Hello, my dear readers! (I’m only assuming I have more than one of you at this point. PLEASE NEVER CORRECT ME.) I’m trying to keep updating the blog on a bi-weekly schedule, and as such, I realize that I have to actually come up with a topic on a regular basis for these things. I literally haven’t thought of one yet. Give me a second.
…Ooh! That’s it!
Since I’m amazing, I have spontaneously come up with such a topic! It’s uplifting, and exciting, and everything you would expect from me, your wise, beloved mentor. (I’m only assuming I am your wise, beloved mentor, which is why you keep reading these things. PLEASE NEVER CORRECT ME.) Anyway, let’s get that topic rolling. Ready? Here we go:
Today’s Topic: You are going to die, and will probably have accomplished nothing meaningful in your life.
Okay, so that opened a little darker than intended. Let me just try and make it better. I sort of approached it from the front; let me just sidle up on the subject from the side, and soften the blow a bit with another take:
You are on limited time, and if you haven’t done something meaningful to you, personally, you have wasted time that will never come back.
…Not much better, was it? Maybe I should elaborate. I don’t want to claim that I’m having some sort of mid-life crisis, but as I’ve worked so hard lately on trying to become what I feel I was meant to be, I realize that, if it takes too long for me to get there, I won’t have any time left to actually enjoy being there. At the time of writing this, I am about to turn forty-two. Let’s say I’m LITERALLY halfway through my life, rounded up. Assuming that I live to be eighty-five, That’s another 43 years. It sounds like a lot, but it’s about 15,365 days left until I drop dead.
…Assuming I make it to eighty-five.
There’s all sorts of shit that can go wrong with a person in forty-three years. I could be hit by a bus, or an errant shot from an archery contest could pierce my colon, which could already be fraught with disease. Or, alternately, I could have a massive stroke tomorrow, fall down a flight of stairs onto a Pogo stick, where I’m impaled to death, but bounce around a little bit in a comedic way for a while before I completely fade out.
Author’s Note: No matter how I die, I want the words “fiery explosion” in my obituary. Even if that obituary says, “Gideon died on a Pogo stick like a jackass, and wanted the words ‘fiery explosion’ in his obituary.”
Now, I’m getting a little sidetracked, but the point of this post isn’t to be a depressing lump of sadness and blues; I’m trying to get out a positive message here. I don’t know how to phrase this without sounding like I’m stating the obvious, but if you’re not out there doing something you love, you need to be. You don’t have to do it full time if you don’t want to, but don’t wait to do it. We’re all on a time limit. I mean, I plan to live forever, but it’s always best to keep an eye on the realism of your goals.
I used to be able to play video games for hours and hours, days and days in a row, and not bat an eye about that. Nowadays, while I still get plenty of video game time in when I can, it’s very reduced from what it used to be. Now, however, there’s a twinge of guilt that I feel. Like, it’s not okay to do something I enjoy anymore, if it takes time away from my aspirations. I literally spend every single day, at some point in the day or another, wondering if I’m wasting time I could have been spending on more of my much-needed writer’s work, and if I should feel bad that I’ve been enjoying myself for a while. How fucked up is that? I don’t know if I should feel bad for enjoying myself or not.
I go to work to pay the bills, and all I see is eight to nine hours of my limited lifespan that I’ve just burned away; a day I could have been spending on my actual life’s work. Because I’ll tell you this right now—my day job is not what I want to do with my life, and I don’t know many people who can say differently.
I don’t know if I’m having that aforementioned mid-life crisis or what, but my remaining time is on my mind a lot lately. The maddening part is that none of us can say how much we have left. The world is getting to be a shittier and shittier place, with no relief in sight, and there are days that I sit here wondering if I actually am going to get hit by a bus tomorrow, or if I’ll die decades from now as an old man in a hospital bed surrounded by family and friends, or if I’ll be eaten by cannibal raiders while my band of survivors try to find the next errant can of unopened Coca-Cola on a dusty store shelf, after the store has mostly been picked clean by other scavengers before us.
