I’ve come around to thinking about the balance of a life. Is it more about the things that happen to you over the course of time, the things you set out to do/be, or the things you choose not to do as you fire forward into eternity? All of those things battle for balance, and I think that more often than not life is, for most of us, what happens to us and what we choose not to do. As depressing as it sounds, many of us spend our lives plugged in. If you’re reading this blog right now you are plugged in. What we plug into has changed quite dramatically over the centuries. Books and music and performance art and even visual art used to be what we plugged into. Now it is games and micro-stories such as snap chat and tik tok which occupy our time in an increasingly distracting miasma of ease and, to be honest, emptiness.
Today I tried–for several hours–to play Elden Ring. I haven’t tackled a large scale MMORPG like this in ages. The scale of the story is tremendous and the curve–the time it takes to get to any real level of talent and equitable enjoyment–is high. Based on one mathematical formula the max level tops out in the 790s. I am level 7. In other words, I got nowhere. I left the experience feeling empty and wasteful and asking myself why I am doing this at all. I chose not to take this same leap for a half dozen other gaming journeys this year (NBA 2k, Spiderman, multiple racing games, Ghost of Tsushima, Pokemon), instead playing Madden on a daily basis and putting time and research into that at a rate I haven’t done in years. Again, why? What am I avoiding? What am I not doing? Writing for one. Living for another.
The second has more to do with not knowing what to do or what a life here in the desert can consist of than anything else. Is life merely a collection and different flavors of distraction?