Sociosomnia: Squid Game (Netflix) 🔺 🔴 🟥

This is not a recommendation. Squid Game is brutally violent.

Yet, it’s the most watched series on Netflix ever, with 1.65 billion hours of viewing in the first 28 days. Things with this kind of popularity are like a direct line to our social psyche, as recurring dreams in our collective unconscious. But since none of us reading this email are (at this moment) in a bloody fight for the death, what’s this symbol reflect about our lives, and the human condition?

The characters are all debtors competing in kids games for a massive cash prize. The metaphor is not about money, or capitalism, or whatever (you can especially tell by the 'game creator' character discussing his 'why' in the last episode). Money is always a symbol—often for value/self-worth or safety. So if we look at the Squid Game characters’ ‘debt’ as a lack of self-worth, they’re competing in savage forms of ‘kids games’ to get self-worth, then it starts to feel eerily familiar. Here are some modern, savage kid’s games that many of us play: How many likes did I get? Hide and seek the truth, in fear of upsetting someone. Red team v blue team, capture the flag (so as not to feel isolated and alone). 

If this all seems pretty dark, it’s because it is. The good fight, as far as I can tell, involves honestly facing what is, good and bad, then risking going for more goodness even in the face of danger and depression and pain. But one interesting thing (spoiler alert:) in Squid Game is that the games go on despite our hero’s best attempts to thwart them. And when the winner decides to try to take the games down (season 2 foreshadowing) he does so at the cost of quality time with his daughter, which was his raison d'etre. From this I take a message of transcend and include: transcend these “childish games for money” (seeking external validation, 3rd Order/Amber/Blue, etc) but don’t try to exclude them. When we spend effort and energy trying to fight them, we lose what really matters most to us (4th Order). Instead, acknowledge this as a part of how your current self-system self-organizes, and then turn your attention to your purpose and go toward that. This is similar to being in a Circle, wanting someone else to be different, and then, rather than making that wrong, turning inward to see what the deeper driver of your desire is and being with that. Or wanting the Circle to be different, going deeper into what you really want, and moving the Circle towards that, rather than criticizing it (which will mostly just perpetuate it).

With love, Jordan

* Sociosomnia: seeing popular media as collective dreams that we can interpret archetypally/reflectively, to learn something meaningful about ourselves—no matter the quality of the product itself. This may say more about the interpreter than the media :)