How Minecraft Helped Me Re-Contextualize Life

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This year has been pretty lukewarm, at least in my personal life. Only real big change was a shift-switch in my job. Everything else? Pretty much just sort of, stagnant, but not really in a negative light. Oh, and there’s me having an ongoing existential crisis over turning forty at the end of May. A spiral that I didn’t think would end, with no answers anywhere, and search results for help only giving more of the same. Jane Doe says, “I woke up this morning and cried for hours on my 40th birthday.” And John McGuy says, “One moment I was twenty years old, barely figuring things out, and now I’m 40, with just the same amount of things barely figured out.”

So, searching for answers on ways to feel better, about anything, seemed mostly fruitless.

That was, until I killed the Ender Dragon in Minecraft (again).

It wasn’t so much the act of beating the original “final boss” in Minecraft, or the resulting loot. It was also the second time I did it! But, I had to do it a second time, because I was interrupted the first time I did this during what I’m actually talking about: The end credits poem.

I’ve posted it here, on my forum.

Up until you get to this point, Minecraft is just a game about breaking blocks and building stuff, while weird monsters try to grief you at any chance they get, and almost nothing more. That is, until you get to the credits, and then this little “story” of sorts completely changes how you view the game, and the world your character lives within.

But how does this affect actual real life?

For the first five months of 2025 so far, I’ve been feeling like a whole lot of everything just doesn’t matter. I’ve been questioning what it is I’m even working toward, and what the point of all that even is, when the end is … not only coming quicker and quicker as each year goes by, but the single thing that would, and will simply erase all of that. That, once you reach the end of the real, what’s the point?

What’s the point? I keep asking.

And then I stopped and actually read this little endgame poem in Minecraft. It’s probably more a byproduct of the original game, before Microsoft added the studio to their monopoly, and introduced the semi-bastardized Pocket Edition rebrand.

It’s about the universe, and the lives we live. That we’re not all completely separate, or individual. That, when you get right down to it, if you look back far enough in time, we all come from exactly the same point of a singularity. And, in that light, none of us are all that different. We’re all children of the beginning. We’ve existed for eons, billions and billions of years, and although we take this shape in one life, we’ll take on new forms in another.

You aren’t just some meaningless, random thing that’s been spat out onto the surface of a burning rock. But, you are the universe, a piece of it, looking in on itself, trying to understand itself.

And, I just think that gives a lot of meaning to things. It means that you aren’t unimportant, that there is a point to everything. That everything you do, think, and feel matters. Because all of that is an expression of something bigger, something greater, something that is almost incomprehensible to wrap your mind around.

I think, if you contextualize it all like that, it makes getting older a little more tolerable. Because, I’m not one to buy into religion. I don’t think I have the capacity to think or believe that there’s a person in the skies watching us.

But, the universe. That is something you can actually see and experience with your own two eyes.

With that, though, I’ll leave you with my first ever screenshot in Minecraft, from 2010.