The World Ends With You

I first heard the phrase in 2007. We were on a family trip in San Antonio and I had brought my DS. I had never really gotten into JRPGs as a kid mostly due to a lack of understanding. I was a Nintendo Console-onlyist growing up by nature of their games being more family friendly, so there was a lot less “trauma and violence” and, instead, I spent hours of my life stomping KOOPAS. I couldn’t tell you why I picked it up, but I can tell you that I am glad I did. The World Ends With You by Square Enix for the Nintendo DS was one of the most unique and impactful experiences I had with that console.

The story follows Neku Sakuraba as he enters a sort of “limbo” between living and dead–The Underground (UG)--where a game is played to supposedly grant the dead a second chance at life. As Neku progresses through the story, he builds connections, albeit reluctantly, with the people around him. The teams at Jupiter and Squeenix that built the game were intentional about the messaging of the game and it was not subtle, either.

Neku lives in Shibuya, a cultural nexus of sorts in Japan. It is presented as a mashup of fashion, music, people, and culture. However, Neku prefers to keep to himself; so much so that he is constantly wearing headphones to block people out. He is a reluctant protagonist throughout a majority of the story as he learns it is impossible to truly live without engaging with those around you. Not just those who are like you, either. Neku was, what most would call at the time, a hipster. He was into the more underground scene of culture; the ‘I knew it before it was cool’ kind of guy.

His first partner, Shiki (yes, this is who our corgi is named after), is open to forming the connection with Neku so they can make it through the week of the death games. In turn, he almost kills her. His second partner, Joshua, is a bit of an enigma and part of the bigger story, but he is a character that slowly helps Neku build up his sense of trust. Finally, we have the lovable idiot Beat. Beat is his third partner and has been a major secondary character throughout the game. Beat’s driving purpose in this game is helping his sister Rhyme recover her memories and gain a second chance at life. But even this leads Beat to do some things he ends up regretting.

All of these characters with their disparate goals, wants, and needs, are more or less forced to work together and build bonds to live once more. The story, and even Shibuya as a setting, open up the more Neku expands his world to those around him. The core messaging of the game is that The World Begins and Ends With You. In other words, your world– your sphere of personage is only as big as you let it get. You can keep people out, shut down opposing views, and treat people as a nuisance if you want. It won’t lead to a particularly fulfilling life or happy existence, but it’s a choice many actually do make.

Many people probably know someone like this. Someone who shuts out the outside world, doesn’t engage with people, and primarily stays at home and watches TV, games, or scrolls on social media. And while that is definitely a version of the character that Neku is depicted as, I’d argue that it’s not the primary person this type of message is aimed at.

Spoiler alert for an 18-year-old game now, but as the story plays out, it becomes clear that the games are merely a subtext to test if Shibuya is worth saving. The people, the culture, the ideas, the memes, the constructs– is it worth saving or should it all be wiped away? Can all of those things truly come together well? Can people cooperate despite being so very different? Neku’s actions at the end answer this as he comes together with the people he has worked alongside throughout the story to not only save them, but Shibuya as a whole. He uses the bonds he has forged to win the game and set things right in Shibuya, even if it is only for a little while.

At the risk of being too nerdy, I really identified with Neku. It was really easy as a depressed kid to shut other people out. I’d been bullied quite viciously to the point of trying to take my own life and eventually just stopped making genuine connections with people. Who could really blame me, right? But the thing is, I still yearned for those connections. We all do. Humans are not solitary creatures; we desire and need connection with the community around us.

Did I immediately go out and make genuine connections? Not by any means. It took several years; I believe it was not until 2013 that I felt that I could breathe around people again. I could open myself up. Therapy was a big factor in helping with that, too. But TWEWY never left my mind. The music was in my constant rotation, the story stuck with me, and the characters lived on in my mind.

It wasn’t until I really started getting into Psychology that I connected my link to Neku to the core of the game’s message. It was very easy for me to shut my world off after dealing with what I had dealt with, but that didn’t make me happy. By all counts, I was miserable. I had decided where the world ended and it literally ended with me. My world was only as big as I let it and its size was one person: me. I remember being really frustrated. I hesitate to use the word anger because I was never an angry kid in that I never showed it, but I was always harboring this deep frustration and resentment.

There is a certain mindset that loneliness begets. We begin with “I can’t trust anyone.” From there, we start looking for the flaws in others. We want to find reasons to distrust people so we can validate our worldview. After enough time of viewing people through that lens, we go from “I can’t trust anyone” to “everyone is awful.” But it doesn’t stop there. If everyone is awful–so awful that we won’t even be around them–then that gives us a false sense of superiority. It’s not just that they’re awful; they’re ignorant. We get to a point of grandeur where we view people beneath us. Maybe not everyone, but a good majority of people.

