Now Boarding: Flight 404, from LA to Sanity

Please keep your arms, legs and grievances inside the plane at all times

So, here I am. Standing in the smoldering remains of what was once called “society.” Not my fault, really.

I didn’t build this mess. I just inherited it like a haunted estate with bad plumbing and 37 ghosts with unresolved issues sealed behind the drywall. The lights flicker, the floors creak, and every time I try to open a window, someone yells “fascist.”

Charming, really.

Despite my best intentions, I’m now part of the problem. Because when the floorboards started to cave under my weight, instead of running to my local Home Depot, metaphorical me picked up a rusty old sledgehammer and then promptly tore apart the rotting foundations, which caused the support beams to collapse.

The glitch in the system

Look, systems were invented because humans—bless us—are absolute trash at making decisions while panicking, hungry, or mildly inconvenienced. Think of them like adult supervision for our inner T-Rex. The nervous system keeps you from licking electrical outlets. The endocrine system keeps you from sobbing every time you see a baby goat. The government is supposed to be a “working system,” so that we can have nice things. Then somewhere down the line, it got rebranded as “the customer is always right,” and now Karen from accounting thinks yelling into a megaphone will reverse global warming.

Instead of recalibrating, we did what every dysfunctional family with low emotional intelligence does—we turned on each other like it’s The Hunger Games. Because when things get hard, people don’t usually rise to the occasion. They lower the standard.

The secret third way

So in Ready Player One, everyone’s basically living in a giant dumpster fire, but with less optimism. Naturally, they all escape into this VR wonderland called the OASIS which is what you'd get if The Sims and every pop culture reference from the ‘80s had a baby, and that baby was raised by Reddit of 2008.

Anyway, the guy who made the OASIS dies (RIP tech daddy), and leaves behind a final message, “Hey nerds, I’ve hidden a magical Easter egg in here and whoever finds it gets my entire fortune, but not before winning three ridiculous challenges.”

Wade Watts, our scrappy little underdog with nothing to lose, does something cool to beat an unbeatable race. (I won’t spoil it because secrets are sexy and also, you should read it. Or watch it. Whatever your attention span allows.)

But what he does to solve it is pure Weird Logic. Like, the kind of move that makes you go, “Wait. That’s so stupid. Why does it work?!” And that’s the charm. Because sometimes the answer isn’t to try harder—it’s to try dumber in a smart way.

These days, everyone feels like the protagonist, but the story isn’t going the way they planned. Just a never-ending loop of Problem → Outrage → Anarchy.

But here’s where it gets interesting. Just like in Ready Player One where everyone’s busy trying to win an impossible race using their own logic and brute force, there’s a secret third way to outsmart the issues that plague our society.

See, the race was designed to be unwinnable if you follow the rules everyone else obeys without question. But you’re different. You don’t race.

What if the hero isn’t supposed to scream the loudest?

What if you, the hero, reclaims your agency instead? Disciplining yourself to swap reactions for actual curiosity—the kind that asks, “Why does this keep happening?” instead of “Who can I cancel to feel better for five minutes?”

You practice discernment. (Not to be confused with judgment, which is discernment’s drunk brother who talks over everyone.)

What if you learned to carry heavy things, like nuance that doesn’t bend to your narrative, accountability when you jumped the gun, and your weird cousin Greg who still thinks the Earth is flat.

Learn to not get weighed down by any of it like the balloons in Up. Not because you're floating off to some flawless utopia, but because you’re building one right here, staying grounded, while the world keeps blowing artificial wind and calling it "momentum."

While everyone else is playing the game forward shouting “justice” while careening into walls. The ones who really, deeply win—who change the world around them—are the ones humble enough to slow down and clever enough to turn the whole thing inside out because it’s the only thing worth doing.

So go on. Be the weirdo who brings a rubber chicken to a metaphorical knife fight. Not to wave your white flag, but to unlock something everyone else was too angry to see.

The system isn’t broken. It was just waiting for someone to follow the glitch.