
Does anybody else feel like whatever you do, it never really has a lasting impression on your “storyline” in life? 

I’ve been dealing with some emotional stuff by playing computer games recently. One of my favorite games of all time is L.A. Noire. To sum it up, it's a detective game set in Los Angeles in the 1940s, where you have to investigate various murder cases by interrogating people and searching crime scenes for clues. While each case is it's own story, everything ties into each other when you near the end of the game. 

Now, this is a computer game; while it gives you the illusion of freedom of choice it is still heavily story based. This makes for some cutscenes that, depending on your previous in-game choices, can come off as more or less logical. But the purpose of the cutscenes and the NPCs is to push the story forward, not to “make sense”. So if you've missed doing something in the game, but nothing big enough to stall the story development, some NPC can go from being your best pal (sort of), to sudden and full-on rage in the following cutscene, seemingly out of nowhere. Then you, the main character, have to go along with this new narrative.

When I thought about this yesterday, it dawned on me that this is exactly how I feel in life. I feel like others' presence in my life is kind of... canned, I guess? And not even necessarily in a destructive way, or in such way that I feel like they have hidden agendas (although I feel that a lot of the time, too), it's just like there are all these NPCs plopped down in various parts of my life, and I just have to accept that they come and go. Life doesn't care that I might have liked one of them or disliked another; they're thrusted into my “narrative” out of left field and I am the one who's affected by them – not the other way around. 

They just wait for me to click that one thing or do that one objective, and then they can react in a way that supposedly “progresses” my story, although for me the story also gets halted because I'm not the result of artificial intelligence or smooth game design; I'm a person affected by my surroundings. 

Other people, however, almost seem like they are not even slightly rocked by events in the life they share with me in one way or another (which I know sounds like I don't care about their feelings, which isn't what I meant).