A few nights ago I was wedged between my bed and the shelves I was trying to cram into my closet. I was soaked in sweat, and resting my head against the flimsy particle board backing of the shelves, which was becoming increasingly flimsy the more I tried to push them into place against the evidenced will of the laws of space and physics. Everything I owned was piled up around the room, and for each new other angle I tried to fit the shelves into the closet I had to move everything around again, each thing blocking where the next thing needed to go, or getting caught on every other thing, or tipping over and scattering things everywhere. So many things. Each action had prerequisite actions, every object a series of locations it had to be shuffled to before it could go where it was supposed to, and at the end, when I was forced to give up, the stacks of possessions piled up behind that stoppage like a train jam, and I felt despair out of any proportion to the problem of fitting a set of crappy Ikea shelves in a closet.
Of course, while the shelf situation was frustrating, it wasn’t the source of despair. The despair that was waiting to raise to the surface was over the chain of prerequisites, the stack of laundry that had to go on the bed so I could open the closet, the boxes that had to go on my computer chair so I could remove the old shelf, the whole room becoming chaotic and unusable just to clear a path, and the path in the end being useless – but then the car I needed to borrow as well, the money I needed to spend as well, the time I needed to make, the projects I needed to plan, as well, as well, as well.
When we speak of the belief that all things are connected, we speak of it as though it ought to make things easier somehow. As though there’s a difference between a web and a tangle when either one can make you drown.
A belief in a the vast interconnectedness of all things is not a cure for anxiety.
It feels like Sokoban, a game of pushing boxes into place, where each box requires pushing other boxes requires pushing other boxes before anything can go where it actually needs to go. It should seem repellent in this aftermath, but Sokoban seems so appealing to me as a game right now because it would be nice to know what the actual boxes are, where the bounds of the arena where they can be moved lie, and to be certain that the posed problem can in fact be solved. Games promise self-contained problems, problems that don’t connect to anything outside of themselves and that you can therefore give yourself wholly to solving without constantly worrying about whether you have to do something else outside of them first. They promise not to be approachable – not necessarily easy, but quantifiably difficult. They promise to have a beginning and an end, to have boundaries instead of the constant hell of shifting walls that the vast sloppy systems of the outside world offers.
They did, anyway. Now games are a service, with boundaries that shift, with ‘new’ services on offer that may in fact just be keyed doors in front of the parts of the game you originally wanted to play. We have gleefully broken down the boundaries of the game that offered such comfort in the naive belief that to have no boundaries is to be free and that to be free is to be unbound. These games are just a symptom of a deeper rot of disruption, naturally. Why have boundaries between work and leisure when you can do both at once? Why have boundaries between work and entertainment when you can do both at once? Why not just have a little bit of work happening all the time, every day, forever? Be a bit more productive whenever you’re idle so you can feel good about yourself? How else could you possibly feel good about yourself?
And before you know it, everything in your life is just a box needing to be shoved into place so everything else can fit. Your chair and bed are boxes to be moved into place. Your friends and family are boxes to be moved into place. It’s all Sokoban now, and what is vitally important is that everything be moved into place, and it’s all interconnected, a puzzle of unverifiable size and complexity and of inescapable urgency.