NEW VIDEO: I Quit MMOs and THIS Happened
Zeno
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Posts posted by Zeno
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The week is going well, so far. I've kept to the plan of writing for two hours every morning and taking care of other business through the day before making dinner. I've been working steadily and, when I run out of the tasks I've written down for the day, I take the time to start meddling in other tasks that need doing or might need doing down the line.
Basically, I am currently reinventing my professional life, which involves undoing habits and patterns which are bigger and older than my dalliance with games. I'm also rediscovering useful older habits, like going for a short, brisk walk to clear my head when I get stuck on something I'm writing. I used to do that in college, and it worked again yesterday morning.
After dinner, last night, I went for another, longer walk, took care of a couple of things around the house, then sat down to read, as usual.
The motherboard arrived for my PC downgrade, and I'm expecting the case sometime today. The CPU, alas, seems to be on a slow boat from China.
It's before dawn, where I am, and the birdsong outside my window is something crazy.
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Thanks, @Theresa. It's not just a single fictional gaming world that acts as a frame - though I certainly know what you mean, and have experienced that - but the whole world of gaming.
Until a couple of years ago, I had barely heard of E3, but last year I was almost devastated that it wasn't going to be happening because of the pandemic. Until last year, I had never thought about the supply chain for the production of graphics cards, or the rise of cryptocurrency "mining", but the fact that it is currently impossible to buy an RTX 3000-series graphics card was seriously annoying to me, and actually occupied my attention for quite a while.
Then there was the endless cycle through news video feeds and news sites. Would CDPR redeem itself after a bad launch? Will BioWare return to form with their next game? Are single-player games a thing of the past? What clever list will those cute humans on that one channel come up with next?
Outside the gaming frame, none of that really matters at all.
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Take It or Leave It
There's a sociologist of technology, Wieber Bijker, who has written about what he calls the technological frame. Basically, we come to understand certain technological artifacts in a certain way, and those artifacts are connected to other meaningful systems and relationships such that, if you start using the artifact, you enter into a world entirely shaped by that artifact.
Bijker writes, for example, that those who buy a car "become included in a semiotic structure of automobiling: cars-roads-rules-traffic-jams-gas prices-taxes" to the point that they may not be able to imagine the world any other way. For those who do not choose to buy a car, "jams and oil prices simply do not matter."
The automobile itself is a "boundary object" that presents a take-it-or-leave-it choice: “They cannot modify the artifact if they ‘take’ it, but life can go on quite well if they ‘leave it.’”
I bring this up because it has helped me to make sense of the weird kind of duality I described a week ago, when I felt like I was flashing between the world as it was after I took up gaming, and the world as it may become now that I've left. Games are, in my experience at least, a kind of boundary object, and I was slipping back and forth across the boundary from the real world to gamer-world and back, from a world in which gaming as much as I had been seems weird and self-destructive to a frame in which gaming all weekend seems perfectly normal.
To say that I sometimes have the "urge" to play a game is not a very helpful way to think about it. It's not an emotion, not a raw impulse about which I can do nothing. If what is happening is that I'm not yet well established in the real-world frame, such that I slip occasionally in to gamer-world frame, then there is something I can do: engage with a person or an activity in the real world, pursue a project that more firmly establishes me outside the frame.
The 'frame' idea also clarifies for me why I likely should never try to take up gaming again.
It's all or nothing, take it or leave it.
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1 hour ago, TheKingNoob said:
Fell asleep early yesterday and forgot the journal, still going strong. Two more days to final exam of the semester, than only two days off before the next one starts. Yikes. That weekend would normally be filled be gaming, and since I'll have been done with my work by then I'll also be mightily tempted. Will be the hardest challenge so far, for sure. Need to stay aware.
I know what you mean. Weekends can be a big obstacle. Plan ahead for what you might do instead, as well as you can. Drawing on your non-gaming connections may help, even just conversations online.
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Welcome! It's a good step to take, though it can be difficult.
You might want to reconsider posting your full name, though, just for the sake of privacy.
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Yesterday seemed long, probably because I didn't try to tune any of it out. I didn't obliterate any hours along the way. I think this is a good thing.
