The Memetic Katamari Ball
11 Jul 2025This is part of a series of articles that serve to describe some of my Theory of Mind of the world. They will be exactly as long as they need to be to convey the concept, so will vary from nearly tweet-sized to extended essays.
From observing people over years, we all seem to think that we are completely unique individuals and all of our thoughts and ideas core to our being are uniquely self-discovered – we chose who we are! Upon cursory examination however, most of our memes were clearly randomly rammed into and mostly pushed by commercial interests. I call this pseudorandom accrual the “Memetic Katamari Ball”, and more casually I will say something akin to “he just got
Katamari Damacy is a game where you start with a small ball and run into stuff, and the stuff sticks to your ball if it’s an appropriate size to your ball. I admit now that I have never actually played it except for an hour or two at a friend’s house where she got mad I sucked at it and took the controller away to “show me how to play it” and then just ended up playing the game in front of me until I got bored (this happened with many PS1/2 games and is why most of the Sony game collection are not in my personal Katamari Ball). Anyway, the ball keeps getting bigger based on what you run into. My obvious allegory is that the memes that make us up as humans are just like a Katamari ball and our environment is the level map that provides the particular random elements we drive our ball towards to make it bigger.
A toddler who saw Death Note on TV is not going to add that to their Katamari Ball, but a teenager likely will. The analogy admtitedly quickly falls apart - A teenager who sees Teletubbies is not going to add that to their memetic katamari ball even though it’s a smaller size. On top of that, a jock is unlikely to see Death Note on TV and relate to it – Death Note appeals to outsiders, nerds, and weirdos. You need to have the appropriate memes on your Katamari ball before certain other ones can stick to it.
The key point here is that your ‘level’ is going to be based around when you were born, where you grew up, and what opportunities you had access to. If someone had put “playing tennis” in my path at the right time I would likely enjoy playing tennis. I’ve never had the opportunity, so I don’t care about tennis at all. My Katamari ball is specialized around computer use and “geeky” interests and now it would be quite challenging to add “playing tennis” to my personal ball unless someone made it quite worth my time to do so.
I’ll reinforce this with specific examples about me. I like Pokemon. I like it because the TV show was cool and I watched it after preschool every day because it was on after preschool every day and my parents let me watch TV then. I like Pokemon because my mom would walk me to Burger King and one day they had Pokemon keychains, and the Sandslash keychain I got was not a complete piece of crap like other kids meal toys (I still have it). When I joined Gaia Online because a friend I made at school was into Gaia Online and I looked up to her (how did she get into it? Who knows!), I gravitated toward the Pokemon Thread because I like Pokemon. I got into competitive Pokemon Gen 4 battling because I was on the Gaia Online Pokemon Thread. One of the users who I really liked was into Gundam and always framed her posts with Zero from SD Gundam Force so I watched SD Gundam Force, and then later in life when a friend showed me 00 Gundam (long before the dub came out) I really liked it, so I got into watching fansubbed anime released online.
I like Pokemon and Gundam. It’s not like I personally sought either of them out, though. They were put in my path and they stuck. There are items that didn’t stick – some examples from the Pokemon thread include one person I liked who liked weed and another who got into lolita dress. Neither of those stuck and I frown on weed use. I do have an innate love of the mechanical/technological and that contributes to why Gundam stuck on easily. Why do I have an innate love of “tech”? My dad is a huge car nut. So you can either chalk it up to my being around a car nut, or being the biological child of someone who already found mechanical things interesting. His father was also into tech – my grandfather worked for Western Electric on phone lines and never had any interest in cars - so I lean toward the biological justification for myself.
Life is a complex interplay between genetics and environment even deeper than what high school biology told us. I’ve been very affected by Sapolsky’s lecture series on Human Behavioral Biology that you can find here on YouTube (for now). If the playlist goes down, I’ll link the first video so that you can find the rest. Environment activates genetics which cause behavioral changes in environment. Fascinating stuff.