I think we need to constantly find our place on this supermassive spinning rock. It's in our blood to search. And every day brings new challenges to the point that it's all too tempting to cling to certainty.
But if you fall too deeply into a groove, you run the risk of your own programming. The Internet has deemed this meme, an NPC or non-player character. Author Michael Malice explained the meme concept on The Joe Rogan Experience as the video game characters that don't exist outside their realms. They don't have fleshed out lives or stories, they don't think independently. And Malice explains:
“You see this on Twitter, where it’s one thing where people say cliched ideas but they’ll say cliched ideas in a cliched way. And it’s like you have no mind. You’re just repeating what has been programmed to you in your script. And as soon as you mention certain terms, there’s a knee-jerk special that they give.”
But all it takes is a second to change. That's the point author, professor, and neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky tries to highlight in one of my favorite parts of his latest TED talk, The biology of our best and worst selves. He explains how millions of years have guided us to act in certain ways and how quickly we can recognize and adjust our most ruthless and violent behavior:
“Consider the World War I Christmas truce of 1914. The powers that be had negotiated a brief truce so that soldiers could go out, collect bodies from no-man’s-land in between the trench lines. And soon British and German soldiers were doing that, and then helping each other carry bodies, and then helping each other dig graves in the frozen ground, and then praying together, and then having Christmas together and exchanging gifts, and by the next day, they were playing soccer together and exchanging addresses so they could meet after the war. That truce kept going until the officers had to arrive and said, “We will shoot you unless you go back to trying to kill each other.” And all it took here was hours for these men to develop a completely new category of “us,” all of us in the trenches here on both sides, dying for no damn reason, and who is a “them,” those faceless powers behind the lines who were using them as pawns.”