Zeno

Raising the Cost of Re-Entry My old PC, recently handed down to elder child, had been dubbed Distractotron5000. I named it with a kind of ironic self-awareness: I could see clearly enough that I was using it to anesthetize myself. My new, stripped-down PC is dubbed Scriptorium, to reflect it's more serious purpose, related to my vocation as a scholar and a teacher. By the terms of the Grand Bargain I struck with myself a couple of weeks ago, I've left open the possibility of building a new PC for entertainment - perhaps the Distractotron6000? - at some point in the future. After a particular debt has been paid in full, I hope sometime in 2022, I may begin to save for a new rig. When I disassembled what had been elder child's PC, I set aside the CPU and the RAM modules for possible use later . . . thinking ahead to maybe incorporating them into that new PC for the back room. Today, though, I decided that would be too easy. So, after I confirmed an arrangement to sell of a couple of motherboards, I made an arrangement to sell that CPU and a handful of RAM modules that have accumulated in my closet over the past few years. The proceeds from all these sales will be added to my next debt payment. When the debt is paid, it will be much steeper climb to build the PC I've had in mind, an expenditure that will be much harder to justify in light of other priorities. At the same time, my interest in having and using such a PC is already starting to decline, and maybe will have vanished altogether by the time the debt is gone. Part of me still wants to have that PC, wants to be able to sink into distraction, at least in a general sort of way, but when I think of the actual experience of playing any particular game, I can already feel the tedium and the pointlessness of it. Today, just out of curiosity, I checked a gaming news site. I saw that one RPG I've enjoyed recently has a new DLC - I'd bought the season pass - and my reaction was . . . indifference. The thought of getting back into it, relearning all the game-play mechanics, and trudging through another set of fetch quests just left me cold. What would be the point? Would it really be worth spending $1500 or more just to be able to do that?

I can relate to this, especially to that first, stubborn resistance when I sit down to write. The only way I've found to get over that resistance is just to start writing anyway, even if the first words from my pen are garbage, even if I'm just restating in different words the writing problem I'm facing at the moment. ("So, I've already written X, and I need somehow to get to Z, but what the heck is Y, and how do I express it in actual words?") Often, that's enough to get me hooked into the task, and I can then sometimes write for an hour or two with only a short break to stretch and walk around a little. Two things have inspired me in this approach. One is from the writer Barbara Kingsolver who has said, in effect, that you should not wait for inspiration to start writing, but should instead "chain your muse to a bench" and make it work for you. She writes on a schedule, eight hours a day, even if most of what she writes will never see print. On that basis, she argues that there is really no such thing as "writer's block"! So, when you sit down to write, just write, just get the pen moving and the words flowing, regardless of their merits or their direction. Set a timer, and don't allow yourself to do anything but write while it's running. The other is a cautionary tale from Camus' novel, The Plague: one of the characters is working on what he hopes will be the greatest novel of his time. He wants to craft a first sentence so perfect and so compelling that readers will immediately recognize his genius and stand to salute him. He struggles and struggles to craft the perfect sentence, but dies of the plague before he can finish even that. The lesson there is: Don't wait until the beginning of what you're writing is perfect before you write other parts of it; in fact, you might consider writing the beginning last. Also: Don't struggle and fuss over any writing that isn't exactly what it should be, at first; the best writing you will ever do is when you are revising something you've already written. Beyond that, it really doesn't help to get caught up in anxiety and regret, which are likely to send you scrambling back into comforting distraction. Rather, just be where you are, even if it isn't where you wish you were, and find a way forward, one sentence, one paragraph at a time.

Another Artifact, Unearthed I have spent some time today reconstructing more of my own history over the past ten or fifteen years, focusing on research and writing projects I have pursued, and some which I dropped along the way. This has been good, because it reminded me of good work I've done in my career, though my productivity took a sharp downward turn sometime around 2010, with sporadic up-ticks until it bottomed out in 2017 or 2018. There are still some good project ideas in those old files, and I can see how they led to and could be updated to fit with my current work, so I now have a new folder full of ideas for future projects. Trying to follow one lead brought me to a blog I used to keep where, in passing, I came across an entry from June 2015. It begins: As I was recounting the various ways in which I tried to make sense of the problem of the Internet, I wrote this: As mere mental and emotional discipline could not create lasting habits, I speculated about making modest changes to the physical configuration of my office to help enforce them. That's when I floated the idea of using a standing desk, with the thought that the discomfort of standing for long periods would dissuade me from wasting time on the computer. That didn't work, as I would evidently bear all manner of discomfort in my hips, knees, and feet if I could just . . . keep . . . playing! Later that year, sometime around October, I quit social media cold turkey, and that did help a little. Mostly, it just freed up more time for me to play games.