I mean, I'm not exactly young, and I have no idea how many days I have left on this Earth - maybe 15,000, maybe 1 - so I should be sure to make the most of each one. So, bring on the long days!
I accomplished every one of my goals, and even got a head start on goals I hadn't written down, yet. I wrote for nearly two hours in the morning, as planned, moved along on some other work-related projects, went for a walk, and liberated myself from a certain graphics card.
Update on that last point: The game worlds I have loved did not all cry out as one, but a few of them whimpered a little, much later in the day. I will think back wistfully on some of them, I think, for a long time.
One day at a time, though. Isn't that one of the mantras of 12-step programs?
After I write this, I'm going to do the NYT crossword puzzle - my current streak now stands at 173 days in a row - get cleaned up, eat breakfast, then settle down to write. I don't have a lot of work-related meetings on my schedule, so I should also be able to get some serious reading done, today.
I'm currently juggling three books at once: during the day I've been reading Nel Noddings, Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, for a paper I'm working on with a colleague; after hours, I've been reading John Rawls, Political Liberalism, to extend my understanding of the conditions under which democracy is possible, and then I wind down with Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand, and Stars.
Just before I turned out the last night, I was looking ahead to weeks and months on end of writing every day, and wondered: what am I going to write about, all those long days, one after another? Then I remembered all the unfinished or half-begun projects I'd left lying around when I was in the throes of distraction-addiction, and I made a list.
Another thing occurred to me: I'm now starting to live the life I'd imagined for myself, back when I was in graduate school. I can trace the steps that drew me away from that vision of myself, and I can't say I don't regret the lost time, but somehow it's all come back around: I'm more or less exactly where I want to be.
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Mid-day update:
I just took a stroll down the the post office - a round-trip of around 1000 steps - where I dropped off my lovely/insidious RTX 2080Ti.
A week ago, I thought it would be an emotional thing, that all the game worlds I have loved would cry out to me as one before they were silenced.
None of that happened though. It was just another package going out in the mail, just another tracking receipt . . . and the anticipation of the money landing in my bank account.
In the mean time, the memory modules for my PC downgrade have arrived. Next should be the motherboard and the case, sometime in the next few days, followed by the processor, likely sometime next week.
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2 hours ago, Julon said:
I think many people don‘t consider themselves addicted even though they are. It is viewed as „cool“ to game 6+h a day nowadays. People in the internet (especially on reddit) surround themselves with people that have the same habits / problems, so they think it‘s normal. 3 years ago I was also in denial, I always blamed my problems on other things in my life. I never had the idea, that gaming could be the problem. And seeing how much my online friends played, I thought it was completely normal.
A fair point. It's as though someone denied being an alcoholic on the grounds that everyone else drinking alone at the bar at 2am says that alcohol really isn't a problem.
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Day Whatever of my reinvention.
I'm going to stop counting days. If I need to memorialize the clean break I'm trying to make, now, I'll date it to April 1, but otherwise the number of days really doesn't matter.
You see, quitting gaming has changed my relationship with time, which is no longer just to be passed or filled or simply skipped, but inhabited. I should live the kind of life in which every moment is sufficient to itself, and whatever I am doing in that moment is the most important thing for me to be doing just then.
Yeah, that sounds like some mystical crap. But what I mean is something absolutely ordinary, something mundane.
Let me come at this another way. All day yesterday, and much of the day before, I felt a growing sense of calm or contentment; by yesterday evening it was almost a kind of elation. It's as if all the anxiety and urgency that has been typical of my days, of late, had fallen away, and I could immerse myself in whatever I was doing - or not doing - at the time.
I also find myself being more patient with everything. If I have a tedious task to do in the house or the yard, I sink into the task without concern for what I might be doing otherwise (gaming), or what I'm in a hurry to get to next (gaming). Washing dishes? A pleasure! Mowing the law? Delightful!
That may be especially easy on a day in early spring, here were I live, when the weather is almost unspeakably fine. But, hey, I like a good rainy day, too. I'll even stop and listen to the rain for a while.
