Before we begin, please note that this guide assumes that you begin in 2015.

Getting this achievement will be a little different for everyone, so if you didn't start the game in 2015, that's okay. You can begin progress on the achievement whenever you like. However, I find it easiest to start five years before getting the achievement.

This guide will not be covering system clock changes. We are pursuing the achievement legitimately.

Firstly, you will need to be living in the year 2015. It's a simple time for you, a time of leisure and schoolwork. You're 15 years old, and life is generally good. You enjoy playing video games, you enjoy visiting your friends, and you enjoy reading. You don't particularly enjoy high school; the classes are stressful, the teachers uninteresting, the material dull. But you try your hardest, anyways. You've had a perfectionist complex that's persisted throughout your life. Failing wouldn't do, not for your bright-eyed youth. You make some friends, but not a lot, and that's okay. You're used to being the outsider. You tell yourself it doesn't bother you. You almost start to believe it.

You often turn to video games as a form of entertainment when you're not doing homework. You never liked shooters, and you were generally mocked for being a Nintendo fan, but for your 15th birthday you received a gaming PC and are eager to try it out. You slowly accumulate games, never understanding why people could have a huge library full of games they never play. In early November you decide to pick up the game you've heard many praise - The Stanley Parable. It's on sale, and you have some Steam money left over, so you buy it.

The Stanley Parable doesn't change your life. In fact, it hardly influences it. But you have fun playing it for just under two hours. It's an interesting title, and you enjoy the ways it breaks the medium of digital games - clicking on door 430 five times was a particularly memorable achievement for you. You haven't 100%ed the game, but you go out of your way to gather a couple achievements and call it a night. After all, it's 8 PM, and you can't be late for bedtime. As you go to click out of the achievements section, however, you notice an odd little goal sitting amidst the other amusing ones.

Go outside
Don't play The Stanley Parable for five years.

Hah, you think to yourself, that's funny, but you doubt anyone would actually try to gain that legitimately. Doesn't matter. You put it out of your mind and go to bed.

You're 16 now, and your depression's getting worse.

You don't know it yet. You don't think you're depressed. You've always been this way... maybe? You honestly aren't sure. High school is dreary as ever, and you've stopped paying attention to your Algebra II class. Math was your strong suit for years - you grew up a "gifted child" - and you wore your big brains as a faux badge of honor. But you're slipping. And honestly, you don't care. What good are all those graphs and crap anyways? You lie to your parents that you're doing your homework. Every time your teacher comes to collect, he looks at you with a twinge of not anger, but disappointment. The guilt stings at you whenever you see it, but you shove it down alongside everything else. You don't like to show your emotions anymore, not since you were bullied for being easy to tick off. It's funny, really; in hindsight, it won't seem that bad, but in the moment it was hell. You're used to it.

At least you have your friends. Your very cool, very center-right wing friends. You love looking at the latest "dank memes" on iFunny. RIP Harambe, Here Come Dat Boi, and all that. You toss slurs around as "ironic" humor, make "ironic" jokes about national tragedies, and talk about the slaughter of minorities "ironically". It's called shock humor, you see, and if you don't think it's funny, well, maybe you're just too sensitive.

When you're not with them, though, you play video games. You play a lot of video games, actually. Your attention span for reading has all but vanished, and you spend hours upon hours nightly playing. Broforce, Shower With Your Dad Simulator, Nuclear Throne, those sorts of things. A little gem called Emily is Away reminds you too badly about how single you are. You're a nice guy, why don't girls like you? You even wear a fedora.

While browsing through your slowly growing Steam library, you notice a game you haven't played in a while: The Stanley Parable. That game was fun, you think. Maybe you'll play it. But as your mouse hovers over that PLAY button, you pause. Wasn't there something about not playing? The achievements list confirms this. Don't play the Stanley Parable for five years. Shouldn't be too bad if you launch it now, you think. But the idea of starting over on that five year timer eats at your perfectionist complex. So... you close Steam. You weren't going to bed - you stayed up on your phone talking with your friends, even though you weren't supposed to. At 3 AM, your consciousness gives out in favor of rest.

