate game. We created our Land Of Make Believe and filled it with nations, economies, religions, political systems, societies, etc. And you know, in the Land Of Make Believe, you have to believe for it to all work, for it all to exist. When people lose confidence in the economy say, when they don’t have faith in it anymore, that’s when it starts to weaken and collapse. I don’t have faith in the sodding transport system. Maybe that’s why it’s so crap.
And the thing is, we forget that we actually have the power – all of us, every single one. Because it’s our collective belief that matters. But guess what? We don’t really want to make our own decisions, we want someone else to make all the big choices for us. That’s because we’re still kids. It’s why we don’t mind having leaders telling us what to do, be it politicians, religious figures or scientists. And the funny thing is, they all have someone in charge of them. Why do you think God is called Father in Judaism and Christianity, or The Great Mother (The Tao) in Chinese philosophy? We even refer to nature as Mother, as we still need and want that guide, that leader, that comforter, that Daddy or Mummy.
I finally make it to the train and sit next to the window, and as the train pulls away, I watch the station get smaller and smaller, until it just disappears. Then I look down at people in the streets below the railway track, watching them zigzag here and there, going about their little lives like ants. We are so, so, so tiny in the universe, and from such a small perspective, we can only see a tiny fraction of what’s going on out there. We’ve got the child’s view, the kid under the table who can only see Mother Nature’s feet. We haven’t got anywhere near finding out what her face looks like. I read somewhere that, according to scientists, the universe is about 12 or 13 billion years old, and that it’s got another 200 billion years to go. So it’s a child itself really. Humanity’s similarly just a kid. Humans have only been around for 200,000 years, and if we live till the end of the earth, that’s another 7.5 million years. So we are almost babies, and it may take thousands or even millions of years for us to become true adults.
But then those calculations are just what the scientist’s say. And this is The Land Of Make Believe, so you can’t really believe anything one hundred percent. I mean none of the theories of life and existence have been proven (be it God, the Big Bang or even that our universe is carried on the back of huge turtles) any more than ghosts, fairies or the bogeyman have been disproved. No one knows for sure. Let’s take the Big Bang, the event that was apparently the beginning of everything, or at least, our universe. There are still so many unanswered questions. Like what created the energy that caused it?
Scientific theories keep changing, making it even harder for us kids to know what to believe in. Back in Newton’s day, people thought that the universe was deterministic, that every single action could be predicted. Cause and effect. In that way of looking at the world, there’s no free will, it’s like we’re all programmed to do all our actions. Mother Nature’s children being told what to do. Or little characters in a computer game.
Then quantum physics came along with all its unpredictability, randomness and lack of laws and rules, pissing on the idea of cause and effect and giving us all a freakin’ massive headache. It exploded the idea that all probabilities can happen at once, that the past can happen at the same time as the future and light is both waves and particles. There isn’t just one universe, oh no, there are multiverses and therefore infinite probability.
The train shudders to a halt in between stations and a man’s tired voice mumbles something over the intercom about signals and waits. I’m now only nearly halfway through my pilgrimage, and my hungover brain is going to crash. I imagine my thoughts as trains travelling around it that suddenly grind to a stop. I then think of nothing and just gaze out the window at a man and his son trying to eat fried egg sandwiches without spilling any of the yolk down their shirts. Neither is successful. The train squeaks as if in protest, but still lurches forward, and we're moving at last. The sudden movement also nudges my trains of thought around my brain again.
Yeah, so the Big Bang, God, multiverses or the universe sitting on top of huge turtles. They’re all unproven. Fairy stories for us kids to believe in, as it seems like we need something to believe in. Which brings us to humanity’s biggest game of all - The Meaning Of Life. Like the game ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’ that kids play or the numerous riddles and puzzles, The Meaning of Life is a guessing game where only the big questions are asked, and we attempt to answer them. The scientists are in one set of teams, religious followers in another, and then there are the various philosophy teams.