In this way of being I'm rediscovering, I don't feel driven to cycle through sites on the Internet, or try one more time for the perfect startup in that one survival/exploration game. I can just be where I am.
Yesterday evening, right about when I would have started to feel the urge to flee to my office and disappear into a game - obliterating some otherwise perfectly good hours - I found myself calmly anticipating a walk, and the process of making bread ('panification'!), followed by sitting for a while to read.
I'd like to hold on to that. I'd like to make that my default state, so that even financial worries (which I have), or pandemic worries (which we all should have), or concerns for the future of democracy (let's not go there), are no match for just being present in the moment in which I find myself.
So, this is the epiphany I had yesterday. My task is not only to give up gaming, nor is it only to rework my relationship to the Internet and to computer technology generally, nor is it even just to come to terms with the long history of my failed marriage. No, my task is to come around at last to learning how to live in the world, to do good work, and be an active member of my community.
So, it is whatever day it is of my reinvention.
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Quick update on the evening of Day 7:
I've had my after-dinner walk - a quick turn around the block - and I've made sourdough and set it to rise overnight. I'm just checking in here quickly before I remove the cat from my chair and sit down for the evening to read.
Even though it's the wrong holiday for it, I've had something of an epiphany today. I'll write more about that in tomorrow morning's update.
This is just to report that, looking through a closet in my home office, I discovered an ancient relic: a GTX 750ti graphics card! It's probably the first serious graphics card I bought, but it's so stripped down, it doesn't even require any extra power beyond that provided by the PCIe slot!
Long story short, it has a DisplayPort output, which is what I'm currently using, so I was able to swap out my 2080ti and prepare it for shipping to a buyer. It will likely be a couple of weeks before I have all the parts for my PC downgrade, but selling off the graphics card now will close the hole in my budget.
Goodbye, old thing! We had some fun, I guess, but now it's time to part ways.
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This is hard, but it's good you're acknowledging the damage done, and turning toward resolve. I wonder if what @James Good has written recently might help, though.
Thinking of quitting as a 90-day "detox" - with a countdown, no less - might be setting you up for a cycle of relapsing and quitting, relapsing and quitting, because you are still thinking of yourself as a gamer-on-a-break, rather than as an ex-gamer, or just as something-else-in-development.
That holds you in the gamer mindset, keeps you focused on the end-date of the "detox", when it will somehow be okay to return to gaming again. It leaves you prone to being drawn back in by gaming media.
Maybe the thing to do would be to focus on what you want to become in a life without gaming, and count up toward it. Say you want to be a dedicated hiker/adventurer, or a black belt in some martial arts discipline, or a musician, or even just a devoted and reliable boyfriend: the day after you quit games could be Day 1 of development toward that goal, followed by day 2.
Then your focus is not on how long you've been away from games, or how long until it will be "safe" to return to games, but on your progress toward what you are becoming next.
I wish you all the best, and will be on the lookout for your new journal thread.
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Oddly, all content from @James Good seems to have disappeared from the forums. Weird.
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The morning of Day 7!
Early evening is the most difficult time for me, and I think I've figured out why.
Without going into too much detail, as my marriage was falling apart, my then-wife would travel quite a lot and, when she was home, things were tense. Most evenings, when I didn't have a commitment outside the house, I would retreat to my home office as soon as I could after dinner to play games for an hour or two . . . or four . . . or seven. For their part, the kids also scattered to their own refuges, for much the same reasons.
Even when I did have something outside the house - something music- and/or dance-related, usually - I would play a game right up until it was time to leave . . . and maybe just past that time.
There were even times when the kids would travel with my then-wife, in the summer, and I would be home alone for weeks on end. Then, I would eat dinner in front of the computer, watching videos - some about games, some about other things - until I had finished eating and could play again. It was during one of those long spells of solitude, by the way, that I downloaded my first open-world RPG.
But even after my then-wife moved out altogether, and even after the divorce, the after-dinner retreat remained a confirmed habit, and most especially during the pandemic. If I had something to do after dinner - you know, like washing dishes or making sourdough so it could rise overnight - I always felt as though I had to hurry so I could maximize my gaming time before it was time to go to bed.