This is why I’m saying, do what you love now. If you are doing something that doesn’t fulfill you, and doesn’t make you happy, try to change it. If you can’t get a job doing what you love for whatever reason, fit that happiness around it as best you can. Use your time for you, and don’t waste what time we have left on something that doesn’t bring you joy.
In the end, nobody is going to bury you and ask, “Hey, how many books did that guy read?” or, “You think he ever beat Zelda before he kicked the bucket?” because what you do is most likely going to be important only to you. And that’s okay. That’s a perfectly acceptable way to live. You don’t have to be like me; (and I don’t advise it anyway,) spending the second half of your life trying to become something. If you don’t want to be anything, and you’re content reading books, or playing video games, or listening to your entire music collection for the 647,892nd time, that is perfectly okay.
Author’s Note: This does not apply to people who spend time doing nothing but play World of Warcraft until they’re so morbidly obese that the side of their house has to be cut out so that their bloated corpse can be yanked out of the bedroom via construction crane. Those guys… maybe take a break from your passions.
Me, personally, I feel like I’m playing catch-up on 20 years of work I should have been doing when I was young. If I had known at 23 that I wanted to be a writer, I would have started then, but I really didn’t figure this out until my mid-thirties, and then I spent a good chunk of that time doing it all wrong. Now, I have to pick myself up by my bootstraps, and try to de-program decades of gamer instincts and addictions, and reconstruct my work ethic from the ground up, to become the person I feel I should already have been by now.
But I love working on it. I love doing it, and that’s what gives it value.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be a famous writer, or blogger, or podcaster, (should I get that podcast started, that is.) I’m just a guy with ideas, banging away at a keyboard like so many of you out there in a similar position.
But your life should fuel you. It should make you feel, and make you do things. There’s more to the world than being dead inside, and going through to motions just so you can live to see the next day. If the next day is going to be just as unfulfilling as the one before it, something has to change.
If this sounds overwhelming to some of you, it doesn’t have to be. It can be something small. Pick up that sketchbook while you’re binge-watching RuPaul’s Drag Race. Got that unfinished book you’ve been meaning to get back to? Pick it up. Make the time. Don’t make yourself feel bad (like I do) that you’re enjoying yourself. Self-care is just as important as doing your dishes, or cleaning your apartment. Some stuff can wait while you take time for yourself. Write that murderer’s manifesto you’ve been putting on the back burner, and really show those voices who’s in charge of your happiness!
Author’s Note: Don’t be a crazy murderer, kids. Nobody likes crazy murderers. That’s not the kind of motivation I’m trying to provide here.
There are times where my brain is firing a hundred ideas at me at once, and it is exhausting. Just this weekend, I deliberately allowed myself to marathon my favorite MMORPG, just because I was having fun. My desk is covered in writer’s notes, and podcast topic ideas, and even a big fuck-all calendar telling me what I should be working on and when. This stuff is my mental priority, and this weekend, I just said, “Look. As long as I get the blog post out there on time, I’m still doing what I’m passionate about. I can allow myself to mentally un-clench for a weekend, and not feel bad about game time.”
Was I working on the writing? Sure; at the bare minimum. But was I doing something I was passionate about? Yes, and yes. I wrote, I blogged, and I binged the hell out of my video games. Normally, I’d feel bad about doing that for so long, but it has been a LONG time since I spent a full day off ONLY gaming, and for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel bad about that. Because, in the end, it was important to me to unwind, and while I don’t want to burn away my whole life in front of video games anymore, I did spend a day doing something I loved doing; and while it may not have been productive, I’m not going to label it a waste of time.
…Well, not this time, anyway.
Don’t worry, dear readers. My plan to live forever is apparently working, since I’m not dead yet. I’m sure I’ll outlive you all. (PLEASE NEVER CORRECT ME.)