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@ RobBrinded
2025-06-04 12:10:56Imagine life as a personalized Virtual Reality game, where you're the player navigating a simulation coded by your deepest programming. Every thought, emotion, and action shapes the reality you experience through your VR headset. You strive to level up—chasing achievements, relationships, or self-worth—believing that winning is just one more quest away. But no matter how hard you play, the game feels rigged. Success slips away, setbacks pile up, and you're left exhausted, wondering why you can't break through.
That was my reality for the first 30 years—trapped in a VR game running five glitchy algorithms I now call "hamster wheels." These binary mental programs kept me locked in endless loops: trying to gain but always losing, attempting to be able but feeling unable, seeking support but getting let down. I was jammed up on the left side of these wheels—the Yin, "not doing" side—paralyzed by fear of failure, loss, and judgment, like a player frozen at a checkpoint, unable to progress yet desperately yearning for rewards.
But this wasn't just some abstract gaming metaphor. This was brutal, daily suffering that consumed every aspect of my existence. I'm talking about waking up each morning with a knot of dread in my stomach, going to bed each night feeling like a failure, and spending the hours in between convinced that everyone could see how fundamentally broken I was.
What I didn't understand then was that I wasn't broken or weak. I was simply running corrupted code installed during childhood, outdated survival protocols that were no longer relevant to my adult life. The most beautiful part? Every human has admin access to their own VR system. We just forgot the password.
This is the story of how I discovered that password, but first, let me show you what it feels like to live inside a completely glitched reality.
The Early Error Messages
My first glimpse that something unusual was running in my background processes came when I was 10 years old, sitting in school assembly at Hillcrest prep in Nairobi, Kenya. The deputy headmistress was addressing the school, and something about her that day caught my attention—like receiving data through an advanced sensor that others couldn't access.
In the car on the way home, I told my mum that the headmistress was pregnant. When she asked if it had been announced, I said no. "I just feel it," I explained. My mum gave me a strange look and commented that I was "weird sometimes." A few months later, the deputy headmistress stood up in assembly to announce she was expecting her first baby.
Instead of feeling proud or special about this ability, I felt ashamed. Deep in my bones, I absorbed the message that there was something wrong with me, something that made me different in an unwelcome way. I started hiding these experiences, learning to keep quiet when my internal sensors picked up information others couldn't detect.
This early conditioning jammed me firmly on the left side of what I now recognize as the "Paying Attention/Ignore" hamster wheel. I learned that getting attention for my unusual abilities felt dangerous, so I began ignoring and suppressing these gifts. Like a player avoiding the spotlight quests, I retreated into the shadows, coded by shame and fear.
Another incident a couple of years later showed me just how high the stakes could be. I was upstairs in my bedroom when I received what felt like an urgent system alert—a sudden knowing that something was wrong. Looking out the window, I saw my one-year-old baby brother leaning over our small garden pond.
Almost in slow motion, I watched him topple headfirst into the water. The terror that shot through me was unlike anything I'd ever experienced. I screamed and raced downstairs, my heart hammering so hard I thought it might burst. Plunging my hands into the cold water, I pulled out my wide-eyed baby brother, both of us gasping.
But instead of celebrating this miraculous save, I was haunted by a thought that would torment me for decades: What if I hadn't looked out the window? What if I hadn't received that warning? The weight of that responsibility was crushing. From that moment on, I became hypervigilant, constantly scanning for threats, terrified that my failure to pay attention could result in catastrophe.
The VR game was trying to show me my inherent capabilities, but my childhood programming was translating every success into evidence that I needed to be more controlling, more worried, more afraid. I was learning to live in a state of chronic anxiety disguised as responsibility.
The System Crash That Changed Everything As I got older, the glitches became more obvious and devastating. By my teens, it was clear that multiple algorithms were running haywire, but I had no framework for understanding what was happening to my system. When I was around 17, my girlfriend dumped me, and my entire world collapsed. This wasn't just teenage heartbreak—it was a complete VR system crash that triggered every corrupted program I'd been running. The pain was indescribable.
