The phrase “x story helped me out during a rough time” is used commonly to elaborate on how much a piece of media has helped someone out, but I can’t say that about Persona 3, primarily because it’s a story that has taken root inside me deeply and stayed with me throughout the years ever since 2021 when I first played it. It’s not like it helped me during a single rough time, it was more like an affirmative embrace and an acknowledgement of my struggles throughout all of these years collectively instead of just one period of time. Persona 3, much like Good Will Hunting, Evangelion, and Pandora Hearts, is a game that I like to revisit and reflect upon every time I feel like I’m in a rut and can’t figure out who I am and what am I supposed to do in this world. It’s something I’ve closely attached to who I am because of how much it shaped my mindsets towards life, “The meaning of our lives is something that we make but don’t see”, and, “You don’t need to save the world to find meaning in life” are quotes I internalised, reminded myself of anytime I felt myself falling down an existential crisis, and the long term effects it had on me throughout the years is not something I take for granted. In a way, Persona 3 is a symbol of my struggles during my adolescence, and so, it is that revisiting it through Reload that I felt like I was looking back on parts of myself from back then and getting in-touch with them again. It felt like a reflection of my past, of all the struggles I pushed through to make it this far to where I am today, and by the end of it, I realised that much of my own growth throughout the years was because of stories like Persona 3, growth due to me burning my dread and venturing in life while living in the moment.


When you’re faced with a crisis that you have no idea how will it end, or how you will resolve it, you have two choices, whether to believe that you’ll fail and fall into a hole of cynicism or to believe in your happiness and work towards that ideal in the moment by focusing on yourself and doing what you can until eventually, everything falls into place. This sentiment seemed too unreal to me because of how clouded my vision was with all of the negativity that I surrounded myself with back in 2020 because whenever I tried to resolve my issues, I half assed it and it backfired, whether it be my existential crisis due to the societal pressure I experienced that made me feel like I had to have a larger than life success story to be worth anything, my ever growing disdain towards the fleeting nature of bonds, struggles with navigating interpersonal issues due to my self pity and cynicism as a byproduct of my fear of abandonment, and fear of death due to religious doubts I had. All of this was too much for my 17 year old self to bear, but as I said, Persona 3 and its characters all reflected different intimate parts of who I am for a reason.


For a dumb teenager like me who couldn’t believe in himself, drowned in self pity and inferiority towards others, and had trouble seeing what was so special about myself, Junpei Iori represented my struggles with the indifference of the universe crucially. He’s someone who believes his own hype to subconsciously convince himself that he’s a hero destined to save everyone, when in reality that’s merely his coping mechanism with his deep-seated insecurity about his incompetence, and that shows in the dichotomy of his goofiness and feelings of envy and jealousy. It’s only later through meeting Chidori, someone who felt like her life held meaning due to her persona, much like he did, that he realized that he doesn’t need to be this impossible image of a hero that he created within himself and that if he kept on being true to his innermost self, the one who wanted to become a baseball player, he’ll have already become a hero to someone, like he did with Chidori. I said that Junpei’s insecurities and tendency to compare himself to others reflects a part of me in the past, but truth be told, I still have those tendencies lingering in from within me, yet in the same vein, over time I’ve learned to trust in myself, that whatever I do, it’ll result in something special. I learned that it doesn’t matter if there’s someone who’s better, smarter, more insightful than me, because no matter what, they can never be me, and so long as I pursue that self and see to it that its potential is met, everything will fall into place. It’s for that reason that I can look back on Junpei’s arc in P3 fondly and think to myself about how much it helped me internalise that self trust, because there’s nothing more real than pulling a mentally ill goth bad bitch by being funny and quirky.