Out With the Old! Another milestone, this evening: I moved the storage drives and graphics card from elder child's PC into what had been my gaming rig, so elder child now has the advantage of a better processor and more RAM, as well as a very slick case with RGB strips behind the front panel. I then broke up the other rig, setting aside the CPU and memory for possible use later, and putting the motherboard back in its box so I can sell it off.. So, here I am, officially without a custom-built gaming PC for the first time since at least 2015. I also did some yard work and made dough for sourdough bread, which I'll finish in the morning. Now I'm eager just to sit and read for a while.

Hey, @Theresa! It's been a minute since the last time you posted. It's good to know things are going well with you, and that you're finding goals and structures to remain in charge of your own life. Rooting for you, too!

It's Done! The new, low-profile CPU cooler arrived early this evening. I had already prepared for its arrival, so it took me only twenty minutes or so to get to this: With the last-minute changes, the new rig is a little over budget, but most of the cost was covered by selling my graphics card. I'll have another motherboard to sell, soon, which should more than take up the slack.

New Desktop PC . . . delayed, again! Good news and bad news, yesterday. The good news is that my new CPU arrived at last, after a long delay in customs. It was shipped from a seller in Hong Kong, and everything between China and the U.S. is a bit . . . messy, just now. In truth, most of the delay was probably due to the pandemic. So, I was able to start building my sleek new "downgraded" desktop PC! It works like a charm and, best of all, has no dedicated graphics card. The bad news is that I was planning to use the stock AMD cooler that came with the processor, which was a bad idea for two reasons. First, the cooler is too tall for the slim case I'm using, so I'm basically running an open rig, right now, as I can't close up the case. Second, I had forgotten that stock AMD coolers kind of suck. Okay, technically they blow, but still, the thing whines constantly! Well, it wouldn't be a PC build if I didn't make at least one mistake. The first time I built my own PC, I hadn't yet figured out that you need to pay attention to all the specifications of the RAM modules, including the frequency, so I was completely flummoxed when the motherboard would beep angrily at me when I tried to boot it up! I've ordered a low-profile CPU cooler that is said to be very quiet. When I ordered, I was informed it would be delivered on Friday but then, this morning, I received notice that it should arrive today. The annoying thing is that I can't just swap out coolers. I have to disconnect everything and pull the motherboard back out of the case to install the custom backing plate for the new cooler. It'll be worth it, though. As an aside, it occurs to me that learning how to cobble together a PC has been one of the things I enjoyed most in the past four or five years. I'll have to consider taking up other forms of tinkering. I've been thinking of getting (or building?) a proper workbench for my basement, so I can repair and restore things - furniture, tools, small appliances - for my household. I think I get this from my dad, who was a mechanical engineer to the very core of his being, always looking for something that needed fixing.

Another point against getting rid of a smartphone is that for better or for worse - and mostly for worse - they are now required for certain basic functions in many contexts. I cannot log in to any of the systems at work without two-factor authentication, and the only non-crazy-making way of doing that is to use the smartphone app. I think @Pochatok is correct, though: address the underlying cause, whatever it is that pushes you toward distraction and escape, and the pull of the smartphone will subside on its own.

It depends a lot on the kinds of games that draw you in, and their technical requirements. If they're games that require a dedicated graphics card, downgrade to a system that uses a CPU with integrated graphics - good enough for doing things online and doing office work, but not good enough for games. That's what I've been doing, and the very nice "downgraded" desktop PC I'm building is almost complete. If the games don't need that kind of power, then you might look into apps that block particular programs from running, or block you from visiting certain websites. I haven't used those, myself, so I can't recommend one, but I do know there are posts about it elsewhere on the forum.

