Just spent a couple of hours replaying Horizon Zero Dawn on the PS4. It’s a stunningly beautiful game. The combat is a little more challenging than I remember. Also, why is collecting loot in video games so satisfying?
I sat down at my sofa and turned on my playstation after coming home from dinner with my wife, and after we had spent some time making some decisions about household appliances. I got home, and a part of me wanted to write word vomits and process my notes, but that felt a little tiresome and daunting, and I wanted to relax for a while – so I decided to play video games instead. As I had expected, I found myself quickly relaxing and getting into the game. The game loaded into where I had previously quit in frustration – I had been dying repeatedly when trying to breach an enemy camp. When I loaded the game, I did more of the same. I was quickly drawn into the “specificness” of the challenge. There are a thousand things going on in my mind, in my life, and the specific challenge of a video game challenge drew me in and temporarily consumed me in a happy way that I’m thankful for. There’s a lesson in here about focus and project management, which I’ll et to later.
But even playing video games isn’t entirely about relaxing for me, is it? Because I’m always studying. I’m a media student. I want to be producing great media in the world. I want to give back. It just really troubles me that there are so many movies and video games that are made that are so underwhelming – and then once in a while, you get something so good that people rush to get tattoos of it because of how much it means to them. I feel like I want to spend my life working on things that are the latter.
I completed the game a while ago, around early 2018. On retrospect, I was in a bit of a rush when I was playing it – and that’s something I want to reflect on. Why was I in such a rush to finish the game at the time? I think there’s something in here about my broader patterns of media consumption. I approach watching Netflix shows in a fairly similar way, too.
I started a replay of the game a while back, but then I kind of got bored of it and dropped off. And today I picked it up again, and made some progress. I took some time to appreciate the scenery, the writing, the voice acting, the immersion. And I do think I caught those things the first time around too, so it’s not all that bad.
I replayed God of War for similar reasons, to enjoy it this way. It’s also kind of like how authors keep good writing around them – books, poetry, whatever – so they can get back into the right headspace to do writing. To be immersed, to be inspired.
So… project management stuff. This is less about big picture projects, and more about moment-by-moment focus. Moment-by-moment framing. Right now, as I’m writing this, the frame is the box that I’m writing in. I’m back to writing in the interface in wordcounter.net – just some random site that I picked to write in. There’s something pleasing about seeing the number change as I type. That works for me, and I’m satisfied with that. But the reason that I wanted to write about this is because of a broader dissatisfaction I’ve been feeling.
What is the nature of this dissatisfaction? Well, I feel like I’m not making enough progress towards my goals. What is a reasonable amount of progress to be making towards my goals? Do I have a list of my goals? Yes – I want to finish my 1000wordvomits project. I want to finish 1000pullups. I want to write and publish an ebook with my twitter alt. I want to write and publish my memoirs, Naughty Boy. I want to do I want to “clean up my notes” – this is something I need more precision onto. A vague general sense of “cleanup my notes” is an infinite task that will never end. I need to be working towards something concrete, the way I am with the 1000-things projects and the ebooks. What are my notes for? I tell myself that they’re for content that I want to produce. What content? I’ve been vague about this. What are all my photos and notes for? I have too many photos in my phone too. But I feel like there’s a reason why I’m taking these photos. It’s to help me understand my own mind better. To know what my own priorities are.
So I think I’ve been carrying some unnecessary tension with me, because i haven’t had this conversation with myself – about what “everything” is for. What are my notes for? Is my goal to have a perfectly curated set of notes? First of all, that’s not even possible. Second, even if I did, what would the point be? To feel satisfied and happy at how clean and tidy everything is? That reminds me of a certain trap I used to fall into when I was playing video games as a kid, trying to engineer perfect outcomes. I wasn’t even really having fun, I wasn’t even really playing. I was just… bugging out, I guess. It’s a bug in my mind of some sort – trying to engineer perfect outcomes is a way of scratching my perfectionist itch. But why do I have a perfectionist itch in the first place? Because the impression of perfect makes me feel comfortable in some way. Do I want to be comfortable? Lol! The entanglement here is interesting. This is where I want to do some refactoring, some upgrading. I want to be comfortable with some mess so that I can clean up other messes. My present system is suboptimal, outdated, obsolete.
I already feel a lightness in my heart from having published several word vomits recently. Continuing on this path will continue to give me joy. I need to figure out how to do the same with my notes.
