Model Trains And The Human Condition

Recently, I started to play games focused on trains: building rails, building networks, handling logistics. In particular, I played a game called Railgrade, where you connect resources to processing plants. Each time the train arrives at a station, it rings outwards a "Choo Choo!" noise. Hearing that comforting, like the machinery of my brain suddenly clicked into place. There was something deeply, existentially satisfying and uplifting hearing that noise. Today, after work, I listened to compilations of trains for 6 hours while I worked on other things, and, for the first time in my known life, I felt completely at ease and relaxed. Something I only achieved previously through extreme physical exhaustion. My conclusion was that if this is how everyone feels, I understand why they can believe in the fundamental goodness of people, their environment, and God: the human condition.

Watching a model train loop in an oval is inexplicably rewarding and soothing. If it's in a loop, it doesn't have anywhere to go. It only circles, and circles, and circles… Yet the train's boxcars are all connected just right, each turning just appropriately around the curve, each rumbling the same across every bump. The proportions are perfect, the sound is perfect, the rhythm is perfect. The train, despite its futility, goes and goes: and it truly seems happy at his fate. I can only see the intersection of geometry, God, and man's ideal acceptance of his condition on this track: the human condition is a likened oval.

Similar in the sense that it is endless: there is no true marker of progress unless imposed upon by the subject. We work so we may eat, we eat so we may work, we suffer and love, we live and die. Atrocities repeat across history, every human, even the forgotten, united by some degree of suffering. The problem with the human condition is that any belief that we have reached some destination, some station where we can ring that bell, is really just an opiate that mostly serves as a distraction from living itself. Maybe the beauty of the train is that it doesn't care where it will go, only where it is, and it keeps going. The agony of being human is the inability to just live.

Of those six hours today, I finally was able to just live. To exist; to be human. To feel at peace with my environment, with everything, like I was not some sick man suffering from his own imposed exile. Just a few days ago, I wished for my brain to burst and to "let this earth's light shatter me"; today I felt no need to erase my consciousness. I have no doubt that this will flip in the span of a few days, and once again I will wish to dissolve into nothing like a man in a vat of acid. I'm tortured by the gap of what I am and what I could be, and maybe I will never truly be able to forgive myself of that sin.

I saw God in a model train set; I saw the true extent of my sickness.