Burning Off the Fog I'm going to stop referring to games at all here, at least for a while. What I did a month ago was not to "quit games", but to begin to reclaim my life from the fog in which I had allowed it to be enveloped over the past five or ten years. The process of sorting photos and - now- videos in the ongoing (pandemic-prolonged) division of the household has been a harsh sort of therapy. With photos from my childhood, and with photos and videos of my children, I can now survey the entire half-century span of my life, and I can begin to reckon with the damage sustained in the last decade of it. Yesterday evening, I spent hours going through professional videos taken of my kids' various dance performances from 2007 until 2017. My kids took various classes in ballet, modern, jazz, and tap over the years, and the spring performances were always on stage at the performing arts center of a nearby university, with professional lighting and sound. I found the segments in which my kids were performing and ripped them from the DVDs onto my hard drive, partly to have my own backups, partly to send them to my ex. My younger child is something of a natural at dance, but ran into some physical problems right around 2016 that kept her from continuing, just as her mother had all but abandoned the family and I started to scrape bottom, escaping more and more into numbing distraction. She was devastated by the compounding of losses, and I was in no fit state even to see that properly, let alone really to help her. By 2018, when my elder child was away in college and my wife was essentially living elsewhere, my younger child and I did talk more. We would go out for pizza once a week, and just vent over everything that sucked in the world and in our lives. Still, a lot of damage had been done. In fall 2019, she returned to dance, signing up for class in modern dance at the ballet school. Then the pandemic hit. I think my younger daughter is now emerging from the fog, regaining some of the confidence and grace that came to her so easily on stage. She's looking forward to college, and has just secured a good job for the summer. My older child is struggling more, having stepped back from college (which is nicer to say than "dropped out") when the pandemic started, and has been adrift ever since. There are also some signs of emergence from the fog, there, but only gradually. The upshot of all this is that, as I looked at all their various performances on stage, I began to feel a tremendous weight of sorrow and loss and regret. There is so much more I could have done to support and help my children, starting with filing for divorce a few years sooner; there were so many lost opportunities for us all. After all that, I had trouble sleeping. I turned out the light around 11:30, slept for a bit, then woke up at 12:30 awash in a kind of desolate grief. I tossed and turned, struggling through it, finding my way back toward the hope I've been experiencing over the past few weeks. I got there, eventually, but I had to work for it. I was not helped at all in that I was awake for the one-year anniversary of the very moment of my father's death. I finally got back to sleep, sometime around 2:00, but had turbulent and elusive dreams about dance and loss, not one detail of which I can now recall. But this is the thing: I felt these things, I allowed myself to feel them, and I summoned the will and the strength to face them and work past them rather than fleeing from them. There is nothing I can do about all the losses and missed opportunities of the past, but I can try not to miss the opportunities still to come, and I can be ready to accept and bear future losses with a bit more grace. So what I've been doing for the past month is letting the anesthesia wear off, or, to switch back to the main metaphor here, burning off the fog that had settled like a comforting blanket, obscuring a ravaged landscape.

Advice from a musician: learn an instrument first, then learn only enough theory to do what you want to do with it. Making music is a living process, something that can only be experienced in the immediacy of the present moment. Theory is reflection after the fact; on it's own, without something to reflect on, it's just empty.