I felt like someone had reached inside my chest and torn out something essential. I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, couldn't concentrate on anything. The simplest tasks felt impossible. I remember sitting in my bedroom, staring at the walls, feeling like I was dissolving from the inside out.
But it wasn't just the relationship loss. This event triggered a cascade failure across all my programming simultaneously. I was facing final exams at school, and my "Unable/Able" wheel went into overdrive—I felt completely incapable of handling the tests and saw myself as a massive disappointment to everyone who had ever believed in me.
A week after being dumped, I badly injured my knee playing rugby, losing the only activity that gave me any sense of worth. This happened during an ambulance strike in the UK, so I was left writhing on the field for almost an hour, using gas to dull the pain that was shooting through my leg like lightning.
When a doctor finally examined me, he dismissed my injury despite obvious symptoms. "Nothing wrong with your knee," he said, as I stood there unable to put weight on it. My sports teacher overheard and thought I was faking, leading him to ignore me completely for the rest of the term.
The betrayal and abandonment I felt was soul-crushing. Here I was, genuinely injured and in pain, and the very people who were supposed to help me were treating me like a liar. I felt invisible, worthless, and utterly alone. Looking back, I can see that all five hamster wheels were spinning simultaneously, all jammed on the left (Yin) side:
Gain/Loss: I had lost my girlfriend, was losing rugby, and faced losing academic success Support/Let Down: I felt completely unsupported and was letting everyone down Right/Wrong: Everyone was wrong about me, and I felt wrong about everything Attention/Ignore: I was being ignored by those who should have paid attention Unable/Able: I felt completely unable to handle any aspect of my life
This wasn't just emotional turmoil—it was a complete VR system overload that manifested in my physical body. Within weeks, I developed glandular fever that would last over a year. My doctor labeled it "post-viral fatigue syndrome," essentially admitting he had no idea what was wrong with me.
Living in the Crashed State
The year that followed was one of the darkest periods of my life. I spent most of it sleeping, hiding from a world that felt overwhelming and hostile. Simple tasks like taking a shower or eating a meal required enormous effort. I felt like I was watching life through a thick fog, unable to engage with anything that had once brought me joy.
The loneliness was crushing. My friends moved on with their lives while I remained stuck in this gray, lifeless existence. I felt like a ghost haunting my own life, present but not really there. The vibrant, curious boy I'd once been seemed to have disappeared entirely. My hamster wheels had drained every ounce of my system's resources, leaving me in a crashed state with no energy to even load basic daily functions. I was like a computer with a virus so severe that it could barely run the most basic programs.
But the worst part wasn't the physical exhaustion—it was the crushing sense that I was fundamentally defective. While other teenagers were falling in love, excelling at sports, preparing for university, I was lying in bed, unable to function. The shame was overwhelming. I felt like a failure at the most basic level of human existence.
The Accidental System Restart
Interestingly, I instinctively found a solution that would later inform my understanding of how to debug human consciousness. I'd read somewhere that sunshine could help, so I used my meager savings to book a three-week trip to the Caribbean. The Gulf War was happening, so tickets were dirt cheap—the only reason I could afford it. The decision to go was one of the first choices I'd made entirely for myself in months. It felt risky, almost rebellious, but something deep inside me knew I had to do it.
I returned completely cured—transformed, really. The fog had lifted, my energy returned, and for the first time in over a year, I felt genuinely excited about being alive. It was my first venture into what I now recognize as alternative system recovery.
Looking back, I think that trip worked because it was a complete environmental reset combined with a fundamental shift in my internal programming. For three weeks, I existed outside the familiar environment that had been triggering my glitchy code. More importantly, it was probably the first time in years I'd made a choice from my own center rather than from the panicked algorithms of my hamster wheels.
But the most profound change was internal. Somehow, in that tropical environment, surrounded by beauty and warmth, I remembered what it felt like to be alive. The constant background noise of anxiety and self-criticism quieted, and I could hear my own voice again.