by LE Francis
I tend to have a lot of weird conversations & that’s fine, I seek them out. But over the last ten years, many have skewed weird (derogatory) & they’ve almost always circled back to someone who unironically came at me with the term NPC.
If you’re not a nerd, NPC means “non-playable character,” & outside of video games it is an insult that means that someone lacks individuality & is either obstinately stupid or mid depending on the perception of the wielder of said insult. As an insult, I don’t care, more often than not, people slinging shit are covered in it. But in the red pill fringes of Sbucks spirituality there is motion behind genuinely insinuating that some people are just not real people but soulless simulacra. At that point, you are veering out of simple asshole territory into dangerous stupidity.
The core of all spirituality, from religious to more esoteric woo practice, is that consciousness or God or the universe or whatever analog unites all. That can vary from all of reality, to all of consciousness, to all of humanity, to all of life. But regardless of the flavor of your philosophy, all human beings are of the same stuff as you. New thought describes this in the oft-misunderstood “everyone is you pushed out,” in Christianity there are countless verses like 1 Corinthians 11:3 “But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ,” Buddhism goes further with a central doctrine of “co-arising” or “co-origination” maintaining that all is connected.
Unfortunately, there are groups of people who choose to solely depend on online content when they form their estimation of the world & spirituality & those same people are unlikely to consult online versions of full texts, preferring to take everything out of context, cherry-picked by creators operating as advertisers and salesmen. (As always, L says, it’s capitalism at the core of some bullshit.) The people you listen to online are trying to make a buck for their time & while I can’t necessarily fault them (a man’s gotta eat), it’s a game of stripping context and making the consumer of your boiled down flavorless bullshit feel special for choosing to believe you.
And ultimately that need to feel special is at the core of people who would unironically use a term like NPC in a spiritual conversation. They are unserious thinkers who have built a world view based on the perceived specialness of their individual existence despite the concept being antithetical to the very spiritual practice they claim.
It’s a rather pitiful place to be, akin to starting on square negative fifty when reasoning with any real spiritual philosophy, however entire industries have been built on it, and the general malaise of the working class sets us up to fall for it. We’re working multiple jobs & doing everything the long way so there’s little time to read; we were not taught basic critical thinking skills in K-12, so when someone presents us an argument that makes us feel validated we immediately accept it rather than questioning why we feel that way; our healthcare system is a sham and we pay enough to maintain a basic physical state of health, the additional financial burden of mental health counseling is out of the question; there’s a social stigma to admitting that you have maladaptive mental health issues & because you have built yourself around the way you are perceived by other people, you are unwilling to be the fool even for a second. I completely understand. I grew up in a trailer park & started working at 14 years old, I have managed chronic illness for decades, after years in professional burnout my personal goals & ideals are incompatible with what success looks like in a capitalist system, I spent my teens & early twenties reading & honing my creative skills because I’d been told so many times I was too ugly to ever be loved & I felt as if I had to have something to be worthy. I’m well-aware that it was a quirk of my insecure reasoning to shift to reading, to studying the classics, to wanting to understand metaphysical philosophy in the framework of more rationalist philosophers & even questioning through scientific method that pushed me to where I am now.
& as always, there’s a lesson in any deep philosophical disagreement & I am out to learn everything I can. However, I am old & tired & can’t keep explaining the same thing forever & really wish that people without pathological issues would allow themselves to cultivate empathy. Or at least not nuke their innate sense of empathy over disappointment, suffering, etc. Suffering is the common condition of unhealed humanity. As much of a shithead as T.S. Eliot is, I was absolutely stopped in my tracks the first time I read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
“My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?”
Do I dare disturb the universe? This poem was published almost 70 years before I was born but spoke directly to my own torment over insecurities & perceived inadequacies through my teen & college years. It was an absolute balm to my soul to hear the sentiment expressed in an antiquated lyric that threaded my pain through so many others, through time itself.
Ultimately, I have to stand on business. There is absolutely zero room for unironic use of the idea of an NPC in spirituality. Indeed, the people who wield the insult are the ones that lack critical thinking & deep, applied understanding of the very concepts they claim prove their case.
& I want to believe that I can make some sort of difference here, that I can have so many exhausting conversations & make you measure the angles of the corner you’ve backed yourself into but I’m only one guy & I’m tired & I spend a lot of time making questionable art & questionable dietary choices involving cheese. So here’s my ask, if you unironically ever think that someone else is an NPC, go talk to them, treat them with respect, & empathize with them on some small level, even if it’s just the unpredictability of local weather.
I can guarantee you that, as always, the flaw in your assumptions lies within.
Notes in Esoteric Creativity is a monthly column discussing the conjunction of creative practices & esoterica from a wide-angle perennial view of metaphysics & spirituality.
LE Francis (she/her) is a recovering arts journalist living in the rainshadow of the Washington Cascades. She is the co-EIC of Sage Cigarettes Magazine. She is a Pushcart-nominated poet & her debut chapbook THIS SPELL OF SONG & STAR is available through Bottlecap Press. She plays bass in the indie/prog band Hands Above Stars & makes noises in the shoegaze project The Bone Palace. Find her online at nocturnical.com.
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