I think I was in the manosphere before it was called that. I turned to intellectualism to supplement the things I truly needed. I thrived on debating, or at the very least pretending to debate, politics. I was on track to become a mini Ben Shapiro of “facts don’t care about your feelings, Liberals.” Truly, that was what I was like until I entered college. When my world was forced to open up, my concept of reality and my worldview changed. Things that seemed right to a selfish, insular person like me were hurtful to the people at large. I realized that I was not alone in this world. Not only do other peoples’ actions affect me, my own actions affect other people. I can decide to shut myself off, but that doesn’t mean that my world doesn’t bleed into the world of others.

As a therapist, I am very purposeful with my language, both in and out of work. I want to be able to control the kind of influence I have on the people around me and I want it to be a net positive. But I would even say that it goes beyond that. I see how other people’s worlds affect each other. Absolutely nowhere is that clearer than politics.

Our current political climate says “The World Should End With You” in the sense that the only person you need to worry about is yourself. What makes you happy? What benefits you? While I do encourage people to focus on these things, prioritizing them to an unhealthy point has gotten us to where we are. There is very much an “us vs. them” mentality that I would argue has been baking for decades, especially in the modern millennial Christian church.

If you were a teenager in the aughts, I’m sure you knew of the “Not of This World” movement. There was this idea in the church that this world is not our final destination, so we should just wait until we get to heaven. This was exacerbated by the postmillennial dispensationalism movement popularized by The Left Behind books. We were essentially trained to think of anyone who was not a Christian or anyone who did not share our worldview as “other” or, at worst, “an enemy.”

And that brings us to now. We have two different sets of people convinced that the other side is their enemy. The Conservative fears and hates the Liberal as much as the Liberal fears and hates the Conservative. The driving force behind all of this is that fear. Someone once told me that “it always goes back to Maslow” and, well, kind of, yea.

Even if you’re not familiar with a lot of psychology, you might be aware of the “Hierarchy of Needs.” It is a vast generalization, but not in a negative way. When I use it with clients, it is more of an outline than it is a hard and fast rule, but it can be helpful to recognize that all people have the same basic needs. Fear, then, is the response we have when there is potential threat to our needs. Fear is the biggest driving force behind pretty much everything in our culture right now. From consumerism to even dating, the impetus behind ‘buying in’ to the product is fear.

Say I want to sell you an idea or a product; sure, I could tell you about all of the benefits that it would give you. Or I could tell you how scary things would be without it. If I can convince you that life without whatever I’m selling is frightening, then you would be more inclined to buy it. (See: Indulgences) I’m sure you can think of a few products that are sold based on fear, but I’m more interested in the commerce of ideas. Products are meant to be short-lived so that you keep buying them, but ideas are meant to become ingrained in your mind. Selling you a product gets your money, but selling you an idea gets your service.

You can see this with the built-in ecosystems of something as simple as phone companies. You could buy an Android-based Phone, but then it might not work well with your iPad or your iMac— or God forbid, you ruin the group chat you are in with the intentionally obfuscated technology that keeps you locked into the ecosystem. It’s not the product that you are invested in; it’s the concept of the product. You are sold the idea that your life would be more difficult without the product even if that is categorically not true.

So you buy into the idea of the Apple Ecosystem or the Android Ecosystem or whatever it is and you lock in. You begin to justify your need for the product— you couldn’t possibly be wrong! You’re an informed consumer, after all! All of your purchases are surely based on careful consideration and logic. No emotion involved, right?

Of course not.

The psychology of sales is incredibly interesting, but it is also incredibly predatory. It is based around convincing you that you absolutely cannot live without this product. Even though I’d like to think that none of us truly think this in the forefront of our minds, we are sold the ideas of convenience and comfort so that we continue to buy into the idea.

So why the long, vague tangent about sales? Because, like I said, it is more important to sell you an idea than it is a product. That is what our current ecosystem of government is based on. Everything from our economic system to our politics is fueled by the transaction of ideas and the entanglement of fear with said ideas. I would like to say I remember a time when politics was not based around this, but I don’t think there has ever been a time like that.

It is now evident, more than ever, that so many people let fear fuel their actions. They let the people in charge—the people we should really be scared of—tell them what to be afraid of and then they buy the ‘solution.’ “The Democrats are evil, but I am good, so vote for me so that I can protect you from their evil!” “The Republicans hate everyone and want all of the democrats to die!” But these ideas just… don’t make sense.