Not that I would go to bed, then. As I say, I was perfectly capable of playing until 2am, or even later.
I figured this out yesterday, after a leisurely morning of grocery shopping and yard work, and a leisurely afternoon of more grocery shopping - had to go to another store - house work, reading, and making dinner.
(I enjoy the feeling of not hurrying through chores and other activities. I may have more to say about my experience of time without games in a future post.)
After dinner, I started again to feel like all hell. The rationalizations began. ("Just one . . . just an hour . . . you can do it . . .")
I can be very persuasive, when I'm rationalizing.
I figured I'd better establish some new habits, so I grabbed my jacket and went out for a walk. The weather here in the southeastern US was very fine, yesterday: sunny and dry and unseasonably cool. The day started with light frost on the ground, but a light jacket was more than enough to be comfortable by mid-day and into the evening. It's rare to have the humidity so low, here, so I made sure to open up the house.
After the walk, I read a bit, wrote a letter to someone - an actual, paper letter, to go in the mail! - had a Zoom chat with an old friend, read some more, and was asleep by 11pm.
An after-dinner walk should be my new habit, whenever the weather is anything but truly foul, at least as long as the pandemic keeps me from other evening activities. It will help me to recover from a year of sitting around too much and eating too much sourdough bread . . .
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Day 6
The Internet took my generation by surprise.
We came of age without it. We barely had what could be counted as computers, though the Commodore 64 and the TRS-80 had their virtues, and the first Macintosh was something of a breakthrough. We could use computers for playing games, but they could also be just tools for particular tasks, with early word-processors and spreadsheets and the like. In high school, we used Commodore Pets, with their 20 kB of RAM, to write programs in Basic to solve calculus problems.
Computers were not yet a source of constant connection and constant distraction. The first modem my family had, with our TRS-80, was a model with a cradle for a standard AT&T phone handset, capable of a blistering 800 baud (changes per second to the carrier signal), and we didn't really have much use for it.
Oh, and 'trolls' were something out of Scandinavian folklore; out in the real world, bullies had to operate out in the open, their names and faces known to everyone.
In my last two years of college, I had a stand-alone Brother word-processor, which was a daisy-wheel printer with an attached keyboard, a CRT screen, and a 3.5" floppy drive. I wrote my dissertation on an IBM PS2 running WordStar in DOS. Those were single-use tools, for me, and they were powered down most of the time.
I had my first email account in graduate school, but could only use it in a computer lab on campus. I didn't get an AOL account - don't judge, it was the gateway drug of choice, back then - until after I'd received my degree. By 2002, I was starting to slip into the always-online life we all know now. I held off getting a smart phone as long as I could, but gave in sometime around 2010.
This is not to say the Internet is altogether bad, and this isn't just another oldtimer's "back in my day!" rant. It's only to note how nothing in the upbringing or early experience of my generation prepared us for it, or helped us to develop the habits necessary to maintain the Internet as a tool we can use, rather than a tool that uses us.
The Internet was sold to us as giving us unlimited access, unprecedented power; it would draw people together, we were told; it would be the single most democratizing force the world has ever known. Well, we've seen how that last one worked out. Before too long, I had to have internet access just to do my job. Even before the pandemic, constant access to reliable, high-speed internet became a basic requirement; for the past five years, or so, a smart phone has also become a requirement, as my employer uses two-factor authentication for logging in to any account.
I am expected always to be online, always to be available and ready to respond.
Which means I'm only ever a few keystrokes or clicks away from YouTube, or Facebook, or Discord . . . or Steam.
And that's what I've been coming around to. What dawned on me, yesterday, as I thought about my current situation and my current resolution, is that my history with games is tangled up together in my history with the Internet, all of which comes down to becoming a distraction junkie.
As I've written already, I knew I had a problem with video games early on, even back in high school. Later, I would find myself in the presence of a computer with a game on it and, if the opportunity presented itself, I would disappear into it. Once, while staying at a beach house with friends, there was a laptop with Civilization 2 . . . and hours disappeared during which I could have been walking on the beach, or talking with friends, or helping with dinner, or . . .