You're 17, and you've found your "squad" - a group of similar teens on the internet. A far cry from your local friends.

You've ditched Skype in favor of this weird new app called Discord. You recommend it to your real-world friends, but they say it won't catch on. It has custom emoji, you say. They don't bother listening to you. You're used to it. They haven't in a while, of course. You're the verbal punching bag of the group. You laugh along, you self-deprecate, anything to keep them laughing. Anything to keep them liking you. If they're laughing, they like you. You're terrified of losing people. You're terrified of rejection. These friends were the only people you know in the real world. You can't leave them. Even if they constantly mock the marginalized, you stay. They use slurs that could target you. You don't comment.

You're bi. Your friend group that you've been hanging with online helped you recognize this. That, and anime boys. A specific anime boy from Fire Emblem, though you won't name names. Your friends help open your eyes to different perspectives about the world. Maybe swastika jokes aren't actually the pinnacle of comedy, or maybe people who trans'd their gender are actually people too. It's uncomfortable. You realize that you've said a lot of terrible things to your classmates in high school. You ditch the fedora.

You're also failing high school. You're failing all of your classes. None of them interested you, so you just talked with your friends when you were supposed to be paying attention. Any sense of tact was thrown out the window. You'd draw and joke and laugh. And all the while, a well starts opening inside you, dug deeper with every lie in the web you spun. Your perfectionist complex is going haywire, but there's another, stronger force opposing it.

You're depressed. Clinically. Self-harm would be easy, but you don't ever feel like it. You have chronic nightmares, nearly every time you go to sleep... so you stay awake as long as you physically can. Most nights you get, at best, three to four hours of sleep. And you lie out of your ass that you're okay.

One day, as you walk your dogs around the block, you take a depression quiz, and score high enough to the point where it recommends calling a crisis hotline immediately. This strikes you as odd - maybe you aren't really depressed? Maybe you were just doing it for attention. Yeah, that was probably it. Still, the fact that you've already tried to off yourself multiple times likely wasn't a good thing. So you turn to your phone and send your mom a screenshot of the quiz. She says you'll talk about it. Eventually you get a therapist. He doesn't help. You get another one. It's okay, until he asks you if you're "really" bi if you've never been with another of the same sex. You don't respond. Your mom tells you that we're not seeing him again. You don't have a therapist anymore.

You drop out of high school for an independent study program. Your teachers call you a coward to your face. They ask you why you can't handle coursework. Your stepdad accuses you of taking the easy way out. You don't have an answer. You never got along with him, especially not this year. You fight. You worry that he'll hurt Mom. You worry that he'll hurt your sister. But if he's mad at you, he's not mad at them. So you stuff it.

You cry alone that night. You fashion a noose with your bedsheet, but you don't have the guts. You untie it and go to sleep.

You're an adult, now. You've had high expectations for yourself since you were 16, but you've been falling short on all of them. You wanted to graduate with a 4.0, but you're lucky you're graduating at all. You wanted to go to an expensive university, but the thought of debt scares you. You wanted to drive a car, but you hadn't even gotten your permit yet, let alone a license. And moving out? Being independent? Forget about it. Maybe you could have in your hometown, but where you live, everything's expensive as hell and the prices only go up.

You don't really talk with your real-world friends anymore. You drifted due to widening ideologies - "politics", some would say, but you don't really see how LGBT people being allowed to be alive is political. It's not economic policy. It's just... people.

Instead, you've been seeing some new people - an LGBT group that gets together to hang out, chat, and eat Mexican food every week or so. It sounds fun, so you go. You're quiet. You have massive social anxiety. You don't like to speak up. But the people there are nice enough. You make some friends. You hope you'll stay in contact with them, and you do, mostly. It's nice, finally having a place to belong. It was a feeling you hadn't felt in years. Slowly, you come out of your shell and become a louder, more energetic person. You fall in love, you try to date, and you fail. You still hadn't quite gotten over your "nice guy" complex, yet, but at this point in time you've developed enough self-awareness as to know that it's an idiotic way to feel. So you stuff it.

