The Simulated Sandbox: When Theology Meets Project Management

What theology, simulation theory, and startup chaos can teach us about leadership, resilience, and managing divine-level project dysfunction.

Look around.

The coffee in your cup. The tapping of your keyboard. The way the sunlight hits your desk just right for ten minutes a day like clockwork.

Now squint a little. Tilt your head sideways like you’re trying to find the cheat code.

What if all of this… every pixel of it, is just a brilliantly rendered simulation?

Not metaphorically. Literally.
Like The Matrix meets Tron meets The Sims meets the book of Genesis.

Reality as we know it: a huge block of code running on a supercomputer that uses more RAM than we can possibly imagine.
The laws of physics: the source code parameters that govern how the program allows the simulation to play out.
Earth: a sandbox environment with questionable QA testing.
You? An individual user prompt tying to find your purpose in a universe that crashes every time Mercury’s in retrograde.

I've always been a little obsessed with this idea. That maybe, just maybe, we’re all NPCs with free will, caught in some divine risk analysis assessment with a lot of unresolved issues.

I can imagine the ChatGPT style prompt:
”Create a simulation spanning civilization of an M-class planet over the course of 6000 years and determine if good prevails over evil.”

Turns out, modern physicists are starting to nod along. So are philosophers, tech bros, and theologians with too much espresso. Which brings us to today’s ride down the rabbit hole.

Let me introduce (or reintroduce) you to my good friend and long-time colleague Chris Day. Chris has a sharp theological mind. He’s deep thinker, and a regular guest on the Hard Knock University podcast. If you’ve been around the chaos long enough, you’ve probably heard us rant, riff, and wrestle with big questions over whiskey and whiteboards.

Chris just launched a new Substack called Echoes of Creation, and let me tell you, it’s pure fire. Imagine theology meets science fiction, written like a script for Westworld if it were directed by C.S. Lewis with a co-sign from Neil deGrasse Tyson.

In one of his latest pieces, he reframes the universe not as a one-God operation, but as the output of a divine council. Think cosmic team of executive stakeholders managing the business of existence… with conflicting KPIs and no project timeline.

And somehow… it maps disturbingly well to life as a project manager in a doomed startup.

Do yourself a favor and subscribe to his Substack. If you like your theology served with mystery, metaphor, and a few existential curveballs, Chris is your guy.

Echoes of Creation

If you’re comfortable with skipping his amazing work or you’ve already fully up to date, let’s dig in:

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TL;DR:

What is this article about?
It explores the idea that our universe may be a divine simulation, blending theology, project management, and simulation theory.

Who is Chris Day?
A theologian, thought leader, and regular Hard Knock University guest who reframes the universe as the work of a divine council, not a solo god.

How does this relate to project management?
It draws a direct line between divine conflict and modern startup dysfunction, drawing a parallel between creation and project management.

Is the simulation broken?
Nope. It’s just in perpetual beta, full of challenges designed to refine us, not ruin us.

What’s the main takeaway?
You’re not a bug in the system. You’re the upgrade! Chaos isn’t your enemy. It’s your gym.

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🛸 Enter the Council of Gods... or, Maybe the Project Stakeholders from Hell

In Chris’s mind-bending take, the story of humanity isn’t a clean linear tale with one divine narrator calling the shots. Nope. It’s more like a committee project. A divine boardroom where the gods don’t just sit in harmony strumming harps, but argue like co-founders at a venture-backed startup on the verge of collapse. Each one brings their own vision, their own priorities, their own non-negotiables to the table.

One might be hell-bent on beauty, obsessed with color, sound, form, and expression, trying to design the human experience like it’s an art exhibit. Another leans hard into order and logic, crunching the equations of existence like a celestial accountant with a whiteboard full of formulas and no tolerance for mess. Meanwhile, a third wants to run multiverse-scale A/B tests on morality, dropping randomized trials of suffering and success like a cosmic UX designer looking for clean data on human decision-making. And then there’s the wildcard… the chaos agent, the Loki of the bunch who just wants to see what happens when everything breaks.

If you’ve ever been the lead on a project where your stakeholders each brought a different vision, refused to talk to each other, and only communicated through passive-aggressive emails… you can see the picture I’m painting.