I knew not to have games on my own computer, and it was easily avoided . . . until I had my first DSL service.
AOL had dumb but compulsive little games built into it, and I started to waste some time with those. Then I found some online sources of odd little games that were free, and I started to waste time with those.
Then I found Steam.
Meanwhile, my then-wife had discovered Facebook, and she was the first to get a smart phone. She disappeared into it for hours, so I would shrug and go play Portal for a while.
It was only after the marriage was already disintegrating that I decided to dive in to open-world games, the kind that could eat up 70 or 100 hours in a single play-through, and I played and played through the isolation and alienation and upheaval that followed. If I hadn't been playing, as I said in my introductory post, I probably would have filed for divorce years earlier than I did and gone on with my life.
And when I wasn't playing, I was cycling compulsively through a regular circuit of websites. I quit social media in 2015, but I would check the news sites for updates, and check some forum I was on, and check YouTube, and then check both my email accounts, and . . .
What I'm saying is that I don't just need to get rid of games. I need finally to come to terms with the Internet as a whole. I need somehow to shift the meaning of this big box on my desk, the one attached to the great fire-hose of distraction that is my Internet connection. I need to be able to leave the thing turned off more of the time, not to keep cycling back anxiously to site after site, jonesing for another hit of dopamine.
There are tools I use online, of course, especially during the pandemic. I've found a budgeting app that is even now saving me from ruin; I also have a to-do list app I've been using more; and then there are all the ways I still need my computer for work, especially in the pandemic: I teach online, and communicate with colleagues online, and find sources for research online. I also do get my news online, but from established newspapers, and I do the New York Times crossword puzzle every morning.
The trick will be to regard those things as simple tools for my use, to be set aside when I'm not actually using them.
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The evening of day 5, and I suddenly feel like all hell.
I had a good afternoon: took a walk, did work tasks that needed doing, cleaned the stove, read a book, played fiddle, washed dishes.
And now, it's Friday evening, I'm stuck at home, alone during a pandemic, and an expanse of time stretches out ahead of me . . .
So, the bargaining begins, and the rationalization. Can't I play just one game? Just for an hour or two? Then I'll stop! I promise!
And if I did play, I might actually stop after an hour or two . . . this time. But then I would probably lose tomorrow and Sunday altogether, just like last week.
I'll write more about this tomorrow morning, but I've been thinking back on my experience with computer games since the early 1980s, and then on my relationship with the Internet since the later 1990s. Everything in my experience tells me that I will never have a healthy, moderate relationship with computer games, and I should not pretend that I ever will.
But, unlike in the past, it's not as though I can remove them physically from my life, like packing them in a duffel and taking them to the curb. I'm online a lot now, and games are online, too, always within reach.
It's as if I were an alcoholic with a beer tap built into my home office, one I can neither remove nor entirely disconnect.
Luckily for me, some help is at hand.
I've long been part of a music-and-dance community in my region - American contra dance, if you know it - and some local folk have been organizing a "dist-dance" on Friday evenings, with live music and prompting for those who want to dance a few steps at home, alone or as couple. (The dance usually involves a longways set of dancers, lined up down the hall, so even dancing as a couple is kind of odd.)
I tuned in for one or two of them, last year, but didn't stick with it because of the awkwardness of trying to socialize casually on Zoom. It starts shortly, though, so I'll sign into it. It will be good to see familiar faces and to listen to some music, even if it will be a pale shadow of a real evening of dance.
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54 minutes ago, ArcaneCoder said:
The "expert" in the room asked the lazy question, "do you play mmos." I said, "I have in the past and I don't anymore due to the time demands, but I still have this problem with my Steam account." She told me point blank I'm not suffering addiction despite my 120+ two weekly gameplay average, then refused to help me. The morale of the story: video game victims will not officially receive the help they need until the APA breaks lockstep with the gaming industry and reaffirms the WHO's official stance; video gaming addiction, not exclusively online gaming addiction.
In the mean time, here we are in DIY recovery.