One Month! Even though I quit games in the last days of March, I'm using April 1 as my reference point for keeping track of how long ago I left gamer-world. I figure that counting days would mean I'm thinking every day about the fact that I quit games, which is an indirect sort of way to be thinking about games. It would be nice to go for days or weeks or even whole months without thinking about games in any way, even in the negative. My various projects are coming along. My writing was a little disrupted this week, but I've still accomplished more in this past month than I had in the previous year. More than that, I've started to take myself more seriously as a writer and scholar than I have in many years. My bookshelf now looks like this: On the top shelf are books I read in April. Not shown are the books in progress: Jessica Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought (for research), Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America, volume 2 (for evening political science), and Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (for the adventure of it). On the lower shelf are books waiting to be read, including Albert Camus, The Plague. Ahem. Because I have more time open to me, and thanks in part to the Grand Bargain I struck this week, I also feel more in control of my own household. I've been sorting and organizing things - books, photos, CDs - in preparation for my ex-wife coming down here next month to take away the last of her stuff. Funny side note: Most of the family photos from my childhood were on 35mm slides, which my parents had transferred onto photo CDs about 15 years ago. In digging through a cabinet in the back room, I came across my copies of those CDs, all gathered in a box. With about an hour and a half of research and tedious file-transferring, I managed to get them all converted into .jpg format. I was then able to surprise my mom and my siblings with a link to a shared online folder of family photos from the late 1970s through 1995. I came across this one, from 1982: It's from just after Christmas that year; my brother is at the keyboard of our brand new TRS-80 Color Computer (with Extended Color Basic!) - known semi-affectionately as the Trash-80 CoCo - with a cassette player connected to it for external storage. I'm hovering over his shoulder, watching and waiting my turn. (For those who don't know, TRS was short for Tandy - Radio Shack, and Basic was a programing language with very intuitive and straightforward syntax ("Let X = 2"; "For Y = 1 to 100"). "Extended Color Basic" was, as far as I know, unique to the TRS-80 CoCo, and included commands for controlling the position and size of colored shapes on a screen. I would spend hours using it to create very simple animated scenes. You might think of the TRS-80 as a down-market alternative to the Commodore 64, which set the standard for accessible home computing at the time.) We also received the cartridge for a game - one I've mentioned before - which was an intermediate step between the old text adventure games and 3D dungeon-crawlers. It was very simple, but also very compelling. I had my first gaming all-nighter with that game, sometime in the weeks after this photo was taken. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this first month away from gamer-world is that I'm rediscovering my own history, even the history of my own household and the lives of my own children. I mean, I was there for them, and I shared in that history, but I had become disconnected from it all in the upheaval of a disintegrating marriage and in the haze of forgetfulness brought on by gaming. I've rediscovered it just in time, while my adult children are still living with me for the duration of the pandemic.

Welcome to the forum, Alexander! I was going to ask whether there is a difference for you between playing online and playing in person. I was thinking chess would be a different experience when you're face to face with someone. You mention playing Monopoly, though, and how much you end up hating those with whom you're playing. That may just be in the nature of Monopoly! Everyone hates everyone when playing that game: too much chance is involved, and once you start falling behind, bankruptcy becomes inevitable. (I've heard that people in Cuba were once encouraged to play Monopoly in order to experience first-hand the evils of unfettered capitalism!) Taking a long break from all games might be a good idea, if only because it will give you a chance to think about what you really wanted from them. From the way you describe yourself, you are fiercely competitive, almost to unhealthy excess. What underlying need does that competitiveness help you to fulfill? Maybe it's to reassure yourself of your own worth, compared to your competitors, or maybe it's something else. Is there some way to meet that need without gaming obsessively and hating everyone else who is playing? One test might be to try a cooperative in-person game. The one that comes to mind, sadly, is Pandemic, which might be a little too on the nose for the moment. Still, it sets up a very different social dynamic among players who are gathered around a table.

Welcome to the forum! Any way to get back in touch with them? There must be others working in the games industry who have the same struggle, maybe even people you work with every day. I'm not sure how you'd find them, but it might be worth asking around, discreetly. I'm just thinking it might be easier to find your way toward balance if you knew you weren't the only one, and if you could talk and compare strategies with others in the same situation.

Also, the CPU I ordered was still stuck in customs as of yesterday. Today, though, there's a change in its status on the tracking page for the domestic carrier that will be delivering it to my door. So, there's some hope I'll receive it over the weekend or early next week. If it arrives on the weekend, I may spend time on Sunday building my new working PC, the slim case for which fits neatly on a shelf next to my desk. Then I'll move my elder child's gaming PC into the case I'm currently using, which will free up some parts I can then sell off to bolster my budget.

The Grand Bargain is working better than I could have imagined. Not only has it completely settled the turbulence I had been experiencing, but it has gotten me to take a closer look at my budget and make a few adjustments in my assumptions as to where my money should be going. Funny story, though. On the very evening I struck the Grand Bargain, I logged on to my employer's HR system to look at the stub for my end-of-April paycheck. I was expecting some supplemental income from an extra responsibility I'd taken on at my university and wanted to see what my total net pay would be for the month. When I saw the number, my jaw hit the floor. Somehow, the amount of supplemental pay was three times what I was expecting, with the result of nearly doubling my take-home pay for the month. I knew this was an error, and I'm not about to take money on which I have no legitimate claim, so I alerted the financial manager in my department, and also the administrators in the office that was the source of the supplemental pay. It was indeed an error - someone had a case of the fumble-fingers and hit one number key instead of another - and Payroll will be in touch regarding options for correcting it. The direct deposit went through already, which means one option will likely be that the difference will be taken out of my gross salary next month, but that's okay. It's a curve-ball for sure, but it has had the effect of making me look even more closely at my budget, with still further adjustments in my assumptions. After all this, I think I may level up, or unlock a budgeting achievement ("Numbers Man") or something . . .