When I said that P3 reflects different parts of myself from the past, I meant that because it’s not just my teenage years that it reflected but my childhood as well with characters like Ken. I could go into how characters like Mitsuru, Akihiko, Shinjiro, & Fuuka connected with me but I want to go with Ken not just because he’s my favorite among the aforementioned characters (I’m quirky, I know) but because of how he crucially reflected a part of me that no other character has, and it’s how Ken chooses to adapt to his situation to fit in in self deriding ways that I feel seen by. From the start, Ken is pushed into this dog-eat-dog world where only the strong survive, even in SEES, and that sudden change in his environment not only made him lose himself but a person’s most precious value, that being his inner child. Ken was forced to let go of his childish nature, gaslight himself into thinking that such notions would only hold him back, and proceeded to move solely through objective means because of how he was stuck in an adult world where if he doesn’t man up and throw away his childish needs and struggles, he’d be left behind, much like how his mother left him behind and so did everyone else, with their looks that were devoid of nothing but pity, yet even then, in his linked episodes, he couldn’t let go of his inner child and it shows sprinkles of his inner child peeking out due to his enthusiasm. It’s a heartbreaking accurate depiction of how much Ken struggles to connect with others and most importantly himself, because nothing has been the same for him since his Mom died. Many people, when looking at Ken’s character, view Ken’s arc as a revenge arc, and while that’s a valid reading of his character, to me, it felt like it was more so Ken reconnecting with his inner child, realising that he doesn’t need to put up this facade to “survive” and “fit in” with this cruel world, and that he doesn’t need to hold himself back emotionally so much because of others anymore, because while he may have lost his family, he gained another through SEES, and that’s what “living” means. Losing people, meeting new people, bonding with them, and doing simple things like practicing your hobbies, that’s what living really means, and that meant so much to me because back when I was a kid, I never had any friends of my own, could never really connect with them, and that’s because I always hung out with my older brother’s friends, which subsequently made me mature too fast for my good and didn’t allow me to live my childhood to its fullest. I could never connect with people my age, because I was so used to forcibly maturing myself to keep up with my older friends, I always felt like bottling up my emotions and needs in favor of a facade that could get me the closeness and sense of belonging I wanted out of their company since I was too awkward to make any friends of my own, yet on the inside I was too young and emotional to get along with my older friends, creating this unstable interpersonal problem I had that plagued my childhood. It’s funny, how I’m a grown person now, yet seeing Ken be plagued with this same issue I had and recovering from it through mundane means, almost had me tearing up because it reminded me of how much I hardened myself and designed a strong man to protect the hurting child inside me.