"Hi. My name is Bob. I'm a game addict."
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35 minutes ago, Jesse said:
Edit: Oh yeah, and I've blocked Youtube on all my devices now. I even let someone type in a random code for screen time on my phone and told them to forget it. So basically youtube is forever blocked on my phone and I can't download any new apps on my phone. My phone is once again only a functional device like it used to be back in the days, and I love it.
This is a good step. I've done something similar, at least in that I've eliminated all game- and movie-related channels from my feed on YouTube. There are still a few things I'll watch on YouTube, though, but I find I'm no longer sucked into it as I was, even last week.
Oh, to have a phone that's really just a phone!
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8 hours ago, James Good said:
So many people are dependent on video games, and will do everything they can to defend them if you say something negative about it.
I always felt a kind of dissonance watching videos on a gaming YouTube channel in which the commentator would flatly deny that gaming is addictive . . . even while reporting "weird" gaming news stories about people who destroyed their lives or their health playing games. He seemed to want to say that some people "have a problem" with games, while at the same time denying that games themselves might be the source of the problem.
It's kind of like blaming the victim, all to uphold the reputation of games as such.
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Thanks, @James Good .
I know you're right. I think the goal is to get to the point that I may think fondly upon in-game experiences without longing to return to them. From my own experience, I know this is possible.
Another thing that helps is to think fondly on past out-of-game experiences, ones that were genuinely satisfying and led to real progress toward real goals, and to create the conditions under which I can have comparable experiences now.
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Day 5 now dawns.
I know what needs to be done. It's only a matter of doing it.
That became my mantra through the day, yesterday. I may still think of what I'm doing now as a 90-day or a 1-year "detox", or whatever, but I really just need to take concrete steps to remove myself from the world of gaming. So, I ordered the components I'll need to downgrade my desktop PC. The money I can get from selling my graphics card should more than cover the expense of it, though it does leave a hole in my budget for a few weeks. I ordered a new, compact case with a low-wattage power supply, a small-format motherboard to fit the compact case, a CPU with integrated graphics, and memory modules to match.
I'll enjoy building it, and I'll enjoy moving my elder child's desktop PC into the tower case I'm using now. Tinkering like that can be rewarding.
I'm not yet at the point where I'd be willing to delete all my gaming accounts. That day may be coming, though.
Remembering something from my deep past helped spur me to action. When I was in my early teens, way back in the early 1980s, I really got in to tabletop RPGs. My cousin was a devilishly creative DM in D&D, and I started to set myself up for the comparable role in a science fiction RPG of the time called Traveller. I had all the books and all the dice and the other paraphernalia of the thing, which I kept in a big canvas duffel bag.
And it started to take over my life. It occupied my attention and my imagination day and night. It's not that I was especially good at it, but that I gained a lot of satisfaction from creating worlds and creating ships and creating characters, in a playing-in-the-sandbox sort of way.
I realized that if I wanted to become good at it, I would have to go all-in and any hope of moderation and balance would be lost. Even at the time, at that age, it felt like addiction, and it frightened me.
I knew what had to be done. It was only a matter of doing it.
On the day trash was collected in my neighborhood, I set the duffel bag out by the curb, next to the trash can one of us had placed there the night before.
And I walked away.
A little later, I was in the car. I think my mom was driving and, as we pulled out of the driveway, she spotted the duffel. She asked: Did you mean to leave that there?
I said: Yes. It's fine.
It really wasn't fine. I felt like all hell. But it was good, and I went on with my life.
Though, of course, it wasn't too many years later that my family got our first home computer, a TRS-80 Color Computer - our beloved "Trash-80 CoCo"! - with a cartridge for an early 3D dungeon-crawl game . . .
One step back into gaming for me as an adult was finding a PC port of that old game.
But I learned the possibility and the sometime liberating potential of renunciation early on, and now I can see it's time to put the duffel by the curb, again.
I know I can do it, even if I feel like all hell, sometimes.
