Neal.fun is effectively a repository of miniature web games produced by a single person. Neal! For fun! One of them is labelled “Life Checklist” and so I, curious whether I’d sufficiently lived life per someone else’s definition, clicked through.
The list is 66 boxes in sum. You’re handed one for free - “be born,” and I think that’s appropriate. Questionable opportunities for joy and infinite capacity for misery should entitle every lived life to a pity point, I think.
Clicking through the easy ones, I remember that not every person who reaches 32 learns to swim. I have to shamefully avoid the “learn to ride a bike” box because I was incredibly resistant as a child and never bothered in adulthood. I remember how my wife had flown in a plane for family visits, but never got to go on anything resembling a vacation, where my own mother flew my brothers and I to various different places. Something I never grasped the weight of in my childhood. One might fail to click on the “see snow” box, living in a warmer climate, while in Canada it’s a guarantee. “Make a snowman” mysteriously holds the same checkbox value as flying in a helicopter. As getting kissed. As learning a language.
The checklist moves rapidly from snow to credit cards, but it’s true to life. It wouldn’t be our well-beloved economic framework without holding interest over the heads of our youths. In the final third or so, the checklist moves into having children. Teaching your children. It caps the whole thing off with “turn 100.”
This is the quiet kind of art I like. I’m left asking if the creator thinks it’s possible to categorize a life, or if this is purely fun, or if I’ve lived a lesser life without children, or if they want me to think about what I’m doing and where I’m going. It’s a painful series of checkboxes. I guess it isn’t, really. Not smooth and sleek as it is, not bubbly and innocent as it presents, but that’s the art. Things aren’t beautiful on their own and beauty comes from reflection.
I’m thinking about how I can’t click on the “get fired” box because I’ve only ever handed in letters of resignation or slowly phased myself out, as in public education, when I felt I had nothing left to give the system.
I think about how I’ve clicked 45 of 66 boxes and how my life is numerically 68.18% complete, per the game of course, and how I feel like I’ve only started to barely grasp at what I want to be.
I’m thinking about the girl I met in my first year of university who vanished after spring break, because she was caught in a terrible car crash, and that life isn’t going to be checking any more boxes.
I’m thinking about how unrepentantly true the flaccid, nonsensical plainness of the checklist is. It seems comical to weight building a snowman the same as graduating college, but I also remember a particular night in South Korea. My friend James and I were coming back from some small restaurant. I was miserable back then and I can’t believe people put up with me. And on the way home he kind of smirked and asked if I wanted to race in the snow, back to our apartments. And I thought “why are you embarrassing me?” But I went along. And I’ll never forget that brilliant, lantern-lit sprint through the snowy streets of Gunsan. That utterly profound act of kindness, gone in a matter of minutes, and stamped in stone.