Earlier, I described Persona 3 as a meditative experience that gives me space for my feelings whenever I need a haven to express myself within, or feel seen within, and so, there are parts of it that are timeless to me, parts of it that help me see myself in a better light and enable me to look at myself more positively, one such part is Yukari’s character and how much of an embrace it feels to me. Truthfully speaking, my aim with my media experiences is to either escape the real world, or for edutainment purposes, but it is so rare for me to engage myself with a story that can help me discover positive, strong traits within my character that makes me love myself. It’s hard for a story to do that, since what I look for in fictional characters are parts of me that I and others around me struggle to accept, more often than not are negative parts, but that’s why Yukari means the world to me, since not only does her character give me a safe space to feel seen and accepted for my contradictory feelings of love and hate towards intimacy, but she also embodies a trait of mine that helps me accept it, that being kindness and empathy. Yukari’s premise is that she struggles with the internal conflict known as the hedgehog dilemma, where she craves intimacy but disdains contact with others, because she wants to be loved, but doesn't think she's worth loving because of the self pity, sense of weakness/inferiority, & self hatred she internalised as a byproduct of being "abandoned" by both of her parents, at least emotionally. I say emotionally because her dad died so he didn’t abandon her technically, and her mother simply clung to other men for emotional support, so she didn’t consciously abandon Yukari, but at least on an emotional level, Yukari felt like she had the deepest craving she had was taken away from her, forever a wish beyond her reach, and that affected how she perceived herself and others and based her moral compass around her disdain for her Mother who abandoned her and what she represents. Following that, Yukari would disassociate with anything that resembled the escapist coping mechanisms her Mother did through either self-denial or self-isolation from others. It’s why she despises being helped out, because not only does she blame and hate herself for what happened to her parents but because it resembles her Mother’s helpless state of feeling like she needs to be saved, it’s why she was mad when Makoto helped her out during her s. Link, it’s why she tries to present herself as this being who towers above the concept of weakness to feel a sense of leverage and derive self-worth from that, but at the same time, she’s a highly emotional person who wears their heart on their sleeve, and so bits and pieces of that need for emotional support and insecurities about her self image come out. An example of this would be her jealousy and fixation over Mitsuru, she’s so fixated on Mitsuru because deep down, she wants to be like her, someone who’s unfazed, looks powerful and is the exact opposite of her Mother. A toxic sense of admiration, you could call it, since she never recognizes this jealousy, how wrong it is since even Mitsuru’s flawless demeanor was fake and a byproduct of societal expectations, and how much it contradicts Yukari’s conscious desire to present herself powerfully, and whenever she recognizes that, it’s in self-loathing, like how she did in Yakushima, because of how much she gaslights herself into thinking that she’s strong and doesn’t need help, even if it means ignoring herself and wrongly seeing others. Despite those insecurities getting in the way of how she interacts with others, she's a very kind person who has all the love to give to others, yet when it comes to loving herself, that ''love'' she has for others is devoid of any love for herself. Time and time again, in various instances Yukari shows how much empathy and kindness she has for others, even from the start of the game, like how she was the first SEES member who bothered to reach out to Makoto and connect with him instead of spying on him, how she was the first to defend Makoto when Junpei lashed out at him, how she made insensitive jokes about Junpei but then apologized to him and considered his feelings, or with how she helped other SEES members navigate their problems like Fuuka who struggled with people pleasing habits during her final s. link and Mitsuru who struggled with self-acceptance and existential dread. Additionally, if you spend enough time with her during the night events, there's a moment where she talks about how inspiring the main female character is, how she wants to be just like her, someone who's there for everyone around her and is capable, and that puts into perspective how kind Yukari is and how much she empathizes with others. Yet, she has moments where she’s a tease and makes fun of others, sometimes in a tone-deaf way, and why is that? The majority would chalk it up to her being a quirky mean white girl, and while I get it and understand how appealing that is since I’d love for a pretty white girl like her to call me racial slurs and deride me my right to live, I think that Yukari’s need to prove her toxic self image right to justify her self hate and rejection of help to disassociate from her Mom is what causes her to be such a tease and to be so slanderous, because while she's quirky and mean in her own right, it's also valid to infer that about her character. It doesn't help that being bullied due to her father's failure influenced her perception of social interaction more aggressively and might've added to that if anything. In a sense, she has the most amount of kindness out of anyone, but the dichotomy she has where she pushes everyone away while craving their love and attention, is what clouds that trait of hers and makes it harder for her to express that, and it's why whenever she gets praised for her kindness, she denies it. She's a perfect example of how someone's personality can be so dynamic, where she's a mean teaser on the outside, but would be the quickest to be there for someone else, and that part of her helps me embrace the idea that I'm a kind person, or at least, try to be because I'm similar to that aspect of her and it feels very validating. It's especially relatable because there are moments where I went out of line and lost friendships due to that, due to unhealthy tendencies and mindsets I had, and that made me reject my kindness in favor of self-loathing, yet through Yukari, I was able to see that part of me, admit to it, and love myself more authentically because of it.


By now you understand how much Persona 3 means to me, how much of a solace inducing experience it is for me, and how much it helps me to love, to feel loved, to express my earnest desires, and to be there for everyone around me, but in contrast, oddly enough, when I was playing through Reload, a certain part of it re-stimulated my fear of abandonment, my disdain for the fleeting nature of relationships due to past experiences, and my desire for everything to stay the same way, thinking about how worthless something is if it’s destined to never last, that certain part being the front and center of the game, Aegis. A few years ago, during the pandemic, I’d say I was at my worst mentally, and it’s not because of the experiences I went through by that point, but it was more so because of how I dealt with those experiences by willingly surrounding myself with negativity, choosing to be miserable instead of fighting, and preferring victimhood over the pursuit of happiness. It led to loads of perceptual issues I had, and that only piled up more on the issues I already struggled with at the time. You see, I grew up in an environment that shunned sensitivity and emotions and saw them as a sign of weakness, and so, a feminine guy like me who was highly emotional and sensitive, was essentially born and raised in the wrong environment because of how much that aspect of it contradicted how I was at my innermost core. In an attempt to fit in, I discarded myself, drowned myself in an endless hell of facades, and over time, forgot who I even was, becoming something of a colorless broken puppet unable to discern my emotions and convey them, forever emotionally stunted and ignorant of how it feels to “live” because all I did was exist. For that reason I’ve had my complications with loneliness and love, feeling like I couldn’t feel it or even deserved it. So, it is that through Aegis I was able to see a picture of my past self, a grotesque portrait of how I was 4 years ago. It was as eerie as it was comfortable, seeing a character frustratingly and confusingly try to navigate their place in the world and getting shredded by it. It felt validating, because Aegis had the same misconception that I did, and it was that I thought I had to do something larger than life itself to justify my existence when that wasn’t the case. It was very comforting for me to see a character that represents how I was a few years ago, that’s how it was at first anyway. It later dawned on me that after Aegis decided to live, she started struggling with something that I struggle with nowadays, and it’s maintaining relationships, or rather, thinking that they’re worth maintaining anyway since they all end. I’ve always had this thought that yeah, sure, all bonds end, that this is an absolute, but it always pained me whenever I met someone, because I knew deep down, that at some point they’re going to leave me behind and we’ll part ways. Even if we reconnect, it might not even be the same as before and that made me oftentimes crave a reality where time could be halted. But upon revisiting Aegis’ social link, there’s a piece of dialogue that reminded me why I cherish the people I cherish and why I’ll never stop loving the people I’m with.

