Chapter 4: The Game of Life—Now in Debug Mode

Chapter 4: The Game of Life—Now in Debug Mode

An Open-World Survival RPG Like No Other

Human existence is the ultimate open-world, survival RPG, told primarily in first person. The only requirements to enter?

1. Be a sentient being.

2. Be a legal resident of Earth.

3. Realize, sooner or later, that you’ve been playing all along.

Welcome to The Game of Life, where the objective is simple: ascend, adapt, and propagate. The difficulty? Entirely dependent on where you spawn.

Land in a developing nation? Your main quest might involve securing clean water or defending against pestilence du jour.
Drop into a country of wealth and power? You might just end up being the guy blogging about muscle cramps and mushrooms.

This was the sequence of thoughts I awoke with one morning after an unusually good night’s sleep. Not so much a message from the ether, like last time—more like a revelation.

And as these thoughts lingered, even as I powered through my morning routine, I considered whether they were a direct side effect of the courseware I’d started just days before.

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Reality Check: Python for Everyone—But Not Really

The course was called Python for Everyone.

A noble title. A promising invitation.

But despite the good intentions of its esteemed professor and the university’s golden seal, it had one fatal flaw:

"Everyone" apparently meant "everyone who already knows how to think like a university student."

I did not.

Welcome to my middle school mathematics class.

My childhood was spent bouncing between divorced parents with wildly different ideas of education, meaning multiple schools, disrupted learning, and a shaky academic foundation. My parents tried to tutor me, bless them, but by then, the damage was done.

And so I feared math class. I feared failing. I feared proving everyone right about me.

But here’s the funny thing:

Despite having to Google half the concepts for better explanations, despite feeling like an outsider in a classroom meant for minds that had been trained differently than mine—

I aced the first pop quiz.
I aced the one that interrupts the video lecture to make sure you’re paying attention.
I dominated the final quiz that covered the entire first chapter.

I was elated.

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You’d think, after that, all I had to do was cruise my victory lap, avoid hitting reporters on the way into the winner’s circle, and graciously accept my laurels.

But no.

Instead, I felt something much worse than failure.

I was bored.

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Welcome to Procrastination City—Population: Me

I don’t know how many times I paused the video lecture to check Twitter, but when I finally realized I was reloading my feed mid-sentence, I knew I was doomed.

I had just been elected Mayor of Procrastination City, a town where every citizen submits daily case studies on the relationship between Nvidia drivers, processor architecture, and Cyberpunk 2077 framerates.

(Go on. Ask me how I know.)

Cyberpunk2077: V’s backup is Solomon Reed? FAFO.

Desperate for a fix, I turned to drugs.

Or rather, I searched for a homeopathic Schedule 2 emulator.

I went straight to the Gen-X market maker himself (you know who), and after chasing down a chewable mint that was sold out everywhere, I headed to the product website and went straight for the ingredients list.

Caffeine, Ginseng, L-Theanine.

That day, I bought three big bottles of the stuff.
That night, I finished the online course.
The next day, I finished two more.

Something about the L-Theanine felt different.

L-Theaninie - Magic in a bottle?

Not a body high. Not an artificial stimulant boost.

More like… a mental clarity unlock.

A near emotional shift. A positive mental attitude injection that turned boring coursework into something tolerable.

And sure, getting those digital certificates of completion meant something. It was progress. It was proof.

Until I tested my skills in the real world… and got annihilated.

Turns out, my new skill wasn’t coding.

My new skill was learning how to pass a test.

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Existential Doom: Level 2 Unlocked

The fear hit me like a runaway freight train.

This wasn’t just frustration.
This wasn’t just the realization that I wasn’t good yet.

This was existential doom.

Why?

Because this entire learning process—this "Python journey"—felt like the polar opposite of how I learned my true craft.

When I got into photography and cinematography, it was because I was obsessed.

Inspired by the fashion portraiture of Helmut Newton.
Electrified by the surreal storytelling of Gregory Crewdson.
Falling in love with the way a scene was shot and needing to know which lens they used.

That’s how I learned.
That’s how I fell in love with a craft.

This?

This felt like an academic chore.

And unless I could find a learning tool that provided a visual and emotional anchor to the cold, impersonal syntaxof coding…

I already knew the truth.

I would never become a programmer.

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Next Up: The Search for Meaning in a World of Code

The question wasn’t whether I could pass another test.
The question wasn’t whether I could collect another certificate.

The question was:

Could I find a way to make Python feel like art?

If I couldn’t… then what was the point?

Next Chapter Teaser:

"Debugging the Human Brain—Can Code Be Art?"

(Spoiler alert: I’m about to break something to find out.)

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Concept & AI-Rendered Art by Athena (In collaboration with Keith DeCristo)