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One of the earliest signs I might be prone to game addiction occurred when I was a teenager - way back in the 1980s - and it involved a tabletop RPG called Traveller. I was obsessed to the point that it was starting to eat up my life. So, I packed all the books and other stuff associated with the game into a duffelbag and left it by the curb on trash day.
So, at least I have that experience to draw from as I try to kick RPGs to the curb once more.
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Single-player for me, with a preference for open-world role-playing and exploration/survival games. Multiplayer simply didn't interest me, as gaming was never about competition, and I wanted nothing to do with the more toxic aspects of game culture.
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17 hours ago, Theresa said:
Day 7
I did a mini running and swimming biathalon before work. Exercising has really helped my energy. I was feeling so tired and down after quitting. I’ve been spending way too much time on Facebook and Discord because I feel the urge to be on my phone. I can’t get myself to delete Discord, I keep uninstalling but feel so much anxiety when it’s gone. It’s also frustrating because on discord they keep asking me to play. I know the answer is simple. I’m nervous about this weekend which I have off work because I don’t want to relapse as there will be extra time. Hope you’re all well. Rooting for you!
I quit social media in 2015, straight-up deleting my Facebook account. I had to look up how to do that, as Zuck doesn't want to make it too easy for people to drop out.
I did feel a lot of agitation over it for a while but, as with agitation over games, it faded pretty quickly. Maybe the same will happen for you when you quit Discord for good.
Weekends will be difficult for a while, especially with the pandemic still ongoing. What other activities interest you? You say you are interested in a healthier diet, so maybe you could look up and try some new recipes this weekend, maybe even preparing food for next week.
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Postscript on Day 4.
I was also thinking of the chorus of an old Talking Heads song: "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens."
And this, too: What I've been experiencing is not nostalgia, but just ordinary jonesing for a fix . . . in this case, a fix of fixity!
A 'fixity fix'?
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It's the morning of Day 4.
A few things fell into place, last night, as my attempts to rationalize slipping back into gaming ramped up. I had framed what I was experiencing in terms of nostalgia for places and characters and experiences in the games I've enjoyed most, but I think that's incorrect.
Real nostalgia for real places involves the painful realization (the 'algia' part) that you can never really go back, because the place you are longing for is no longer what it was: the people who were there have moved on or passed on, buildings may have risen or fallen, landscapes may be reshaped, and - increasingly - the climate is likely to have shifted noticeably.
But in-game places don't change, not really. Sure, there may be story-based reasons why a place changes, but you can always restart the game and experience it as it was. Only then you might become more aware of how hollow it all is. The characters never change because they were scripted that way: they go through the same movements, repeating the same inane things (i.e., "an arrow to the knee"). You can always bed your favorite companion-NPC by completing the same side-missions and passing the same speech checks. The places never change because they are only backdrops for whatever fetch quest you happen to be on.
There is a kind of comfort in that for someone trying to avoid dealing with upheaval in the real world, I suppose, but there's not a lot of meaning in it, and not an iota of progress toward anything actually worthwhile.
The funny thing is, I've long recognized that what I wanted from games was that kind of changelessness. That's why I adopted 'Zeno' as my user name on Steam, a couple of years ago.
Zeno, you probably know, was an ancient Greek philosopher who offered four proofs that motion is impossible, known as "Zeno's paradoxes". This was in service to the Eleatic school of philosophy, the main figure of which was Parmenides, who argued that Being must be unitary and changeless, with the implication that any change you experience in the world must be an illusion.
So, calling myself 'Zeno' was kind of a joke at the expense of games: Nothing really changes here; the 'reality' is just a fixed code running on solid-state electronics with no moving parts; any 'change' or 'progress' you may be experiencing in the game is only an illusion.
I think I've had enough of that, now.
I've also realized more fully in the past year that change and loss and grief are unavoidable, and dealing with them directly is the only way to move forward and to learn or accomplish anything of real value. I've known this my whole adult life, but it came back to me forcefully as a member of my extended family lay dying last spring.
I thought: when you cannot avoid grief, you should walk out to meet it.
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We Now Rejoin Real Life, Already in Progress
in Daily Journals
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And, naturally, today's crossword in the New York Times had a video-game theme . . .