“Life is both short and finite. That’s what makes it so invaluable, and why one feels that it must be cherished… When you think about it, it’s a miracle that two given people are able to ever meet in this chaotic flow of time and space.”


It’s a simple line, something that’s hard to miss, but that's the case with most ideas in life and is what makes it connect with me because of how Makoto’s dynamic with Aegis resonates with that sentiment and embodies it with the stark contrast of how they live. Their differences made them feel complete because, on the two opposite spectrums, they struggled to understand life and the worth of the process that goes within it that inevitably leads to death, yet through something simple, like knowing and understanding each others' emptiness, they felt the elusive taste of connection and yearned for more from it. Makoto is a human who tries to be a machine, while Aegis is a machine who tries to be human, yet despite their differences, they connected because they both yearn for the same thing, to stand with one another atop Gekoukan’s rooftop and gaze at the city that gave them a taste of that elusive connection. The shortage of something is what makes you fear losing it. Yet, in the same vein, it makes you want to appreciate it and make use of it to the fullest so that when it ends, you can look back on it with no regrets and cherish your memories of it because it’s the memories that make our experiences with one another flow through all eternity. And so, even if I fear losing the ones I love, even if I lived a life of an emotionally stunted puppet, even if I lived in existential dread, even if I thought at times that I didn’t deserve to be liked, or that I was of less worth than others, none of that matters, because regardless of what happens, I’m human, I have feelings worth conveying, I will always have people I love, and I have something to live for, it may not be monumental, but the small ripples caused by the day to day things I do will surely produce a result worth living for in the long run because no two days are the same. It’s funny, I talked about my time during the pandemic as the worst time in my life, yet when I look back on it, I can’t look at those days as an unhappy time. To me, they’re a sign that I’m alive, a backdrop for me to push forward from, a pat on the back telling me how much I’ve changed, and a signal to dash forward and follow my heart, because I now know that rejecting it is the most painful of all. Maybe that’s how I feel about them because over time, I’ve slowly subconsciously implemented the feelings and lessons that Persona 3 made me feel and taught me into my day-to-day life, and now looking back on it, after everything has been said and done, I feel nothing but pride and love towards who I became and who I was. Through remembering my mortality, I remembered to live, and so I did.

OF DIZZYING HEIGHTS: only up, twitch, gambling, and the pipe-dream of capitalism

Dilapidated favelas, densely packed. Concrete and rebar, vandalism and trash piled up, compacted. The latest Twitch phenomenon, Only Up, starts us here — the “humble beginnings” of our protagonist, a nameless boy.

Only Up descends from a lineage of rage games: experiences engineered for frustration, games which forsake traditional progression, or punishment & reward systems, offering instead an inherently infuriating gaming experience, often sending the player to the absolute beginning with even minor mistakes. Jump King, Getting Over It, all being huge hits in the landscape of gaming content. The appeal of these games is elusive; one would expect such an unfair and absurd experience would be far from ‘fun’ — other games which often frustrate, like from Fromsoft or of the roguelite genre include a system of progression or metaprogression, which allows the player to beef up their stats or abilities, before attempting the intimidating task before them. The games termed ‘true / real’ roguelikes lack metaprogression, but are still dedicated to a fair and rewarding experience. They reward knowledge, adaptation, reaction.

Yet these rage games more or less are designed for unfairness. They feature jank controls, unclear rules, and rapidly changing level design. It is impossible to predict or even react, especially if one is approaching the game blindly. Every player is going to fall at some point. The games taunt you with a seemingly intuitive ruleset and design philosophy, but the only static is surprise. Even so, these games garner millions of eager viewers, and many eager players.