It's good that your profs were willing to cut you some slack. The message has been circulating among faculty at my university since last March that we should be more accommodating to our students during while the disruptions of the pandemic continue. I hope the new approach to scheduling your time works for you.

I think you have the right idea about learning to handle failure, but it goes one step further: one of the very best ways to learn is to fail, early and often, but in a setting in which failure is somehow safe. One of the worst things about educational institutions these days is that every single thing - every assignment, every test, every breath or stray movement - is observed and assessed on a rubric, with no margin for error. Everything is for high stakes. Every failure is a potential catastrophe. Is it any wonder millennials and gen-z-ers are racked with anxiety and depression? What students need - what everyone needs - is a chance to fall flat on their faces and then pick themselves up again; they need to work through frustration and doubt because those are unavoidable when you are trying to understand things you have never understood before. What applies in formal education also applies in life more generally. People who tell you to lower your expectations are way off the mark. Don't go giving yourself trophies just for showing up. The thing is to keep your own standards high, maybe even ratchet them up as you go, but to become more resilient in the face of failure, on the understanding that falling flat is part of the process of eventually living up to your own standards for yourself. I posted something related to this in my own journal, if it's of interest.

It may be that your lack of purpose is both cause and effect of your obsession with gaming, which can provide the illusion of structure and direction without the kind of attention and discipline you need to accomplish anything worthwhile in the real world. [Full disclosure: I teach at the university level, so I have a different sort of perspective on the problem you're facing. At the same time, I used games to escape from a bad home situation, since resolved, which left me adrift in my professional life.] Your immediate problem is somehow to finish your current term. What you may need to do is to prioritize the list of assignments you need to catch up on, and dedicate a set period of time every day to doing nothing but work on those assignments. When I say "dedicate" I mean "schedule": actually add it as a block of time in whatever calendar you might prefer (Outlook, Google, etc.), then stick to it. If you find yourself in a bind with one or another of your classes, a deadline you simply cannot meet, contact the course instructor and, without making excuses for yourself, ask for extensions or even, if it comes to that, an 'incomplete' in the course, if that's a possibility at your institution. You may be surprised how helpful some instructors can be. Not all of them, to be sure, but some of them and maybe, in your case, just enough of them. Also plan a time in the evening when you will stop working and do something low-key and enjoyable, like listen to music or read a book, so it becomes possible to sleep. Also pay attention to eating regularly, and drinking plenty of water: good sleep, nutrition, and hydration will do wonders for your energy and your ability to pay attention. Also get some physical exercise, even just going out for a walk every day. As for summer, yes, it's unfortunate that you don't have a job or internship lined up already, but you can take that as an opportunity to reset a little bit, think about the direction you want to take. You say you no longer want to go into finance, but do you have any sense of what you would like to go in to? If you have the time and the financial support for it, you might consider taking a summer course or two in some other direction, something that just appeals to you on its surface, just to see if it opens up any possibilities for you. Or try to find a job in some unexpected direction - shelving books in a library; serving as a fire lookout in a wilderness area; working in a bakery - to shake you out of the rut you're in. Or both . . . and other things besides. Challenge yourself to learn to play a musical instrument. Volunteer at a food bank. Read 30 books. Take up tai chi. Really, try anything and everything, even if it turns out to be a dead end, just to see what's possible.

