The True Nature of the Blame-Shifting Mindset That Bugs Your Life: Installing a 'Self-Directed Life'
[Chapter 1: The 'Meaning of Life Bug' Corrupting the System and Escaping from Being an NPC]
7:00 AM. The alarm goes off. I squeeze my body into a crowded train. I sit at my desk. Before I know it, the sun is setting outside the window. In the middle of my daily routine, my hands stop moving.
“What am I spending this time for?”
“What is the point of days spent just walking on tracks laid by someone else?”
There is a heaviness deep in my chest. My thought processor reaches 100%. I become unable to move from the spot.
You, standing on the other side of the screen, are my past self.
That freeze is not a defect in your brain.
The emptiness spreading in the back of your throat is not a malfunction in the program.
It is an alert that sounds when you hand over the reins of your life to others and execute processes as an "NPC (Non-Player Character)" following code written by someone else.
When you lose your sense of self and become a part used to maintain someone else's system, your brain outputs a massive amount of warning logs to avoid crashing.
April 1988, the AI research department of a certain H Manufacturing Company.
My career started there.
I was convinced that if I just had the knowledge and skills, the game called life could be cleared exactly as described in the strategy guide.
However, the AI boom ended, and I was transferred to an ETC system development project.
Late-night overtime every day. Deadlines that wouldn't wait. Relentless pressure.
My brain's main board burned out. I developed depression and spent the ten years of my 30s on my bed in my bedroom.
Although I returned to work, I resigned one year before retirement.
I was scammed, betrayed, not even helped by relatives, and I let go of the new house and new car that I didn't even want and that still had loans on them.
Even in the Philippines, where I fled, my mother-in-law used up my startup funds, and I divorced my wife.
October 2025, in front of the Japanese Embassy in Pasay City.
I stood frozen in a parking lot in Manila. I had nothing but a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops.
The heat of the sun-baked asphalt traveled through the thin soles to the soles of my feet.
The exhaust fumes spewed by jeepneys obscured my vision and irritated the mucous membranes of my throat. As I stared at the shoes of the people passing by, I curled my back and sat down on the ground. Even when I shoved my hands into my pockets, my fingers didn't touch a single one-peso coin.
"Why is this happening to me? I just don't have enough luck."
In my heart, I rewrote the past logs over and over again. Running away from reality, pushing responsibility onto others, and continuing to depend on the variable called "luck."
I understand now. This "bug of blame-shifting and avoidance" is the very cause that completely destroyed my life.
When I became penniless in that Manila parking lot, it was the first time I was able to face my own bug.
That is precisely why I understand the pain you are feeling right now—the system freeze where you feel like you aren't living your own life—as if it were my own.
You are not broken. You just haven't installed the procedures for walking as the owner of your own life yet.
There are people who survived in environments where everything was taken away, just like us, in Auschwitz.
People who, while surrounded by external constraints, did not shut down their life system and were able to own their own lives. What kind of procedures did they follow?
I will analyze that structure in Chapter 2.
[Chapter 2: The 'Final Administrator Privileges' Discovered Under Environmental Control]
Humans are programs driven by their environment.
That is what is written in the life specifications circulating in society.
Income, relationships at work, the country you were born in.
The structure where external input (environment) determines output (one's life) is installed in the brain OS of many people.
However, in the system known as Auschwitz, that premise ceased to function.
In an environment where everything was stripped away and humans were processed and discarded, the actions of the people interned there rewrote the descriptions in the specifications.
People brought to the concentration camp had their clothes stripped off, their watches taken, and all the hair on their bodies shaved off. Instead of names, numbers were tattooed on their arms with ink.
I never knew when I would be sent to the gas chamber. Was it tomorrow, or tonight?
There was no way to know the timeline for when my termination process would run.
External constraints governed 99% of the entire system. However, the remaining 1% was a domain that refused external interference.
Deep within the system settings, there exists 'administrator privileges'.
These are the privileges to change settings and make the final decisions on the behavior of the entire system.
Even if data is overwritten from the outside, this ownership remains.
In life, this is the authority to choose what 'attitude' you take toward the environment you are given.
When fellow prisoners were being beaten in the mud, there were those who would walk around the huts and hand their own bread to others. Even though their bodies were captive, they had not surrendered their internal administrator privileges to anyone else.
October 2025. A parking lot in Manila.
I was gripping the edges of the cardboard I had laid out on the asphalt with both hands.
From the sky, the rain falling relentlessly soaked my T-shirt.