Essayist Patricia Taxxon makes a vital observation of rage games: The thing to understand about Getting Over It is that it was at least partly made with an intent to be observed second-hand.

Perhaps the most surprising phenomena to many, at its inception, was the popularity of lets-plays. Many confused parents have asked their children the question: ‘Why aren’t you playing the game? Why are you just watching someone else play it?’ It’s a very Baudrillardian experience, watching someone else have an experience, as an experience. But, it’s also a very human experience, to live through the experiences of others, for both the experiencer and the observer. If one doesn’t share their experiences, have they really happened? Living vicariously is perhaps the most important human desire in regards to social media and our content landscape — in some ways, in our overwhelming and complex world where no one really has agency, the experiences of others are much more tangible and immediate than our own.

Baudrillard discusses the concept of “transcendence” in relation to the modern experience: a meta-referentiality that “dominates the trajectory of modern art, not only of art but also of all our deeper perceptions, of all our apprehensions of the world.” This transcendence is, inherently, denial, a denial of evidence: by stating something is irreal, and it becomes palpable to us, bearable. “The world has become so real that this reality is only bearable at the expense of perpetual denial.” His example being Magritte — Ceci n'est pas une pipe — without the “transcendence”, commenting and denying itself, the not-pipe doesn’t become a pipe, it just disappears — the pipe lives, reflected, in the commentary on the pipe.

Magritte’s surrealist denial of evidence itself – this double movement of, on one hand, the absolute and definite evidence of the world and, on the other hand, the radical denial of this evidence – dominates the trajectory of modern art, not only of art but also of all our deeper perceptions, of all our apprehensions of the world. We are not talking here about philosophical morals, we are not saying “the world is not what it should be” or “the world is not what it used to be.” The world is the way it is. Once transcendence is gone, things are nothing but what they are and, as they are, they are unbearable. They have lost every illusion and have become immediately and entirely real, shadowless, without commentary. At the same time this unsurpassable reality does not exist anymore. It has no reason to exist for it cannot be exchanged for anything. It has no exchange value.

In his book, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact, Baudrillard proposes what he terms Integral Reality, a state of hyperreality where everything becomes Real. He specifically notes that in this hypothetical state that everything would have a meaning, “whereas it is in the nature of meaning that not everything has it.”

Now, this state isn’t something that comes naturally, it’s specifically only achievable through a process, a task, the “undertaking of realizing the world, of making it technically, integrally, real” — giving everything a meaning, giving everything a metaphor, transitioning from reality (0) to reality (prime).

What we see now, behind the eclipse of the 'objective' real, is the rise of Integral Reality, of a Virtual Reality that rests on the deregulation of the very reality principle.

In T. Fleishmann’s essay “House with Door,” they comment on the tendency to experience words as metaphor rather than literal meaning, as exemplified by a statement a child makes to them: “I live in a house with a door!” Fleishmann points out how their first instinct, and all of our first instincts to this puzzling sentence, is to assign metaphorical meaning to this statement — Fleischmann illuminates the mundanity of metaphor, and how we seek out things that make us feel real and not a metaphor —“I shouldn’t have to think about [being not a metaphor], but thinking of the absence of a thing is still thinking about it.”

Right now, as I am writing this post, as the popularity of Only Up is growing with great ardor, the most vital recent news story in regards to gaming content is the competitor streaming platform to Twitch, Kick, and it’s tremendous bids, hundreds of millions dollar deals with many of the most popular streamers.

Kick has garnered considerable controversy for its finances, being linked to gambling money. Gambling itself has been, for years, a key puzzle piece in the modern content machine — from gambling on phase 4 doppler talon knives from CSGO to straight up gambling as done by streamers such as xQc — it’s a subsect of gaming / content culture that’s perceived as a bit embarrassing, yet is hugely important to how things are.

The appeal of gambling content is surprisingly similar to the appeal of rage games — it pits the inevitability of losing or falling with the possibility of success. The observer, the watcher knows that the gambler or streamer will lose, but they continue watching, just as the streamer continues, repeatedly, until the slim likelihood of a run with little mistakes or a gambling win happens. Which is in turn, similar to the appeal of the growth of high stakes personal investing such as that of Reddit board “WallStreetBets” — a communal experience where every individual has a low chance of winning, but the serotonin of seeing someone winning significantly, or even losing significantly, keeps people hooked. These intensely frustrating, high risk activities are long in a line of escalating stakes Content — in our mundane, boring world with little agency, watching someone win or lose it all feels Real, in a way many things don’t.

