There's a game from 1999 called Planescape: Torment. You wake up on a mortuary slab. You're covered in scars and tattoos. You don't know who you are. A floating skull tells you you've died before. Many times. And every time you die, you come back, but you lose your memories, and the person you were before is gone, replaced by whoever you become next.
The entire game is one question: What can change the nature of a man?
You spend sixty hours looking for the answer. You walk through a city called Sigil that sits on top of an infinite spire at the center of every plane of existence. You talk to people who knew your previous selves. You find journals you wrote in lives you don't remember. You meet a woman made of fire who loves you because of who you were three incarnations ago and doesn't know what to do with who you are now.
And the question keeps coming back. NPCs ask it. The story asks it. The game asks it so many times in so many ways that by the end you realize the question isn't looking for an answer. It's looking for what happens to a person who sits with it long enough.
I finished it for the first time when I was seventeen. I've played it four times since. It's 5 AM and I just finished it again, and the chai is getting cold, and I keep thinking about why this game won't let me go and what it has to do with selling things.
Bear with me.
The Nameless One has a problem. He's lived so many lives that the accumulated weight of his past selves has warped reality around him. People he hurt in previous incarnations are still suffering. Debts he incurred are still unpaid. And he can't fix any of it because he doesn't remember doing it.
His past selves are, in Girard's language, his mimetic models. Not in the usual sense. He's not imitating them consciously. He can't. He doesn't know who they were. But they shaped the world he moves through. Their desires left grooves in reality, and he's walking in those grooves without knowing they're there. Every relationship he encounters is pre-shaped by a version of himself he can't access. Every enemy he faces was made by a person he used to be. He's inheriting desire. Living out patterns established by someone wearing his face who wanted things he can't remember wanting.
That's not a game mechanic. That's Tuesday.
Werner Erhard talked about something he called "already-always listening." The idea is that you don't hear what people actually say. You hear what your filters allow through. Your identity isn't a window. It's a wall with specific holes cut into it. Information that fits through the holes gets in. Everything else bounces off.
You don't notice the wall. You think you're hearing everything. You think you're seeing reality clearly. But you're seeing reality through a series of interpretive frameworks that were installed by experience, trauma, culture, family, and repetition, and those frameworks are so fundamental to how you process the world that questioning them feels like questioning whether you exist.
The Nameless One's problem is that his wall keeps getting rebuilt. Every time he dies, a new identity forms, and that identity comes with new holes in the wall, and the world looks different through the new holes, and he can't figure out why people keep reacting to him as if he's someone he isn't. Because he is someone he isn't. He's all of them. And none of them. And the question, what can change the nature of a man, is really asking: can you get past the wall? Can you hear something that your identity is specifically designed to prevent you from hearing?
I think about Erhard's "already-always listening" every time I sit in a buyer interview. The buyer has a wall. They have holes. They hear my questions through a lifetime of filtering. And what they tell me is true, but it's true through their holes, which means the really interesting data isn't in what they say. It's in the shape of what they can't say. The places where the wall is thickest. The questions that make them pause, or laugh uncomfortably, or change the subject.
The Nameless One can't answer "what can change the nature of a man" because the question requires him to see past the wall that defines what he thinks "nature" means. The buyer can't tell you why they really bought because the answer lives behind their wall, in the identity they perform so automatically they've forgotten it's a performance.
Girard adds another layer. Because Girard always adds another layer.
The Nameless One's past selves aren't just memories. They're models. They're the people he unconsciously imitates even though he doesn't know they exist. His first incarnation made a bargain with a night hag for immortality. Every subsequent incarnation is living out the consequences of a desire they didn't originate. The wanting was done by someone else. The suffering is theirs.
That's Girard's whole thing. Desire isn't native. It's inherited. You want what your models want, and your models wanted what their models wanted, and the chain goes back so far that by the time the desire reaches you, it's been laundered through so many intermediaries that it feels original. You think it's yours. It's not. It's the Nameless One's first incarnation, making a bargain you don't remember, in a room you've never seen, for reasons that died with a version of yourself you'll never meet.
Your buyer is walking around with desires they think are their own. The desire for a certain kind of business. A certain level of income. A certain lifestyle. A certain version of success that looks specific to them but, if you trace it back far enough, originated in a magazine ad or a podcast or a mentor's offhand comment or a parent's unfinished dream. The desire was transmitted. Mimetically. Through models the buyer may not even remember being influenced by.
And here's the marketing problem: if you speak to the desire the buyer thinks they have, the conscious one, the one that fits through their wall, you get a polite response. A click. Maybe a lead. If you speak to the desire underneath, the inherited one, the one they can't name but recognize when they hear it, you get the jolt. The stop-scrolling moment. The "wait, how did you know that."
You know it because you listened past the wall.
Ernest Becker called this the immortality project. Not literal immortality, although the Nameless One has that and it's a disaster, which is kind of the point. Becker meant the symbolic version. The project of building something that will outlast your death. A legacy. A business. A book. A family name. An identity so solid that it feels permanent even though you know, in the part of yourself you don't let speak at dinner, that nothing is permanent and you're going to die and the universe doesn't care about your brand.
The Nameless One's first incarnation pursued literal immortality and got it. The cost was everything that made the immortality worth having. Memory. Identity. Connection. The ability to know who you are. He traded his nature for the chance to never end, and the game's central question, what can change the nature of a man, is haunted by the fact that his nature has already been changed, repeatedly, by the very mechanism that was supposed to preserve it.
Your buyer's immortality project is their business. Or their career. Or their reputation. Or the story they tell about themselves that makes the work feel meaningful. And your marketing is either serving that project or threatening it, and you don't get to choose which one the buyer perceives, because the perception happens behind the wall, in the already-always listening, in the identity layer that processes your ad before the buyer's conscious mind even sees it.
I played the last hour of Torment tonight. The part where you finally meet your first incarnation and he asks you the question one last time and you have to answer.
There are multiple answers. The game lets you choose. You can say it's regret. You can say it's belief. You can say it's experience or will or the realization that nothing can change the nature of a man, that the question is the answer, that sitting with it is the change.
I chose the last one. I've chosen the last one every time I've played. Not because it's the "right" answer. Because it's the honest one. The change isn't a destination. It's the willingness to keep asking.
Your buyer has a nature. A story. An identity built from inherited desires and accumulated walls and an immortality project they'd never call by that name. Your marketing either acknowledges all of that, operates within it, speaks to the person behind the wall, or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, it's noise. Expensive, well-designed, strategically targeted noise.
I don't have a clean ending for this. The game doesn't either. The Nameless One finds his answer and then walks into the Blood War, an eternal conflict between demons, to pay for the debts his past selves accumulated. The game ends with him marching toward suffering. It's not a victory. It's an acceptance.
Maybe that's what changes the nature of a man. Accepting the debts you didn't incur. Doing the work you inherited. Sitting with a question that doesn't resolve.
It's 5:47. The chai is half full. Somewhere on the Astral Plane, a man with no name is still walking.