I’ve been lacking motivation recently, lacking the drive to do all the things I want to do. So I don’t do things.
That makes me depressed that I haven’t gotten anything done. So I get even more demotivated. So I don’t do more things.
This spiral is a bad place to be in. I’m trying to get out. I’m going to set goals to work out on specific days (MWF). I’m setting measurable deadlines for things to get done in both my work and my personal life. I’m going to set goals to reach out to my friends more often, because being with friends always motivates me.
And I’m going to try to get less depressed when things don’t go right. I think that’s been part of the problem, when things go poorly I take it too hard on myself.
I’m a scientist, the hallmark of science is that while we can predict what may happen, we then have to test it through experiments. If our experiments go a certain way, then our prediction was wrong and we have to find out what to do now. That’s just part of science, it’s all part of the process.
But when my experiments aren’t going as I expected them to, I take it too personally. I haven’t yet learned enough how to step back and just accept it, just find out what happened, alter the conditions, and revise the predictions. Instead I keep wondering if I myself am to blame, and if I myself and uniquely unqualified to do this job I’ve been doing my entire adult life.
What makes people successful isn’t just a single moment of brilliance, but a determination to keep being brilliant, which takes work. Whether its physical determination, mental fortitude in the case of adversity, or what have you, success if a pattern of behavior, not a lottery ticket.
And I need to remember that and act like that. It won’t help me if I just get things right once and then rest on my laurels, that won’t bring success. And likewise it won’t help me to mope about whenever I get things wrong.
This is all something that I’m sure everyone deals with, no one needs me to tell them, but it’s something I want to tell myself and I feel like writing it down is the best way to do that.
I need to keep going, keep trying, and keep acting like this matters, even in the face of failure. Letting every failure spiral me further into depression is just a recipe for more failure.
I still want to finish my Stardew Valley miniseries, but I also want to get something off my chest: it’s ok to not like things other people like, and I wish more people felt this way.
I’ve written before about games I like, but I’ve also been honest about how some of them are the kinds of games I wouldn’t recommend to others, just because I know some folks won’t like them. I really enjoyed Pillars of Eternity, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t.
What turned you off of it? Was it the 30+ different status ailments to keep track of? The overabundances of resistances and damage types? The stats each doing 5 different things? The rest-heal system? I loved all that shit, but you don’t have to. Or maybe you just don’t like real-time-with-pause, I’ve been open that I’m probably the only one who prefers it to turn-based-tactics in RPGs, so while I’d be disappointed at your criticism I wouldn’t be surprised.
Or maybe you played Cult of the Lamb, but hated how the base building got in the way of your dungeon crawler. Or you tried Ace Attorney, but couldn’t get over how it was a visual novel with pixel hunting for puzzles.
If you told me you didn’t like any of these games, I’d understand. If you said they were *bad* games, I’d disagree but I could probably at least understand your viewpoint. Even if a game is loved by 99/100 people who play it, that still means a game with a million buys is disappointing *at least* 10,000 people.
Our culture has even had a resurgence of memes pointing this out. Standing up and telling the whole world that they are wrong has become a point of pride for some people. So if you don’t like a game I like, I try not to hold it against you.
But I feel some people just can’t accept this. If you don’t like something, you must be *bad* at it, or impatient, or stupid, or you didn’t read the tutorials, or you mashed through the story. The reason you didn’t enjoy it is a *moral failing* on your part because *I* liked it and *I’m* a good person so anyone who thinks differently than me must be a *bad* person.
If this feels like a petty call-out of “gamer” culture, that’s because it is. Too often I’ve seen people disliking things be attacked for being bad, or salty, or unmanly because they can’t handle the “difficulty” of a game that can never just be criticized. I’m tired of this shit, I see it all the time, and it’s why I almost never talk to people about video games.
Because no one is ever allowed to just think something is good or bad, no one can accept that different people have different opinions. You must be too stupid to understand Pillars of Eternity, or too illiterate to appreciate Ace Attorney, or too impatient to enjoy Cult of the Lamb.
And yes this post is a subtweet, because when talking to a friend recently, I had exactly this kind of conversation. I didn’t like part of a game, and this was thrown back at me as a *moral failing* on my part. That because I didn’t play *the right way*, my complaints about not having fun were invalid, and were instead a reflection of my impatience and ignorance for not reading the correct menus or using the correct strategies.
And I hate that shit. Sometimes people just hate your favorite game, or favorite movie, or favorite book. And part of being an adult and not a child should be accepting these opinions, allowing people to complain if they want, and if you feel obligated to defend the honor of your favorite media, to at least couch your defense as how “you” feel, and how “you” played, rather that attacking the other person for their failure to enjoy it.
I just feel like too many people treat and attack on their preferred media as an attack on them. If you thought Ace Attorney was bad, I disagree. And it could be fore any reason, you can think that the murders are too contrived, or the world is unrealistic, you can think the characters like Mia and Pearls are creepy, or that Phoenix is an empty suit, you can think investigations are boring, and trials drone on and on, you can think it’s too simple or too convoluted or anything else. And I’d disagree, but I would hope I’d be willing to see that an attack on my favorite media is just you venting, and not an attack on me.
Nothing you say is an attack on me. “How was I supposed to know to press on that statement!” Fair criticism, I get people can get bored when most presses yield no new information. “I think Mia’s power is creepy,” is something I disagree with, but I can accept others think this way. “The murders are unrealistic and convoluted,” I like it because every case feels engaging and nothing is ever simple or straightforward, but you don’t have to like it yourself. Unless you go out of your way to say “only idiots/perverts/misanthropes enjoy this game,” I’m not going to hold your critiques against me.
So please give me the same treatment. If I dislike a game or movie or book, I’m not attacking you or the people who like it. I’m talking about my dislike because all people like talking about themselves. You just told me about your day, can’t I tell you about mine? So just let me say I don’t like it, say you liked it and that’s fine. But don’t attack me, because I’m not attacking you.
Streams of Consciousness 