Inc Description Dimension

Most gamers know what an NPC is: a non-player character that goes about its business following instructions written by the programmer.

Picture an open-world simulation where every NPC runs on two sets of instructions. The default instructions say what to do: take out a loan for university, get a job to pay it off, climb the corporate ladder, take out a 30-year mortgage, buy stuff, keep working to pay the bills until 65, retire on a pension, game over. The behavioral instructions keep it on track: stay alive as long as possible and don’t take risks, and care what others think, so buy, do and behave like them.

Sometimes an NPC glitches and gets stuck halfway into a wall. Now it can see beyond the play area, but it’s still stuck.

You might recognize the simulation. It’s the reality we live in, the Default Dimension. The behavioral instructions are in our DNA, because the human who waited to see whether that rustle in the bush was a saber-toothed tiger didn’t live to pass anything on. The default instructions come from society, which means we can change what we teach the next generation.

I was that glitched NPC. I followed the default instructions, bought a house on a 35-year mortgage and climbed the ladder at Amazon and Microsoft, then spent my evenings on a blog and a side gig building websites. I knew my own gig was where my time should go, but my corporate job paid the mortgage. Stuck.

What got me unstuck was one recurring thought: what if? Playing it safe doesn’t make you safe. Things beyond your control can make it game over any day. They say your life flashes before your eyes just before you die, and I didn’t want mine full of “what if” regrets. That question led me to Japan, to starting my company Mirai, and to Smart Doll.

But the simulation has a backup plan for NPCs who escape. As a business owner, I’m now the one paying my team to follow the default instructions. So Smart Doll has become a place where team members are expected to leave one day and run their own business. We mentor them, many already have side gigs, and some who have left the nest now count us as a client. I’ve been cutting working hours while still paying full-time wages, and I want us on a four-day week. I don’t have all the answers, but Dimension is my reminder to keep asking “what if?”

Who is Dimension?

“Because you only start to live when you discover what reality really is.”

Dimension is a particle physicist at CERN, working on ATLAS, one of the four major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Her fascination with discovering new dimensions is what led her there.

If you want to go down the same rabbit hole, look up the Copenhagen interpretation, Schrödinger’s cat, the double-slit experiment, the quantum eraser experiment and the simulation hypothesis.