I need to reinvent myself as a person who’s capable of living in this world, having learned the things I’ve learned.

Imagine you are looking at a map on your phone, and on the map there are two mountains. One is called Man, and one is called Woman. They’ve got the icon for “mountain” so you know they’re real enough geographical features to be represented as such on a map. In the space between the mountains, even if you pinch and zoom in, there is nothing at all, just a featureless void. But you get curious. There must be something out there between the mountains. Something worth putting on a map at some scale.

So you decide to make the journey and see for yourself. You’ve lived on the side of a mountain your whole life so you figure climbing down to the ground would be fairly safe and then you could report back what you find. Astonishingly though, everyone you talk to about the idea is horrified, and you can’t figure out exactly why, but it has something to do with your immortal soul.

It doesn’t matter. You’re never going to be satisfied unless you see it through. You pack two lunches, one for the climb down and another for the climb back up. Nothing to worry about. Might as well bring the rifle, though, just in case. Yeah, in this scenario you own a rifle. Don’t worry about it.

You travel all day, and first you find a peaceful grassland, and then a river valley, and a meadow and a forest, and then you stop for the night at a hot springs where you meet some nomads passing through in search of a theoretical third mountain. They seem weird, but in a nice way.

The next afternoon you arrive at a magical city where every single person you encounter is so radiantly beautiful that you fall to your knees and weep because you never imagined any human animal could appear so angelic.

You also start to appreciate what it’s like to not live on a mountain. You wonder why you never considered it before.

Reluctantly, after a few days, you make the trip back home to tell your friends and family about the wonderful adventures you’ve had. You are shocked to discover that your friends and family don’t want to hear about your adventures. They don’t want you to contaminate them with your madness. It turns out, all this time, there was a terrible secret, the kind that everyone knows and no one knows, simultaneously.

In nervous whispers behind closed doors, they admit it, saying Oh you know. Sometimes we have to cull our own population, quietly, late at night. It’s easy. We just pick out a person we think is ugly or annoying and while they’re sleeping, we roll them off the mountain, presumably to their death. Or sometimes, if they try to climb back up, we just shoot them outright. Surely someone has mentioned it to you before?

Yeah, so like I said at the start, I need to reinvent myself as a person who’s capable of living in this world, having learned the things I’ve learned.