Your online friends are fun. You get into Dungeons and Dragons, but you never finish a campaign. You make new friends. You lose some friends. You start to feel like you drift from place to place, but at the very least you tend to have more than one online friend at a time.

You're practically attached to your computer, when you're in between community college homework. Your family calls it an addiction, and you have a sneaking suspicion that they might be right... but you don't want to admit it to yourself. It's just what you like to do, obviously. It helps you escape reality. It lets you be someone you're not. A ninja, a revolutionary, a hero. You get hooked on one game at a time, playing for hours over hours daily. Twelve hour sessions become common. Your room is your haven, and outside meant dealing with your family. With your stepdad. You still weren't friends with him.

The Stanley Parable catches your eye, again. It strikes you that, suddenly, three years had already passed by now. Time flies, you suppose. What would you be like in 2020? What person would you be? You had already changed so dramatically in the last two years. You had tried wearing different clothing. It made you feel... comfortable. You had tried going by another name. It made you feel comfortable. But you didn't like to think about the implications. So you stuff it. Pushing the thread out of mind, you pick something else and play until 3 AM. You don't get nightmares anymore. Just sleep paralysis, now. So you play until you cannot stay awake anymore, plummeting into slumber.

2019 was supposed to be "your year", but ever since 2016, it's felt like things were going downhill. Life was consistently getting worse, but at least you still had your friends.

You used to, anyways. You cut off your racist friend group. One of them, aged 20, dated a 16-year-old, and nobody batted an eye. You're still friends with her brother. He wasn't a terrible person, and he didn't necessarily support the endeavor either.

Then you drift from your online friends. Things were great, for a long time, but everything simply grew... quiet. Nobody would respond to you. Nobody wanted to participate in your projects. That's fine, you tell yourself. You've been wrestling with the entitlement for years, now, and you think you've got it. It hurt, but you had no reason to be hurt, because they're allowed to do what they want. They don't owe you anything. So you stuff it.

Finally, you drift from your real-world friend group. You have a gut feeling that they just don't like you, which worsens over time. It was the little things - the way nobody would listen to you, the way nobody engaged with you, the way you heard about events through a friend instead of being invited. You stop attending. It's better this way, you tell yourself. You still have a couple real-world friends, anyways. You're used to this. So you stuff it.

Nothing seemed all that interesting anymore. You try to off yourself again, but don't go through with it. You couldn't, even when this deep in the muck. Thankfully, you've been fortunate enough to have a therapist. You make great progress, though you never feel like you do. You start antidepressants, and they make your brain foggy, but at least you're better. You think? You're not sure. Your memory was getting worse.

You hang out with another friend group a few times. You go rock climbing. They're nice people, and better friends with each other than with you. You stop attending.

You spend every waking moment on your PC. You couldn't handle another year of full-time college, so you take a few interesting classes and call it a day. You much prefer losing yourself in the virtual world than having to deal with reality. You can just forget all your issues, your traumas, your everything. You don't have to think. So you play. You stop eating. You stop hydrating. You forget you even have to until your hunger cramps are so bad you have to vomit. You don't. But you feel the powerful urge to. You lose weight. You've always been underweight, but it was getting serious. You could practically count your ribs. You don't see a doctor.

You see The Stanley Parable again. At this point, you're a little excited to finally get that achievement in a year or so. You wonder if you'd have moved out by then. You want to. You desperately want to. But you couldn't get a full-time job. You didn't have the qualifications for anything. So you click away from The Stanley Parable in search of another game to play. One more year, you think. One more year.

2020 was supposed to be your year... again. Turns out, time flies when you're inside all day.

You've been working at a small local restaurant for around a year. You make minimum wage, and you barely work a few days a week, but it's money. You aren't forced to pay bills or buy food. You don't have any direction in life. Sure, you play video games literally every waking moment... but that's it. You can't code, you can't engineer, you can't... anything. It's disheartening. You want to off yourself, but that's become a compulsive thought more than anything at this point. You put it out of your mind.

