Wednesday evening, day 0: I know that if I were in direct contact with the whole of humanity, there could not be any time to play my game(s). Sadly, I only invested myself in a few lowly text message chats with my male family members, and was disappointed. One asked how I was going, and I told them - that interaction dead-ended. The other responded condescendingly, in my view, after I made the only two advances of the day - also to discover that I'd missed a chance to visit extended family: though I think it was a quick, 'emergency' visit to say the least.  Eventually, at around 1:30pm, I found that there was no available time for anything else BUT a lolly-gagging click-fest for a couple of hours. I counted it exactly. What differences registered? I told myself that I have 'forever' - but only if I can keep contact with friends/people I don't know like I know my family - because friends tend to keep track of progress, like I inevitably do with gaming pursuits. My destiny can't be aggression towards the majority of people, but nor can it be pure submission. Furthermore, keeping my mind on a permanently delicate balance is also intolerable. In the meantime, I figured I'd aim to 'pretend' less. Que sera, sera - but of course, today was an unplanned day, and not every day will I achieve so much in the morning that I beg on hands and knees for boredom to alleviate in the afternoon. I guess I'll probably see y'all tomorrow if nothing else happens. Peace, ~ Matt

Wednesday morning, day 22: The best 'experience point' gains in-game usually came while in the throes of good conversation - or as good as you can have while click-grinding and messaging in text. You could almost say the same is entirely true of a good conversation while exercising offline, in person. The one thing that gets to me is forgetting how I arrived at any certain place, or thought.  Nevertheless, such an offline conversation with Wheatbiscuit Senior (WS) was probably made possible by the free space left in the wake of abstinence from my problem game. At one point I forgot which opinion or experience I was agreeing was good. I don't know how people in high/very important places have serious, collaborative discussions without becoming 'heated' or lost. I don't really know if said people have to stop each other's eyes from bulging with many, many non-verbal cues as the discussion progresses. 'Give me the simple life', indeed. I even asked WS once about people bringing their 'whole selves' to work, and I think he scoffed a little. But then how do people muster all of the facts and wave their hands wildly, tap whiteboards in presentation and accept questions and interruptions without being fully present? Have I been training myself to be 'simple' through repetitive gaming and reinforcement with music? On one of my news applications, 5 multiple-choice questions were offered across 10 high school subjects to test readers on knowledge they may or may not have retained since then. I knew one. I misinterpreted another, which did little for my confidence, other than that I perhaps deserve more fun instances of multiple-choice testing, and I proceeded to dream about them. The spooky thing was my reaction to immediate correction of a wrong answer - 'I don't need this'. But don't I? I've said before that I was only able to game successfully as a teenager because of the challenges of school either carried over to my online presence, or simply made me want to 'brain dump' at that particular game, at my computer. I mean, what is the 'real' life challenge once we've found work that we actually want to do until exhaustion; accepting that we might suddenly pass away in the midst of routine, so we'd better be happy wherever possible? The only thing I might have wanted to change about my schooling days would have to be how connected I thought I was - in spoken words - with all of my classmates. As it happened, I played a lot of my problem game in my final year because I thought moods were too low for my liking, due to intense study. Instant fact recall, or uniquely helpful viewpoints, to offer people? Hm.  ________ Edit: I felt good about where I 'left' things yesterday, but instead of running back to my game to 'celebrate', I cleaned and vacuumed the living space. It was easier than ever too, save for the drone of the vacuum at the beginning. But what with the rain, and presuming few people really want to be out spending time in it, I just thought more of 'cutting (clicking on) trees in free-to-play' on the game. What is it going to take to forget where I left that? My first thought there was of one of the high school practice exam mathematics questions - I temporarily forgot everything to try and fix up an equation (though I didn't reach the conclusion that I might have had to 'trial and error' the multiple-choice answers to check it yet). I used to love doing quick math, and numbers/stats. It's just that they didn't help me make/keep many friends back then. Plus, again, when I imagine that something matters to many people, it is more motivation than just revising what I once learnt out of fear of failure/repeating a grade. But the other day, I found that my first-year statistics book is still going strong in online sales ads. I said to everyone who'd listen back then that I intended to finish learning all of it, even after passing the unit, so that I could make better calculated decisions (on God knows what) in the future. Maybe most people didn't truly live through their favourite game(s) like I did, or feel like they did, and as such studied hard to earn their all-approved freedom(s). What drove me literally crazy was trying to measure the influence of news on game-players and family, detached from it all. *sigh* My favourite song for awhile was 'Smash' by The Offspring (look it up, lol). Suddenly and forevermore applying discipline would be a hell of a go, even when some could promise me that the world would be safe, as I kept my nose to my desk. ________ Gratitude: ~ We're getting about a week of rain here now - something to talk about/around. I also dreamt of cyclone avoidance. ~ The company of WS at the workout park yesterday ~ Slept a little more normally, and again triumphed over the early dark hours ~ Finished leftover meat and veg for breakfast 😄  Peace, ~ Matt