It was stealing body heat from my skin.
A young person passing by on the sidewalk threw an empty can at my feet.
The metallic sound of it rolling across the asphalt echoed in my ears.
As I stared at my fingernails filled with black mud, I kept outputting error logs in my mind endlessly.
'My mother-in-law squandered the funds'
'My wife served me divorce papers'
'Society is to blame'
'The variables of fate are glitched'
I was blaming others for events, throwing away my administrator privileges—my ownership of life—on the streets of Manila.
Even at the shelter after returning to my country, I continued to spew logs of blaming others.
On a creaky bunk bed, I flipped through self-help books, waiting for a program of good fortune to be downloaded.
I saw the other residents around me standing still.
'The government should help more,' 'Why doesn't luck come my way?'
The voices of my companions reached my ears.
That was when it happened.
The rainy night in Manila and the room in the shelter synchronized in my head.
By playing the NPC who is a victim of their environment, I had handed over my administrator privileges to others.
It was I who was running the bug of blaming others.
The moment I stopped blaming others and
re-chose my own attitude regarding
how to behave in the situation,
was the moment full control of my mental OS returned to my hands.
Building a self-centered life is not about waiting for the environment to change.
It begins with choosing your own attitude toward the environment you are currently in.
Even if 'choosing your environment' is impossible, 'choosing your attitude' is possible.
In daily life, how should we 'respond' to the difficulties that life sends our way?
I will disclose the specific action steps in Chapter 3.
Are you ready?
[Chapter 3: Escaping the Infinite Loop of 'Why'. 3 Debugging Actions to Meet Life's Requirements]
Let's analyze the inside of our own heads (OS).
When you start observing objectively, you notice a certain malfunction.
When reality doesn't go as planned, we throw the question at life: 'Why is this happening only to me?'
However, the act of repeating this question is a bug—an infinite loop with no output of an answer.
No matter how much you spin the processing in your head, it only consumes resources.
Your thinking freezes, and you become unable to move from that spot.
That is precisely why you must first stop the processing of this 'Why' question.
The actual mechanism of life was completely the opposite.
It is not that we ask life for 'meaning'.
From the side of reality—life itself—tasks (requirements) are thrust upon us daily, asking, 'How will you respond to this difficulty?'
We were beings who returned responses to those demands through our own actions (How).
There are three actions to choose from in response to the demands from life.
Create
An action where you focus on the work or task in front of you and output deliverables that change reality to the world.Receive
Accept the words of others and burn the contours of the world into your eyes. An action to synchronize the world with your own inner self.Choose an Attitude
When faced with unchangeable constraints or hardships, this is the action of choosing how to stand there while maintaining your own core.
November 2025. A shared room in a shelter.
I lay on a creaky bunk bed, staring at a stain on the ceiling.
"Why am I, who was an AI developer at H Manufacturing, penniless in a parking lot in Manila, having lost everything and ending up here?"
I repeat the question 'why' in my brain. I cannot move a single finger. Only time passes.
I tried to change my current situation.
Imitating Jim Carrey, I wrote '10 million yen' on the back of a flyer to make a dummy check, and looked down at the city lights from a high hill at night. Clutching that scrap of paper, I tricked my brain into believing I already had it.
I applied for jobs and received a job offer as a programmer in the first month. However, the next day, the president told me:
"A person who was homeless in Manila is too high-risk. I'm afraid to hire someone who is so easily deceived."
My job offer was rescinded.
In a room where the move-out deadline was approaching, I watched my roommates.
They were standing still, blaming others by saying, 'Why won't the government do anything?' or 'Why won't they introduce me to a job that suits me?'
At that moment, I realized.
Their words were the very image of my own self that had been running away from reality and pushing responsibility onto others.
The question 'Why only me?' was a bug code to justify my own stagnation.
Because I could understand that structure, I stopped blaming luck and accepted the blame-shifting bug as my own defect.
The moment I switched the direction of my questioning from 'Why' to 'How do I respond now?', the infinite loop in my brain stopped.
Before me, having stopped the loop, the demands of life arrived. I began to respond. Every day, I searched for job postings at the public employment office and city hall, sent documents, and went to interviews.
At first glance, these were just job hunting activities.
However, for me at the time, it was a practice in building a self-centered life, where I addressed the presented real-world challenges without making excuses.
If I ran away from the challenges, I would revert to the original blame-others bug.
That is why I took every task in front of me as a demand from life itself.