Chris describes their interactions not as divine harmony but as tension… sacred, complicated tension. It’s not dysfunction for dysfunction’s sake. It’s competing values colliding. And if that’s not project management in a nutshell, I don’t know what is.

We like to think our job is to lead. But more often than not, we're mediating. We're not managing tasks, we’re navigating personalities. We’re herding visionaries. We’re refereeing tiny, mortal, over-caffeinated gods who all think their priority should come first and that your job is to “just make it happen.”

So when Chris talks about a divine council shaping the trajectory of the universe, I see a team gone off the rails. I see that one stakeholder who “circles back” at the eleventh hour with a totally new vision. I see every PM trying to hold the project together while the gods of scope, budget, and deadline fight over the whiteboard.

It’s sacred chaos. And somehow… it works.

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🛠 So… Is the Simulation Broken or Just in Beta?

Let’s say the simulation theory holds water. That this whole gig is just a grand experiment running on some reality engine way beyond our pay grade. In that case, Chris’s divine council isn’t just a poetic idea. It’s the original dev team. The OG architects. The ones who spun up this sandbox environment and launched it into production with all the grace of a startup pushing to meet a deadline before the funding dries up.

Now here’s the kicker: what if all the “bugs” in the system; the heartbreaks, the breakdowns, the existential dread at 2 a.m… aren’t bugs at all? What if they're features? Built-in, intentional, engineered not to ruin us, but to refine us?

Suffering, confusion, ego clashes, and blown timelines might not be signs that the system’s falling apart. They might be the very mechanics that make progress possible. The universe might not be running a smooth, optimized release. It might be running in perpetual beta, with adaptive challenges coded directly into the mission so we grow… whether we like it or not.

You ever lose a subcontractor mid-job and think, “Well, the universe must hate me”? Nah. Maybe that’s just the simulation queuing up your next XP boost. Maybe the universe is tossing you mystery invoices or budget line items labeled “mystery costs” not because it’s broken… but because you’re supposed to become the kind of leader who thrives in that environment.

That’s what we’re about here at Hard Knock University isn’t it? We don’t wait for clean projects or perfect timelines. We don’t demand bug-free builds. We take the chaos, the curveballs, the unplanned change orders, and we use them to level up.

We treat every “we need to talk” client meeting like a boss fight. Every glitch is an opportunity in disguise. It’s not just about surviving the game. It’s about learning to play it with style, with grit, and maybe even a little laughter along the way.

So is the simulation broken?

Hell no. It’s just got a wicked learning curve.

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🎮 So, What Do We Do With All This?

If the universe really is a divine group project ; one part theology, one part codebase, all held together by duct tape and divine conflict… then your daily chaos isn’t just noise. It’s signal. It means something.

You’re not an NPC! You’re not just a bystander in this simulated mess. You’re a participant. A builder. A translator. A stubborn, slightly sleep-deprived innovator who gets back up every time the render glitches and the client changes the scope halfway through framing.

Maybe the gods, or the devs, or the divine council, or whatever you want to call them… didn’t design a perfect system on purpose. Maybe perfection was never the goal. Maybe growth was. Maybe collaboration was. Maybe the pain and friction are the code that makes empathy, resilience, and leadership possible.

And that means your struggle is sacred. Your late nights matter. Your project headaches are the very forge that hammers out character. Every hard conversation, every impossible deadline, every moment you lead through confusion instead of quitting… that’s you, leveling up inside the game. That’s you proving you’ve got what it takes not just to exist, but to lead inside the glitch.

So whether you're managing people, raising a family, running a jobsite, or just trying to keep your coffee warm long enough to finish a thought… know this:

You are not a bug in the system.
You are the patch.
The upgrade.
The living proof that imperfect design can still produce powerful results.

Keep building. Keep leading. Keep laughing at the absurdity of it all.

Because even if this is all just a simulation, you were clearly coded for the chaos.

#HardKnockLesson:
Resilience isn’t what you have when things go right.
It’s what you build every time the universe hits you with a glitch and you keep showing up anyway.

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👉 Read Chris Day’s full piece: “Echoes of Creation”

I’m rooting for you.
—Mark

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Previously on Hard Knock University Dispatch:

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