Scheffler’s lecture, The Afterlife, opens with a question: how would you react if the world ended 30 days after you died? Our reactions, Scheffler argues, are evidence that we care more about the survival of others, the continuation of humanity, than the continuation of our own lives, not merely because we are altruistic but because the existence of a future with other people is necessary for things to matter to us at all.
Journey gives us the opportunity to explore this apocalyptic scenario from a different direction: what would it mean to be born into a world that has already ended? Through the prevalence of solitary activities in a dead world, Journey extends Scheffler’s argument by demonstrating that the dependency runs in both directions: just as we need future others for things to matter, we can still find meaning after they are gone in the recovery and preservation of their stories.
Scheffler argues that even solitary activities like journalling or enjoying a sunset, are made meaningful by the assumed existence of an ongoing civilization. What meaning then, do we find in all of the walking, soaring, and meditating of Journey? One answer is simply that there is no greater meaning, it is just enjoyable. And indeed, soaring through soft blue skies overlooking endless, golden sand-dunes is a blissful experience. But bliss is not sustainable. Eventually our scarf runs out and we must return to the ground where we are reminded of two things. The looming, glowing mountain we are prophesied to climb and the array of ruins, tombstones, and trapped creatures buried in the sands beneath our feet.
This juxtaposition of beauty and death, freedom and fate, the now and the end gets at the essential problem Scheffler explores of meaning-finding in the face of mortality. While it can be enjoyable to perform solitary activities simply for the sake of performing them, eventually that enjoyment ends and when it does, what remains? Scheffler answer is that doing things for others like cancer research can sustain us: we live on through the lives of others. In Journey we are not living for future others since, well, everyone is dead. Rather, we work to uncover the lives of those that came before us.
The world of Journey is revived by our interactions with it. We free trapped creatures from the sand; we activate dormant monuments that pulse back to life; we become a spark of color in a monotone landscape. These mechanics demonstrate that the world never actually died, it was just lying dormant, waiting for us to come and revive it. In this way, Journey fills a gap that Scheffler left: the backward-looking chain of human meaning is as important as the forward-looking one. Preservation of the past gives meaning to the future.
Why do we find meaning in the recovery of others’ stories? Perhaps it is because preservation is another way to live on. At the end of the game, rather than restore the world from its apocalypse, we are turned into a shooting star. On starting the game again, we see that a new row of paintings have been added to our cloak: we have become a part of the story that we worked to preserve.
