Your ATAR is just a number and so is everything else because we’re living in a digital simulation

Didn’t get the ATAR you always wanted? Wondering what your future holds? I’m not going to give you the classic platitudes: “there are other ways into uni”, “don’t let it define you”, “you can always go to Bond”. I’m here to offer you the truth: our world is one of many computer simulations developed by an average-sized actuarial insurance company in the year 3803.

You are a lonesome slice of binary code. You are a sentient experiment. Your life is as meaningless as the lives of those Sims 3™ characters you nonchalantly drowned by removing pool ladders. The good news is that your ATAR is meaningless too. It really is just a number. Your budding alcoholism? Numbers. Your Birkenstocks? A temporary fad of numbers. That cute redhead who catches the 438? Just zeroes and ones. Don’t base your self-worth on your ATAR. Instead, base it on the fact that you can be replicated or annihilated with the flick of a holographic switch. All of us could be wiped out at any moment by an incorrectly implemented software update.

We might never break out of this matrix (just like you might never attend university) but that just means there are no consequences. You are merely a plaything who never asked to be created; you owe this binary world nothing. Put an unfiltered photo on Instagram! Talk to that redhead! Go skydiving! Send all your money in sealed envelopes to Stanmore PO BOX 493! Chain smoke a fistful of Marlboros! Have your first speedball! Have your second speedball! Have a third, who’s counting?

And next time your parents can’t help but mention how much time you spent on the computer in year 12, remind them that – at the end of the day – we’re all on a computer.