I’m not saying that people don’t hold to these ideas, but they didn’t come from the ether. People don’t just pop out of the womb and fear their parents’ opposing political party; that is a learned fear. We can trace it back to their parents’ parents and so on, but the real culprit is much more simple. Who benefits from keeping us fearful? Who profits from division? If you answered your opposing political party, I’m sorry to say, but you’ve been sold a bad ecosystem.

I’m not writing this based on a misplaced sense of cynicism or fear; I’m writing this out of genuine sadness and heartbreak. People that you love—that I love—who live in this cycle of fear, hate, and misdirection. They have bought into the lie that their fellow working American is their enemy.

Everyone is scared. Well, except for those at the top. This isn’t some ‘eat the rich rant,’ though. This is a genuine appeal to your humanity, and, if you’re a brother or sister in Christ—your command to love others regardless of race or creed. The people who have different values than you or who view you as an enemy are rarely fueled by anger or hate. No, those are secondary emotions. They are reactions to something far more primal: fear. We are constantly being told to fear our neighbors because we then need to look for a hero to assuage those fears. The hero we are told to look to, and the lie we have been sold, is supposedly found at the top of the pecking order. The people in Washington, the billionaires– these are the people who will supposedly save us. After all, they have power and power is what will save us, right? What our instinct tells us is that we need a warlord on a steed (with gold-plated armor DLC) to take down our enemies.

While I truly believe that the people up top are definitely our enemies as they do not care one iota for us, our true enemies are ourselves. We let our fears consume us and listen to those that tickle our ears with supposed solutions so we can give them more power. But they hate us. The people in power hate us because we stop them from having more power and more money. Yet we give it to them; we willingly give up our humanity to buy a false sense of peace at the cost of others’ lives. We as humans do not care who we need to step on and crush beneath our feet in order to secure our own needs.

We let that fear turn into anger and then to hate. We listen when we’re told to hate our neighbors. And who are our neighbors? Well, unbelievably and shockingly, the Bible actually has an answer for this! Shocker! I’m sure you all know the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), but what we tend to forget is the purpose behind the parable. Jesus told the parable to answer the question of who our neighbor is. It ends with Jesus asking “who was the neighbor to the injured man?” The religious leader then responded that the man who had mercy on the injured man was the neighbor.

We are called to be neighbors. We are called to be kind to people that we are told by society to hate. Kindness doesn’t necessarily mean acceptance of sin or hatred, but we aren’t called to question that or change that. We are commanded to be kind and to be neighbors. Without exception. Full stop. There is no “but what if they’re a Republican/Democrat?” No. If you are letting hateful rhetoric spill from your mouth simply because someone has opposing views, whether political or otherwise, then you are undoubtedly in the wrong.

I think this has been the biggest thing that has been hurting me and weighing me down lately. It is constantly on my mind that people who I used to view as kind and godly have let this hate infect their spirit. They allow this poison to turn them against their neighbors and cause us to turn inwards.

As I said earlier, we are our own worst enemies. We have a choice to let fear guide our actions and, oftentimes, I think we do. As I tell my clients, the emotion itself is not wrong. Fear and anger are natural responses to perceived threats. How we respond to those emotions is when we enter into dangerous territory.

Right now, a lot of us are Neku at the beginning of the game. We want to shut others out and simply take care of us and our own. We are willing to do whatever it takes to protect our own needs and senses of freedom, no matter who suffers in our wake. We let the people above us–the people running the game–tell us that this is the best way to play the game. They say that we can’t be safe or live if we don’t focus on ourselves. That is a terribly sad way to live.

I’m not coming at this from a political lens; there is plenty of hate thrown around on both sides. I’m not coming at this from a purely Christian lens as I don’t think kindness is reserved exclusively for Christians. I’m not coming at this from a therapist’s perspective because I don’t think you need to be a therapist to empathize or sympathize.

I’m coming at this as another player in this game. A neighbor. A member of the community. Our enemies aren’t the other players, so we should stop treating them like they are. In Ephesians 4:29, Paul tells us that we should not let any unwholesome talk come out of our mouths, but rather talk that builds others up. I would say our actions should also follow suit. We should not be seeking to tear others down; they’re already being torn down enough by this game as is.

The easy call to action is to say “be kind,” but I think it goes way beyond that. Stop living a life drowning in fear. There are plenty of valid things to be scared of, but why live like that? Why let that close off your world? I don’t want my world to have an end; I want it to be infinite. I want to have experiences with everyone else from every kind of walk of life. I want to understand their struggles, share in their pain, and help them through it. THAT is why I became a therapist. My world is not one in which I want to step on anyone to get ahead or shut anyone else because they have a different viewpoint. That’s not who I am as a therapist, a Christian, or as a human.

So where are you going to let your world end?