It’s all too easy to get overwhelmed in this world. So many desires, wills, and dreams end up flowing into one another and creating murky waters — you’ll end up changing with every consecutive encounter.

This is not all bad, mind. Sometimes you may find yourself learning from your mistakes or the mistakes of others and grow. But learning can backfire; one can learn evil just as easily as good.

Hah, ignore that, actually. Life would be easy if living could be compressed into platitudes and cliches. In reality, there’s so much nuance that it gives me a headache.

Let’s take a smaller example instead. Say, a habit. What are good habits and what are bad habits? I never understood the difference; they’re both behaviours or tendencies that people do without really thinking. They just are. There are the obvious habits, like eating healthy being good and pulling out your hair being bad, but what about the in-between?

Take drawing. The act of creating images on a two-dimensional plane of your choosing. If somebody had the urge to sit down and draw a pretty picture, is it good or bad? You could throw any amount of context at such an innocuous act to push it into either camp, and there are many willing to argue about this.

Drawing pretty flowers before work? Good. Drawing genitalia at a funeral? Bad. Probably. Drawing as a coping mechanism after the death of a loved one? After chopping up a corpse and passing it off as high-quality meat? Questionable. Dubious. A point of contention?

Who knows.

You can apply this principle to so many other things. Ice cream, tire brands, weapons manufacturers, defensive clothing — the other day, two people stabbed each other over a disagreement over what knife to use. In broad daylight. Is that crazy or what?

It was snowing. It was always snowing here. There was not a single day in my entire life that it wasn’t snowing. My breath was turning to icicles as they left my mouth. Yet there would still be some that would say that this was good weather — and they’d be entirely correct. Good and bad are so subjective that it makes my head spin.

It’s all so annoying, isn’t it?

In this world, the meaning of hero and villain was completely lost. The Nexus system allows you to see everything and all sides of the story, and most conflicts are never kind to be easily distinguishable.

To compensate, I know what’s important to me. I let those desires rage forth and give me the strength to do what I know is right. But you’ll inevitably end up in situations where you suddenly hit a wall of lucidity and start to wonder what you’re doing.

For example, right now.

I just killed a man.

That man spent three days breaking into that vault. It took me a single twitch to remove him.

The data I recovered from his body would place me firmly on the side of good, and him on the side of bad. There was no other way to intercept this package. And yet, I was the one that pulled the trigger. He would’ve certainly killed me, but I killed him first.

Did that make me a hero?

I didn’t even notice the blood anymore. It was all the same to me. As long as I could keep what was precious to me safe, I didn’t care that much about what was going on around me. Still, those thoughts came up from time to time.

Was I really doing good? Was I really doing bad? If there was nobody to judge me, was I still a hero?

I told my precious brothers and sisters many years ago that a hero was an ordinary person who did the right thing at the right time. That a hero didn’t need a mask or superpowers to make a change.

Looking back at the path I took, I’m not so sure anymore.

Hey, what do you think a hero is?