Level 53

In the middle of a recent lunchtime academic conversation, I made the joke that I’m a level 53 human. It got the expected laughs from the much younger crowd (most folks in an undergraduate program are substantially younger than I am), but even as I enjoyed the geeky RPG joke, I came to the realization in my head that there is literally only one requirement to advance to the next level: wake up and not be dead for 365 days in a row, 366 in leap years.

That’s all.

You don’t have to learn anything new or improve any existing skills. You don’t have to get better at being human. You don’t have to do anything other than not die. Just keep existing.

So, if I successfully wake up every morning from now until my next birthday, I’ll automatically become a level 54 human.

Yes, not every RPG uses level-based progression, but it’s by far the most common in my experience so that I’ve come to think of it as standard. I hope I’m not going to flog this metaphor too much, but I’m not quite done yet.

Pushing it further, even NPCs have skills that are dependent on their level. Shouldn’t advancing as a human in the real world need more? Show more?

I’ve had to develop skills and knowledge for every job (character class?) I’ve been in, especially if I wanted to advance in that character class. But if I didn’t want to advance, I only had to hit a certain set of expected minimums and then I could just coast for the rest of my life, or until the company decided to downsize to hoard more gold.

Would that have been so bad?

Not on its own, no. But that isn’t what getting better at being human means to me, and we each need our own definition.

As much as keeping my family safe and secure will allow me to do, getting better at being human means continually try to be a better human. Learning and understanding more about people, cultures, the world around me, the universe at large. To borrow from Brian May, as sung by Freddie Mercury, “Mind you grow a little wiser, a little better every day.” (Okay, taking a single line from a song isn’t entirely fair to support my point, but you can decide what the song as a whole means to you.)

The goal is to be a better human today than I was yesterday, and better still tomorrow. So maybe the RPG metaphor doesn’t really hold as more than a joke. A lot of things are like that, funny until you hold them up to the light and see what they might really be trying to tell you.

So what am I trying to tell you with this rambling post? Nothing you don’t already know. Maybe I just want to remind you that as long as you keep leveling up, you have the potential to be a better version of you than you are today. We all do. Be well, everyone.