How do I describe Mania? I find it difficult to do so, to find a way to put it into words for the average person to relate, to have it make sense. I’ll try to explain one aspect of this condition, and I hope that, to some degree, I can provide a bit of clarity on the issue.
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You know role playing video games, like Skyrim for instance? In this kind of game, you are brought into its world as a grown individual, a stranger to the foreign setting you’ve been thrust into.
The idea of games of this nature is to, well, roleplay—to create your character’s personality, backstory, race, the fundamentals of who they are—and engross yourself in this world, as if you truly are the person you’ve created.
However, there is another option when playing these games. You could, instead, still “role play” the game, but in a non-traditional sense. You play the game, not as someone else and neither as yourself. Instead, you become a vacant observer. You are thrust into the games’ world, and like the protagonist without a “self,” you are also vacant, a shell. You absorb what is going on around you, while only going through the motions of your role in order to continue on the stories’ path.
And, in terms of the actions you can commit in the game, as you can just so easily save and reload to change an undesired outcome due to a poor decision, you feel your actions and words have no weight. You know they do hold weight, or should at least, as that is the message the world around you is telling you. But it does not feel so. Because if you are a shell with nothing but a pair of eyes, watching, only going through the motions—you have no identity. Just like that nameless character in the game.
No identity, no sense of self, no sense of time, no sense of morals and values, so therefore no sense of any weight your actions are capable of having. Because you are nothing but a pair of eyes in a world that isn’t even real.
To the Manic Eye, the world can be a game with no consequences.