The Grand Bargain I have jokingly suggested that I have been going through the "bargaining" phase of grief, lately, trying to establish terms on which I would allow myself to buy back into PC gaming. The constant switching back and forth between gamer-mindset and non-gamer-mindset has been creating some turbulence, though I'm happy to say it has not seriously affected my productivity. I think I've hit on a way to calm things down, and it's by way of taking a good look at my budget. One good thing I've been able to do in the last year or so is to get a handle on my spending, using an online budgeting app, so I know pretty much precisely what I have, what I owe, and what my expenses are every month. One big dent in my budget is the debt I incurred in replacing the roof of my house, last fall, followed soon after by debt for replacing my refrigerator. So, I've made a bargain with myself: I can start thinking about saving money for the components I'd need for a new gaming PC - for the back room - when all that debt has been paid off. The refrigerator debt should be gone in a month or two, but the roof debt will take longer: if I stick with my current payment schedule, it will take more than three years to pay it off. I might be able to adjust things to pay it off in 12-15 months. This has two benefits. First, it ties any future return to gaming to a tangible accomplishment, rather than to an arbitrary date on the calendar. I can cut corners or cheat on a 90-day or a 1-year detox, but I can't cheat on the amount that appears on the statement for the loan I took out. It also prevents me from cutting budgetary corners, taking on even more debt to buy toys. Once I've paid off that debt, my monthly budget eases quite a lot, and I can start to think about discretionary spending. The second benefit is that it motivates me to pay off the loan sooner, which means I will be paying less in interest. If I'm to cut any corners in my budget, let me trim other discretionary spending and direct as much as I can get away with to the pay-down. The elite-level challenge is to pay it off in one year. I think this is a good bargain.

If you have a calendar you use for yourself (Google, Outlook, or whatever), schedule a two hour block every morning that is devoted entirely to catching up on lectures. Having it appear in your calendar with a reminder can help reinforce the habit. When you do watch a lecture, have paper and a pen at hand to take notes (and to doodle, if you need something to carry you through the boring bits.) (Disclaimer: I teach at a university, and know precisely how alienating and dull lectures can be for students. I don't lecture much, preferring that students be actively engaged, one way or another, but that's very difficult in remote learning. So, yeah, notes and doodles can get you through.)

I suppose I should consider also when (and for how long) I play, and what I play, all with the aim of enjoying some games without allowing them to take over my life. But since I'm in a reflective frame of mind, and since I have broken out of the dopamine-loop so that I can actually think about games, rather than jonesing for them, I figure I should be thorough. I should set out not just what games bring to my life, but what they take away. Today I'm thinking about a handful of reasons not to try to get back into gaming. They come down to: money, energy, and opportunity. Money. The aftermath of the divorce has pushed my cash-flow to its very limits; most months, I have just enough to cover mortgage, property taxes, and expenses, especially since I have new debt from a major home repair and a major appliance, both of which I needed to pay for last fall. The house was never properly furnished, so I should see to that, and I need to build up an emergency fund and begin to rebuild my retirement savings. My younger kid is going off to a private college in the fall and, though there is money set aside, I need to be saving more to cover my bit of the last year or so. My elder kid has stepped back from college, only partly due to the pandemic, and is now seeking another path; I need to be ready to provide what support I can to get elder kid launched into the world. I've also long had it on my wish-list to buy a new fiddle. So, yeah, money is tight, and I have other priorities. Gaming is an expensive hobby, especially since I've put myself in the position of needing to buy back into it if I want to play again. Am I really going to try to save up and spend $1000 or so just to play games once in a while? That seems extravagant. It seems like a failure to keep in view what really matters. Energy Earth Day was just two days ago, and I was thinking about this, then. Where I live, much of the electricity is generated from burning coal, most of which comes out of the Appalachians: mountaintops are ripped off to expose coal seams, the overburden dumped into rivers and streams. At the power plant, the fossil carbon in the coal is released into the atmosphere where it contributes an impending climate calamity, all just to keep the power flowing. Seems to me I should think more carefully about how I use that electricity, about the value produced by each watt. Gaming rigs are not energy efficient. Sure, you can have your 80 plus Titanium power supply, blah blah blah, but I needed one rated at 750W to power my previous setup. Higher-end CPUs use upward of 100W at peak, and graphics cards vary, but the high-end ones are power hogs. As a proxy measure for how much power is being wasted, just consider how much attention must be paid to cooling a gaming PC, and think about where that heat is coming from: coal is ripped from a mountaintop in Kentucky, transported by train to my state, turned into heat (by combustion), which makes steam, which drives a turbine to make electricity, which is transmitted to my home and into my PC, where it is converted back into heat. I have long considered myself an environmentalist, and I even teach courses on environmental issues which include consideration of the true costs of "benefits" we derive from technology. Can I really, in good conscience, buy back into gaming? Just to have some pretty pixels dancing on a monitor that give me the dopamine-jollies? (And just don't even get me started on cryptocurrency mining!) Opportunity I was going to call this one "time", but I've already written about how much time I used to spend gaming, and how much time I might have left to live in the world. I've also written about how not gaming has made time behave differently - or maybe, start to behave normally! - something I still sort of marvel at. But this is a related issue: Gaming has a steep opportunity cost. Any time or effort or attention I put into playing a game is no longer available to be invested in activities of much greater value: establishing meaningful connections with other people, maybe eventually a new partner; spending time with my grown kids before they go off in their own directions; writing; making my home environment functional and pleasant; expanding my understanding of the world; dancing and making music; listening to the rain. Knowing myself and my history, I know that it would be very difficult to moderate my gaming. The pull of the dopamine-loop is especially strong, and I'm only too happy to settle into it, wallow in it, for hours on end. Time would contract, one opportunity after another would pass me by, all so I can level up in some RPG grind-fest, or put the finishing touches on a base in a sandbox exploration game. Even in the depths of my gaming habit, I had a sense of the waste of it. I would occasionally think: when I'm on my deathbed, I won't be wishing I had played more games.