You drift away from most of your friends over quarantine. You still talk with maybe two people from 2019 consistently. You make new friends. You lose them or drift just as quickly. It bothers you. But you can't do anything about it. So you stuff it.

You see a notice of The Beginner's Guide going on sale, and remember The Stanley Parable. That game you hadn't played in... how long? You check. The five year mark was swiftly approaching. You feel kind of silly. You'd waited and waited... to open a program, watch a little box appear, and then close it again. You feel like some other way to commemorate the occasion was in order. The idea to write a memoir in the form of a Steam Guide comes to mind. It was stupid, granted, but The Stanley Parable wasn't afraid of looking stupid to break genre conventions, so you take it in stride and wait.

You start family therapy. Your family was near dysfunctional in 2019, and as much as you loathed initiating it, you pushed for it. You hate the idea of being vulnerable near other people. You hate the idea of being vulnerable around these people. But you do so, anyways. It takes time, it takes tears, but it starts to pay off. You're glad you did, even if you still hate it.

November 11th rolls around. It's been a long five years. You think about launching it, but if you've somehow managed to log in at 4Y:364D:22H, you'd be pissed. Not as pissed as you used to be, but still pissed. So you wait, and think on that idea you had before. It was, in fact, pretty stupid. You don't write anything, and you don't launch the game.

Someone dies.

They weren't close to you. In fact, you didn't know them at all. But you saw someone mourning on social media. Their friend had died, suddenly, for no apparent cause. They simply had passed in their sleep. You think about ghosts, often. The accounts of the dead that drift through cyberspace, nobody left to open them, a password taken to the grave, nary a note left in their room for the living to access. When someone dies, it's rare that they are able to post a final farewell before they pass. How many people who've gone idle have actually vanished? How many of your own friends have passed? If you died tonight, would anybody notice?

You don't like to think about these questions.

November 30th. Today. You sit down and type out your last five years. Reading over it brings back all the emotion you've stuffed for years. You're not sure if posting this to the public is even a smart idea. But it serves as a sort of reflection on the past, you think. It's more so for your own benefit than anyone else's. You're honestly not sure. You don't think it matters.

You've changed a lot in five years, mostly for the better. You thought the achievement would be as simple as just ignoring it, and in a way, it was. But each time you pulled it up, each time you stared at that tantalizing Go Outside box, it served as a marker of sorts. A tangible point in time where you thought about your past and your future. It helps ground the passage of time, weird as it is. You don't know where you'll be in five years' time. Likely a radically different person, if not dead. You honestly never thought you'd still be alive at this point. You thought you'd be another drifting profile in a sea of the living, an icon eternally marked offline. You'd even thought about preparing a way for those around you to be granted access should the worst come to pass. You haven't, yet, but writing this makes you change your mind.

As you type, you recall much more about the previous half a decade than you expected. You have far more emotions about that time than you expected. But most noticeable was your growth as a person. You had gone from an edgy, conservative, self-proclaimed "memelord" to the exact opposite of the political spectrum. You had changed from someone who wore a t shirt and jeans daily, someone who didn't care for their appearance, to someone who liked to experiment with their clothing, their appearance, their means of expression. You had gone from, in your opinion, a bad person to a good one.

You think it's important that people take the time to reflect on themselves. That's the point of your memoir, if anything. Reflection. You encourage whoever may stumble upon your work to just... stop a moment.

To think.

To Go Outside.

If you've followed the instructions clearly, five years should have passed and you should be able to receive your achievement! If this fails, don't come asking me for help. Every person's game is different, and your five years will look radically different than my own. The most important part of the achievement is to, quite literally, go outside. To change. To learn. And then, when all is said and done... please do me a favor, if not for yourself, and ask the question... Are you the best you that you can be?

- Kazzi

TL;DR don't play the game for five years lol