Entry 29.7 Weeks until average life expectancy: 2767 (80th birthday) Day 195: No Useless Videos Day 1027: Sticking to Food schedule Day 630: Eating Only between 06:30 and 19:00 (Last bite before 19:00) Day 8: Being in bed before 23:15 3 Things I did well, no matter how small  - 75% effort run - finishing reading all the non-video parts that are relevant in the telegram group - Finishing lesson summary 1 Thing I could do better - Get in bed earlier. I don't know how exactly but I must find a way since it is going to help me function more effectively the next day Gaming (Death, Slavery, Regret, Disease) - 5 Yan (Life, Individuality, Freedom, Purpose, Self-Fulfillment) - 197

It's very hard to look at yourself objectively and to make the right kind of conclusions. More often than not you need the help of others, and most importantly professionals. I never even entertained the thought of being diagnosed with something up until I reached my late 30's. But this was also because I was living in a bubble most of the time, where all I did was to sit in front of a screen all day and losing myself in entertainment. Even acknowledging those activities as problematic at the time took a lot of inward searching and effort, and today there is no hesitation at all that they were very destructive to me. But this insight also came from seeing myself outside of the bubble for the first time, and the slow realization that there was a fundamental issue that created the bubble in the first place. Most of my family are still in their bubbles. Some of them try to break free, and when they do you can see that it takes a lot of effort to not just repeat the patterns in new problematic ways. My mother is open to the discussion of diagnoses, but she's also in a lot of denial and has perhaps the most apparent bubble of all my family members. When I visited her this summer we actually watched a program about autism and ADHD, and she recognized a lot of things in herself. She just has her own way of expressing them, like complaining about bad memory, being unable to gather her thoughts or general sensitivity to social interactions. She's just completely clueless on how to act on her knowledge, and how to start breaking the patterns. 60 years of living the same way will do that to you I suppose, seeing how hard it was for me after "only" 30 years.

What i boils down to is managing my energy input/output in the best way possible. Even though I can excel at the work I'm doing right now, in the end it's simply too draining for me. I cannot keep up with the demands put on me for so many hours a week, especially if it involves a lot of social interaction (and it almost always does). I had my peak during my university days, where I could work on the weekends and then put everything aside the rest of the time. It really made me shine, as I could concentrate my energy a lot more and make the most of it. I was also very happy with it as my self-image got a great boost. But this is also the ongoing struggle with my brain. I can't seem to be satisfied with anything in the long run; I always want a change of pace or a new environment to explore. This is why video games never became boring to me, because they always offered that solution, for better or worse. Finding a new kind of job is less about finding something that I'm very good at, and more about finding something that gives as much energy as it takes from me. At the moment it feels like I might have to explore the possibility of working two different jobs simultaneously, or to shorten my working hours to maybe 75%. I need the extra time off, and I need the variety of both mentally and physically exhausting tasks.