Relapse

[Hobedaga]

Hello

 

I have to say I'm quite happy to see other people post threads here about how disappointed they feel in relapsing and knowing that I'm not the only one feeling that way  So I recently relapsed and talked about it with slowpoke on the discord chat and he found something I said interesting so I thought I'd talk about it with you guys.

Recently I relapsed after having not played games for a bit more than a year in the past. I played my favorite video game, dota. I'm quitting from today but it's no big event. I know I'll be able to stay off it and it won't be too difficult for me anymore. 

The way it happened was that I was felling ashamed back in my father's house after coming back from working in england, and it was an escape from that intense feeling. It kind of snook up on me because I felt quite in control of it. But since I dreamed up a yet another fantasy in my life of making money off it in dotacoach.org I played more and more. 

This is not the main thing that I want to say here, it's something else. And I am going to talk with specific gaming terms because it's a great analogy for what I want to say so don't continue reading from here if you don't want to see that.

I've failed and failed and failed throughout my entire life. Many promises and loud proclimations of how I'm going to do this that or the other always ended up in disappointment. And the worst part is I never understood why I failed, what was it that I was doing wrong. Enter gaming example. I wanted really bad to become a professional dota 2 player, gain 7k mmr. I fantasized about it a lot, most of my thinking throughout the day was dedicated to becoming a better dota player. But I've never climbed above 3k mmr with the exception of once spamming and overpowered hero and immideatly losing mmr after I was done with it. Isn't that a bit crazy. I've spent countless hours, it was my only wish and I read a gazillion guides, watched instructional videos and despite all that I have constantly failed. Why is that? 

I've come to understand that pretty much like in any other area of my life, I didn't understand what I was doing at all. All my decisions were based on emotion. In any given match, whether I was going to attack another hero or not was based on how that sitation felt, the way I farmed etc. I did it all in a similar way I saw other pro players do and I did it not because I understood why they're useful, but simply because the pros were doing it. So while doing it I also felt quite advanced mechanically which induced even more rage when I lost, since my teammates or the enemy didn't seem to have knowledge of that advanced mechanic that I used despite not understanding the basics of the game. So when I tried to learn this time I've checked something out. There was a dota youtuber who was very high mmr and he is a coach and has coaching videos on and there was a video were he verbalized what he thought throughout a game he was playing. Every single movement, every single item purchase... everything had a clear logical reason that would advance him to his goal. I was surprised by that, every decision I made was based on a combination of feeling/a pro did it in a video/habit . Never understanding. One more example is, when I decided to understand and be able to clearly explain what a lane creep is. To my surprise, when I started to learn about this one small part of the game... I knew close to nothing. After so many hours and such a strong wish to become better I knew close to nothing about a basic part of the game.

I think this is a perfect analogy for pretty much anything else I've been trying to do in life. You have to understand, that trying to do something and failing, and failing, and failing, year after year, and worse yet, not even understanding WHY is an incredibly frustrating feeling. It can easily bring up resentment or envy when you see other people succeeding in what they set themselves out to do with less effort than you! And I have to say, in principal I think doing something in real life, and doing something in real life... you need the same things to do it. You need to understand. Clearly understand what and why you are doing. 

I don't know how to put to words how important I think it is. Just one last thing I want to add is, since I'm such a dummy, I can only do things that I understand at an INCREDIBLY slow pace. But no matter how fast I would be doing them without understanding, I would never do them and only grow frustrated. And it's especially hard because I have to admit, something that might be obvious to others, that I am way less capable than others and that I don't understand much. It's part of the emotional reasoning to try and go fast again, but it's not based in logic.

TL;DR: made emotional decisions in a game in the past, failed constantly despite trying really hard. Constantly failed and disappointed people at pretty much everything I did in life and didn't even know why I was failing. Understood that it's because I never used logic much, mostly made emotional, rash and impulsive decisions throughout my life.

TL;DR TL;DR learned life lesson: make decisions based on logic, not emotion.

[Cam Adair]

Welcome back brother.