Well, I'm not a counselor, so this is not the advice of a qualified professional but, basically . . . RUN. Now. Save yourself. There is no point in you trying even just to get through to him, to communicate what you need, if he's just going to pull that defensive little-boy bullshit. Even if you genuinely care for him, even if you love him and want nothing but his well-being, the pattern the two of you are in will exhaust your capacity to care for him, for yourself, or for anyone else. I'm afraid the only path for you is right out the door. It will be difficult. There will be confrontation. Don't get drawn into the trap of trying to explain yourself, to offer some cogent argument. Just go.

Today was especially productive, and I'm feeling more than ever engaged in my working life. I worked on one of my papers, commented on the draft of a paper by a younger colleague, participated in a public online event I helped to organize, and took care of a number of other tasks. Tonight, I'm joining in the (online) New England Folk Festival (or NEFFA, after the association that organizes it), listening and sometimes playing along with the music. I only ever attended NEFFA in person once, and that only for an afternoon. So this is a treat. Despite all these good things, I still find myself mulling over/rationalizing/scrutinizing a possible return to gaming, at some point in the future. What I wonder is this: Is falling into a self-destructive gaming habit really only a matter of whether I play, or is it more a matter of why I play, and maybe where I play? It's easy to think that any gaming at all will be bad for me, regardless of other factors, because I'll inevitably get sucked in to the dopamine-loop and everything else in my life will start to wither . . . again. But might it be that, if the rest of my life is caught up in a general trend toward improvement, and productivity, and hope, I'll be able to enjoy a game once in a while? There really are some remarkable experiences and innovative storytelling to be found in games, often in very short and well-crafted games from indie studios (e.g. Journey, The Outer Wilds, Gone Home). In other words, if the reason why I play is for occasional enjoyment rather than from a compulsion to escape from or (not) cope with being trapped in circumstances that are bad and getting worse (e.g., a disintegrating marriage), I might be able to keep gaming in its place. As for where I play, part of my problem has been that my gaming PC was also the working PC in my home office, which has also served as my music practice room and all around refuge. Now that I am reclaiming my house and turning it to my own purposes, perhaps, I can have a gaming setup in another room, separate from my office and other work spaces. That, and the fact that I may soon - by August of this year - be able to spend more of my weekdays on campus, working in my office, could help to reinforce the separation of gaming from the rest of my life. So, these are the things I have been wondering. Again, though, I appreciate the foresight of my recent-past-self in selling off the graphics card. It was a bold and desperate move, which now gives me time to reflect on on these things, and settle in to new habits, before I can even begin to plan seriously for a return to gaming on any terms. I would need to save several hundred dollars - when more of my budget needs to go to new furniture for the house and new clothing for my eventual return to in-person work - and wait until the graphics card market has settled down a little . . . maybe sometime in 2022?

I'm skeptical of this. I once moved my desktop PC onto a standing desk, with the idea that I would get tired of standing and so spend more time away from the computer, even when I was working. Given the kind of work I do, I need to sit down and read actual books, or write notes with pen on paper, and even write drafts with pen on paper. I also had my students submit assignments on paper, so I could sit and read through them, scrawling my comments with a pen. I also thought that, if I walk in place while I'm at the computer I can get a little exercise, maybe burn a few calories. It didn't work. I would stand and play for hours and hours, until my feet were swollen and numb, and my knees and hips ached. I ditched the standing desk for one that can be raised and lowered . . . and it generally stays lowered. Anyway, you know another good way to get fit? Dance a lot!