Everybody calls everybody an NPC now. That’s the great insult of the age. NPC. Like the fellow saying it has uncovered a secret code in the universe.

But I don’t know. I’ve met people. They’re not robots. Robots are built for a purpose. That already gives them a leg up.

No, people are something stranger. They’re alive, conscious, full of pain and memory and longing, and then somehow they spend the whole day doing the same five things that ruined yesterday.

Most people aren’t running one bad loop. That would be tidy and almost be respectable. No, they’re running a whole little carnival of failure. They eat their emptiness, watch their boredom, resent their defeats, avoid their discomfort, repeat opinions they never inspected, and then call the whole sad arrangement “who I am.”

Take the land whales. There’s this deep, gnawing void inside them – some spiritual emptiness they can’t name. So they reach for food, thinking it’ll finally bring comfort. But the more they consume, the bigger that hole grows. They’re trying to fill an existential lack with junk, and every bite just leaves them hungrier and further from reality.

It’s much the same with the screen zombies. Restless, bored, and lonely, they glue themselves to glowing rectangles broadcasting celebrity whores, endless trash TV, the latest garbage pushed from on high. They think it’ll fill the emptiness, but it’s pure junk for the mind. They come away reciting who’s sleeping with whom, yet still just as hollow as before.

Then you’ve got the directionless ones. The world is vast, packed with possibility, but they never take even a single step toward any of it. They drift along, killing time until time finally kills them.

The resentful ones are always angry, always the victim while blameless for their own atrocious behavior. Mad at the world, mad at everyone else, but never at themselves. Their entire personality runs on bitterness, feeding the same miserable loop day after day while rejecting responsibility.

Then there are the timid ones who refuse to take any pains. They’re so scared of discomfort that they huddle inside their tiny comfort bubble, never pushing limits, never growing, never discovering what lies beyond their safe little zone.

And the intellectually incurious are the most ironic. They might have a fancy degree and watch the news religiously, but they never actually think. They’re excellent mimics, wonderful parrots who can repeat the talking points perfectly. Ask them how something really works, its history, or the predictable outcome of some policy, and you get nothing but blank air. They’ve trained themselves for emptiness. Look behind the curtain and there’s just a void they fail to recognize.

Most of these poor souls are running several of these loops at once, affixed with defensiveness and denial.

A man can inherit a lot without ever being handed anything. He can inherit a flinch. He can inherit a resentment. He can inherit the idea that effort is for fools, excellence is arrogance, discipline is oppression, and every failure must have been arranged by someone else.

And then comes the modern superstition: relocation as redemption.

We act like dirt has magical properties. Put a man on different soil and suddenly the old machinery stops running. New roads, new schools, new laws, new grocery stores, new signs telling him where to park, and somehow the soul is supposed to say, “Well, that clears everything up.”

But geography is not baptism. A border is not a confessional. A passport stamp does not reach into a man and remove the thing in him that keeps choosing ruin.

You can move people anywhere and give them paperwork that calls them anything. Across a town, across a country, across an ocean. But if they bring the same appetites, the same excuses, the same fear of work, the same hatred of excellence, the same worship of grievance, they will begin rebuilding the old failure the moment they arrive. That is the part people don’t like. Failure travels light.

And I’ll say this for failure: it’s loyal. Failure will follow a man farther than love ever would.

To avoid delusion, you should know what to realistically expect of people imported from failed civilizations that have been stumbling along in dysfunction for thousands of years. Their ancestors built exactly the kind of societies their inherited traits could produce: low cognitive ability, poor emotional control, low trust, chaotic temperaments, and a general inability to maintain order. These aren’t random defects. They’re the natural result of deep, unchangeable patterns passed down through blood and time. You can’t fix them or their countries – better to preserve what demonstrates capability.

Moving useless people doesn’t fix anything. It just transplants that same system of traits into a civilization that neither wants nor needs it. You can’t expect average results from people who have reliably produced failure throughout history. There’s no magic dirt that somehow changes their innate traits. The same low-trust, low-ability patterns follow them wherever they go, and it’s no surprise when they deliver chaos, dependence, or violence, just like their homelands always have.

So once you see these loops for what they are, you stop thinking of them as NPCs. That’s too easy and flattering, almost. An NPC has a function. He guards the bridge. He sells you a potion. He says, “The king awaits you in the northern tower.”

Most people don’t even do that. They are not non-players. They are players, technically. But somewhere long before they arrived, they learned how to lose, and then mistook a lack of function for a way of life.