Tim is also a genial person**, and he has a passion for games and game development. He's opinionated, but he's not an asshole about his opinions. That's something I can get behind.
On his Fun Friday video today, he had a short discussion about Being Happy:
Anyway, his first point of emphasis (and the reason for this post) is to stop rage watching videos and rage playing games. You know, the idea that you watch something that makes you angry --and you know it's going to make you angry but you watch it anyway-- and then you complain about it. It's corollary, rage playing games, is going out and playing a game that you hate and then you go online and talk about how you hate the game.
This resonated with me because of my personal experience with my health issues and social media. And, well, the news.
Before somebody complains that being a CIS white guy means that I can tune the news out, fine. Yes, I am a CIS white guy. I'm also a CIS white guy who has health issues, especially hypertension, and I need to cut out stress in my life or I won't be around for very long.*** You can't vote if you're dead, even in Chicago nowadays.
One of the things I've done over the past several years was to cut out social media in my life, because first I couldn't stand the misinformation floating around social media with the pandemic, and then because of people within my extended family going down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole when they ought to know better.
I can draw a parallel to this from a couple of decades ago when I cut out some news channels because their modus operandi is to generate a strong emotional reaction (frequently anger) as those strong reactions can turn into dedicated viewership. It becomes it's own feedback loop: keep throwing out red meat at their viewership, and their viewers get mad and tune in to listen or watch more often. I realized I was getting angry when those channels were on, and when I stepped back and turned them off, I realized I was much happier as a result.
***
But recognizing that rage playing games --or even just playing games that have changed over time into something you don't like-- isn't healthy is one piece of the puzzle. You have to break the chain and go play other games that you might actually enjoy. As Tim points out, there's oodles of games out there on Steam right now, so why not try other games instead? And if you don't like the game, return it and try another one.
Before you ask, no, I'm not using this as a prelude to doing something drastic such as quitting WoW and playing only Civilization IV or something. After all, I still derive a lot of fun from playing Classic WoW, and yes, I've even enjoyed poking around here and there in Retail**** as long as I limit my interactions to places I'm familiar with and I ignore all the helpful suggestions to try Retail's version of Green Eggs and Ham.
I will not try Dragonflight in a boat, or with a (space) goat, Blizz-I-Am.--Dr. Seuss, maybe
Anyway, Tim has gotten me to thinking that I need to work more on trying to be happy, or if I'm not careful I will turn into a "get off my lawn" old guy, and sooner than I'd like.
*I should be clear: I enjoyed that software development part of my life, but I'm glad I'm no longer involved with it. Knowing what I know now about my health, I doubt I would have remained married or even been alive in 2025 given all the stress involved in what was a CAD/CAM software development job.
**Yes, I know, he presents that way on YouTube, and people might not be like that in real life, but since Tim basically makes his videos in one take it's kind of hard to fake it for over 500 videos without using a lot of editing. Still, I haven't experienced him as either a coworker or a boss, so I can't speak to that.
***I just had my six month check in with my doctors --both cardiologist and my primary care physician-- and I'm still hanging in there. I wasn't planning on providing an update in a post this June, but the TL;DR is that I need to keep doing what I'm doing, and my primary doc keeps hounding me to take vacations and relax more. Of course, working on projects such as woodworking do help me relax more, so there's that at least.
****Within reason. Without "playing the game" by questing or anything like that, I can simply move around the Old World and enjoy what I see for the art alone.
I keep dropping comments like that into threads here and there these days. Stuff like "It's only a video game. If you don't like it there are plenty of others" and so on. Partly I do it because I can't help myself but mostly it is how I feel nowadays. I absolutely do not care about finishing anything that isn't otherwise life-threatening or means my house is going to fall down. Short of that level, everything is just stuff that's passing by. Enjoy it, ignore it or get out of its way.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if it's an age thing or what. I think it's mostly just perspective and that can come at any age but it also might be apathy, which ditto. Anyway, I do hold the belief that if you aren't going to *do* something abiout whatever it is that's riling you up then angsting about it is doing absolutely no-one any good at all, least of all you, so just get over it and move on. Of course, it would be better to do the something rather than opt out but a reality check should tell you if that's a likely outcome or not.
I do wonder if it's the 10 years you have on me, since when you were mentioning here about how you where were I was at a decade ago suspect this is just another manifestation of our age differences. At least I have an inkling of what to expect! ;-)
DeleteI think a lot of us struggle with the fact that with the way our modern world works, we're being subjected to a lot of things that are meant to generate negative emotions that have no useful outlet. Being angry is not inherently a bad thing, but being angry about something spurious or distant that you can't affect in a useful way is not helpful.
ReplyDeleteI've had my own encounter with this recently on Discord. There's this one guy on one of my main Discord servers that likes to talk a lot and has a way of constantly pushing my buttons. He's not a bad guy, I even used to consider him a friend in the past, though I'm not so sure anymore now. Either way, many of his posts and prods would rile me up and make me angry and anxious, with no good way to react other than to start a debate or fight online about nothing, which I obviously didn't want to do either. The other week I finally put him on ignore and it's already helped a lot. I wish there was a better way to deal with these things because I'm not sure I'll ever love "just ignore it" as a solution to anything, but I have to remind myself that we always have to make choices about what to pay attention to and to not get trapped in a bad cycle of my own making.
It's part of the curse of our interconnected modern era that items that we would never have known about --or would have been so distant from us that it would have been on the back pages of the local newspaper-- are now front and center. The drive to generate more traffic to websites and to stake out "our territory" within like minded people make this problem even worse. Viewed from that perspective, "just ignore it" was something we did in the past without any knowledge of us consciously doing it.
DeleteHowever, going totally silent isn't a good thing either; there are likely some people on FB that occasionally wonder what happened to me, and I ought to at least let some of them know that yes, I'm still alive (despite my heart's attempts otherwise) and that I'm avoiding FB for my physical as well as mental health.
Oh, and happy birthday, btw!