This economy of stakes is driven by another quality, of gambling, rage games, and investing — namely that it looks easy. Rage games have deceptively simple control schemes: For Getting Over It, the hammer mouse control looks easy and intuitive, but is quite unforgiving. For Jump King, the jump itself requires precision of timing, that seems simple but is again unforgiving, requiring trial and error. And Only Up perhaps has the worst control quirks of all of them — entirely predicated on a jank mantling system which is seemingly random and unpredictable.

For gambling and investing, the prospective player sees many losses and a few wins, and asks themselves “what if I won?” — the prospect and possibility of winning being infinitely more appealing than the cost & risk evaluation going in one’s mind. Similar to players of rage games thinking to themselves after observing other players, “what if I could easily beat the game?”

Even the losses provide an experience of reality, of real stakes and real experiences.

Only Up, specifically, is deeply ironic, in its connections to investing — the title itself is a reversal of the crypto / investing phrase “Up Only”. As has been pointed out many times, Only Up features many spray painted images of NFTs, including on the back of our very protagonist.

Only Up features a faux-realistic aesthetic, with tech demo-esque sunbeams and lighting, rolling off vaguely impressive-looking rusty structures straight out of a game engine’s asset marketplace. An AI voice calls over the favelas of the earth, rattling off platitudes and faux-profound statements about life, and childhood. The objective of the game is to scale to the top of a sprawling floating debris field, impossibly tall, reaching to the heavens, hanging above the favelas — when the player starts their journey, and start climbing, they come across countless floating vignettes, of train stations, factories, homes, schools; the boy’s ascent clearly representing a synecdoche of life.

From the protagonist’s beginnings in the visually impoverished favelas, he climbs rusty pipes and old railways — when he ascends, the vignettes become less dilapidated, more metropolitan, more modern.

At some point, luxury becomes the norm. The protagonist platforms over floating piles of money, personal helicopters — he weaves through highrise offices and through gold-lined hotel rooms.

And after this point, the images become increasingly stranger, more thrown together and abstract. There’s a giant anime girl with platforms built of innuendo around her. There’s a pirate ship. And on and on.

Something I have to address though — the soundtrack is scattershot, appearing at random, sometimes with the AI voice. The track selection seems to rotate between a few emotional tracks, but all of which have been lifted from other works — for example, there are tracks lifted from the anime Aria; one of the most used tracks in the game being Senoo’s “Shourou no Patori~Neo Venezia~” [鐘楼のパトリ〜ネオ ヴェネチア〜].

I just gotta point out the irony of this blatant IP stealing. I just have to. It’s so comically bad. Many other tracks are stolen but I fr just do not have the patience to watch this game again, im gonna be honest.

Only Up’s faux-profundities and it’s idealistic ruminations just seem to expose the fraudulence of its ideas. The dream of capitalism, of course, is vertical mobility. Starting from the bottom and ending at the top (insert drake voice: started from the bottom now we here). That’s the ideal at least. But the game is purposefully built to be unfair. It has inconsistent platforms. Some of which aren’t solid, for no reason. Some of them fall. It throws curveballs, even more unfair than the rest of the rage games. It’s deeply ironic, in regards to its idealization of this boy’s journey. It’s almost a sadistic relationship between the designer and player.

In Ayn Rand’s novel Fountainhead, the protagonist, Howard Roark is tried at court. The crime, you may ask? Blowing up an in-progress construction of a building he designed. The company constructing it however, went against his original specifications, and he decided that his individual idealism, weighed against everything else, prevails. In classic Randian fashion, Roark makes a speech about individuality and how Man will Prevail against The Things Trying to Crush Him. The courtroom claps and he wins the case.

Roark, represents a stubbornness and arrogance, exemplified by the action he takes: tearing the building down. It’s a fundamental disrespect for the construction workers who were working on it — a selfish act, for one's own vanity. Glory in destruction, in tearing down others for one’s personal gains. And likewise, Only Up tears down the players, leering with fake-profound dialogue. It is never fair, it is all spectacle. It is a journey in the way “venture” in venture capital is a journey. Only Up is the dream of capitalism, on full display, in all its unbecoming, illegitimate, unfair, and straight up criminal glory. But we can’t look away.