A big part of this game is questioning reality. It can go a bit like this. “I believe in fairies.” “They don’t exist you dummy.” “How do you know?” “Well, I’ve never seen one.” “Well, I’ve never seen God or those strings in that string theory. Not even under a microscope. So ner ner na ner ner.” “Alright, well what about this. If a tree falls in a forest but there’s no one to hear it, did it make a noise?”
I laugh to myself as I wonder, if my keys got lost and no one was around to see it happen, then did it actually happen? Maybe they were already lost? Or, better still, always lost. In which case, it really isn’t my fault. I suddenly feel a lot better about myself.
So what’s real and what’s not? I watch a fly head butting the train window time and time again. To try to understand what reality is, a lot of people contrast it with illusion. Although I reckon Philip K Dick summed up reality well when he said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” So it’s what’s consistent for everyone. What we see, hear, touch, smell and taste. And it’s the perceptions and interpretations of this reality that are different.
Whether you’re a scientist, a religious person or follower of a certain philosophy, you’re producing your own ‘reality’ by acting on a specific interpretation and your knowledge of it. That’s how we created our Land Of Make Believe. We’ve named everything in it and have given it all a meaning. Nothing had a meaning until we came along and gave it one. It’s not just nations and countries that we’ve made up. What about a week, a month, a year? The planets, the solar system, atoms, quarks, the past, the future? They only mean those things to us humans. They only are those things to us humans. That train window is real to the fly, but it doesn’t see it as a window. It could see it as the edge of its world, its enemy, a series of zeros and ones or it might not see it at all. It could simply ‘sense’ it as hard.
It’s why I kind of side with the philosophy of those weak social constructionalist guys, who think that we’ve socially constructed our ‘reality’ through social interactions, common perceptions of reality, common sense and common knowledge, all of which have been negotiated by people. We’ve been like kids fabricating a ‘reality’ in the corner of the playground, with dolls, teddies and trees with time machines on the top, monsters that live beyond the fence and people made from ice-cream. Baudrillard called it the ‘simulacrum’, where modern society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, so that the human experience is of a simulation of reality rather than reality itself.
You know, when you get down to it, what are scientists, philosophers and religious-types but just a bunch of kids asking question after question, and then battling to answer them, trying to outdo one another, the winner being the team with the most followers? The Wire should have had a 6th season based around this biggest game of all. Forget the small-scale street, gangs and political stuff, what about the game the scientists, religious leaders and philosophers are playing, and the money, corruption and lies surrounding it? We’ve become so caught up in it that we don’t realise it is a game. Most of us think that the Land of Make Believe is real.
Why has this game taken over our lives? Is it because it distracts us from the only thing we can be sure of? That is, you know, we all die. I hate to be morbid, but that is one thing that has been proven time and again. So in this life at least, we’re all losers in the end and because we’re still children, we look for comfort when faced with this frightening fact. So we’ve created this illusion, this game to divert our attention away from our own mortality, and we’ve put into our heads the comforting possibility of life after death and immortality of the soul - the human race even. “Daddy, has Max died?” “No sweetheart, he’s gone to doggie heaven.”
We’re children who’re afraid of the dark and need to know all the answers, but as we’re still the kids under the table only able to see Mother Nature’s feet, it’s almost impossible to know it all, to know the truth. Rather than us inventing our reality, perhaps something else has? Our universe could be someone else’s game, like SimCity, where we’re the little kids being told what to eat, what to wear and what to say. Ha, what a turn up for the books that’d be. Our game is just a game within a game. But how do we find out what the truth is? Buddhists reckon that material reality, that is, our world, knowledge and time are all an illusion and we can only see past it to find the truth through meditation. Others believe drink or drugs work just the same.
So when I finally get back to my flat and my pilgrimage is over, I realise that, ironically, the most adult thing I can do in the here and now is to pour myself a glass of red wine. I sit on my sofa and take a sip, ready to escape from this ‘reality’ and find the ‘truth’. I smile as I hold my keys in my hand, their metallic coldness contrasting with the warm satisfying feeling of the wine in my belly. Hmmm, this is going to be fun, I think to myself. Just don’t go telling my Mum, ok?