I take 100% responsibility for my entire life.
With this stance of self-understanding, I went into the interview with the final company, and as a result, I was hired on the spot, and a future of full remote work from Manila slid right into my life.
It was the moment I stopped being an NPC who sells the ownership of their life to others and regained the initiative to live my own life.
Why don't you stop throwing the question 'why' up at the sky? Right now, daily tasks should be reaching you. Messages from your boss, the work at hand, words from your family. They are all asking for your response.
By executing the action of responding, your self-centered axis will be implemented.
Having the ability to provide a response.
That is what responsibility meant.
Taking 100% responsibility for your entire life.
With this, the processing procedure for life's demands has been installed in your brain.
However, in the human system, there exists a glitch that cannot be deleted no matter how many actions you take.
The loss of past data, such as a new house, a car, or family. Or the specification of your own termination process (death) that will certainly arrive eventually.
Once the termination process is executed, you cannot proceed to the future.
What is important is how to walk through the remaining time without freezing, now that you are faced with that time limit.
What is the 'solution code' to keep the will to live moving within that reality?
I will unfold the specification document in the final chapter.
[Chapter 4: The 'Final Patch' to Accept Unerasable Errors and the Reboot of the Autonomous System]
Even after understanding the three actions, there are moments when your feet still stop.
This is because no matter how much action you take, there lies a reality that cannot be eliminated by individual effort alone.
Let's analyze the basic specifications of your brain's OS.
This system has three errors built into it that can never be deleted, no matter how many times you update it.
Unavoidable hardship
Guilt over past mistakes
The end called death
These are not bugs caused by design flaws. They are non-removable initial settings (specifications) required to drive the system.
Many people try to forcibly delete these errors from their database.
They consume brain resources trying to regain what was lost, regretting past choices, and trying to forget the fear that the end is coming.
However, the very process of trying to delete undeletable data overloads the system and triggers a shutdown called despair.
There is no need to delete the errors.
The attitude of continuing to choose how to behave as an administrator each time, while allowing the undeletable errors to exist.
This is the solution to keep the system running without freezing and to continue outputting the product called meaning.
November 2025. A shared room in a shelter.
I am lying on a creaky bunk bed, staring at a stain on the ceiling.
The fact that I lost everything in a parking lot in Manila and the regret of having been deceived by others are fixed as undeletable data.
My new house, my car, and the time I lost can never be restored. As I age, my physical strength declines, my feet falter every time I try to walk, and the deadline of the system shutdown called death is surely approaching.
With that error log displayed, I sit at the reception counter of the public employment office.
I write my work history with a black ballpoint pen on the paper handed to me by the staff.
There is no program anywhere in the world that can erase corrupted past data. I continue to respond to the immediate requirements, such as the interview procedures for the day, while carrying these errors.
You, too, must have past failures that cannot be erased and omens of malfunctions regarding the future.
Please do not consume your brain's resources by trying to force them away or blaming the fate outside of yourself.
Even with error logs remaining, you can still handle today's tasks at hand.
As long as you maintain the stance of taking responsibility for your own life, the system can be rebooted as many times as needed.
Once, we were non-player characters (NPCs) without autonomy, moving according to specifications prepared by others.
We waited for others' instructions, worried about others' evaluations, and spent our days carrying an inner emptiness.
Now, that figure is no more.
What lies before you are the daily tasks that continue to arrive as always.
Documents to clear, conversations with family, and daily health management.
However, the eyes with which you face that reality are no longer those of an NPC waiting for someone else's instructions.
They are the eyes of a system owner who holds administrator privileges by their own will and moves their own life forward.
My profile, processing numbers and text while aiming for full remote work from Manila, also carries the same error logs.
The limitations of the past and the specifications of the death that will eventually come remain there, unerasable.
If this record of debugging has been of any help in rebooting your system, there is one command I would like you to execute before closing the screen.
Press the 'Like' button at the bottom of the screen, leave your brain's logs in the 'Comments,' and 'Follow' this account.
This is because it will act as a trigger to deliver this specification document to the screens of 'unknown comrades' who are currently frozen on someone else's tracks.
Hoping that the insights I gained on a bunk bed in a shelter after losing everything in a parking lot in Manila will help in the rebuilding of our 'self-centered' axes.
We, while carrying our errors, simply respond to the realistic tasks at our feet.
The autonomous system has now rebooted.
Lolo Kiko's Recommendations
I also used these articles as references. Please take a look at them as well.
