I just made a horrible discovery about myself during my most recent introspective drawing session.
I can't be happy for people when I'm in a bad situation. I can be nice and say the usual "that's great" and "congradulations, dude." But two seconds later, I'm back to moping around wondering why I can't have any good things like that happen to me. Why can my hard work pay off? All the search and researching; filling out applications and nights improving my skills. Trying my best to be as...
...
Oh, who am I trying to fool? I'm not trying. I'm putting minimal effort into doing what needs to be done because what I want to do is still a mystery to me. I thought it was art, but after getting a degree in it, I found out that isn't the feild I want to go into. I thought I could use those skills to do something in the video game industry, but everywhere I look, the schools that offer classes on the art side of that industry are so expensive, I'm better off avoiding them for now. So all I do is doodle in my sketchbook, and it's clear that my skills are lacking these days. Severely lacking, as it is.
Part of me feels dead already, while the other and more hopeful part of me is trying to hang on to life. Or at least I would like to think that. In reality, my escapism practices are starting to fail. I'm no longer playing any of my video games so much as I am complaining about all their flaws that caused me to stop playing them in the first place. The ones that work I haven't touched in years. The Pokemon game that I started a month back has grown stagnent due to the lack of any kind of social interaction as the game was designed for. Yes, I called Pokemon a social game, because that's what it is. Half of the mechanics is interacting with other players, and if that's not a social game, then excuse me.
I even tried watching a movie this afternoon and couldn't enjoy it. And it was a movie I know I like. Porn isn't helping either, as everything that is suppose to be stimulating is now just so boring. Music helps kill the silence, but it no longer sooths and entertains me. In fact, I find myself skipping through several tracks, including the ones I like, or stop playing it altogether.
I can't escape from reality anymore. I can't pacify this overwhelming sadness. I'm stuck in a pity party of one that nobody wants to be a part of and that nobody will help me escape from.
And the horrible thing about this? I'm too tired and beat up from life to do it myself. I just want everything to be over.
I don't want happiness; I know that's out of reach now. I just want stability.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Thursday, May 05, 2011
Agency and Pokemon
I was recently turned on to a web series called Extra Credits. It is a show that talks about video games and how they can be used to push the media into a serious state of debate, as well as how it is now becoming an intragle part of our culture. They're latest episode set off something in this time of lots and lots of introspective thinking.
Topic #2: Agency.
This is me. This has been me for a long time, actually. Trodding through everyday life with no long term goals. While I don't feel like I can't control my destiny, I do feel that I'm stuck in a situation of my own creation due to some seriously bad life choices. Even my short-term goals tend to fail due to one reason or another. I don't feel motivated at all to do anything, not even draw. It's becoming a habit to force myself to do things I don't want to do, like work out for half an hour every day or look up job listings. But when everything is all said and done, I sit here in front of all my technology under motivated to do anything else.
If agency is really a scaling system, then there has to be a way to increase it. Much like confidence building, some kind of factor must allow agency to build in a person to the point where I can become that "Oh well, that's life. Let's try it again." guy described in the episode. While the show may suggest video games, the games I play don't really give me any kind of agency due to the choices I make. Even the ones that actually do reward that, such as Pokemon (which I've been playing a lot of lately), don't really make me feel like I'm controling the outcome of the battle. If anything, because I have the option to power through the game through constant leveling up, I've learned how to save my strength and energy for when something really matters. Like, I don't know, SCAD.
SCAD mattered to me, and after getting fired from my job, I actually found myself motivated enough to go through the application process. Why? Because I knew what would happen if I didn't attempt to better myself. I would be in a worse situation than I am now.
But that was then, and this is now. Having dropped out of the school after being accepted and paying the deposits, I'm in the situation I was trying to avoid in the first place. Why? Life. Lack of funds. That Ego-shattering moment when reality bitch slaps you in the face and says "NO SCHOOL FOR YOU!" in a booming, God-like voice.
It's similar to how I would be able to dominate the competition in the Gameboy version of Pokemon, but the moment I transfer my killer team to the N64 game and enter them into a stadium tourniment, I get my ass handed to me. Powering through isn't enough. I needed to reanalyze my tactics and then retrain my Pokemon, or catch new ones that could fill in the slots in a better way. Eventualy, I would find a strategy that would work, albeit it still fell on the whole "hit them hard and hit them fast" mentality I have with battling games like these. But I set no real long-term goal with myself or the game. All the choices I made were on the spur of the moment, which is kind of the point of the episode when they illustrate that the cycle between choice and consiquence is shorter in games than in real life.
What they don't really talk about is the fact that the consiquences in the game aren't nearly as impactful as the ones in real life. In a way, you have more to lose from failure in life than you do in a Pokemon game. But the key is to know how to start over again. The Game Over screen isn't the end of it all. It just means you need to try again. For some people, they can do that in life. Their Game Over moments may be big disappointments, but they don't last long before they try again. For a normal person, it could be a week or a month or even a year before they try again.
For me? I don't know if I'll ever try again. My sense of agency is so low that I just learned that I had one today when I saw this episode. That's how small it is. At least with self-confidence, I had that and knew when I was starting to lose it. The idea of a scaling sense of agency is new to me, but it makes sense. It goes hand-in-hand with self-confidence. The more of either you have, the better your life can be.
For now, however, I need to find out what gives me motivation in general. The SCAD thing was out of urgancy if anything. The want was there, but never the drive. Which, surprisingly, has always been the case. I need to find that one want that is actually in the driver's seat with the key in the ignition just waiting for me to say "Fire it up."
Topic #2: Agency.
This is me. This has been me for a long time, actually. Trodding through everyday life with no long term goals. While I don't feel like I can't control my destiny, I do feel that I'm stuck in a situation of my own creation due to some seriously bad life choices. Even my short-term goals tend to fail due to one reason or another. I don't feel motivated at all to do anything, not even draw. It's becoming a habit to force myself to do things I don't want to do, like work out for half an hour every day or look up job listings. But when everything is all said and done, I sit here in front of all my technology under motivated to do anything else.
If agency is really a scaling system, then there has to be a way to increase it. Much like confidence building, some kind of factor must allow agency to build in a person to the point where I can become that "Oh well, that's life. Let's try it again." guy described in the episode. While the show may suggest video games, the games I play don't really give me any kind of agency due to the choices I make. Even the ones that actually do reward that, such as Pokemon (which I've been playing a lot of lately), don't really make me feel like I'm controling the outcome of the battle. If anything, because I have the option to power through the game through constant leveling up, I've learned how to save my strength and energy for when something really matters. Like, I don't know, SCAD.
SCAD mattered to me, and after getting fired from my job, I actually found myself motivated enough to go through the application process. Why? Because I knew what would happen if I didn't attempt to better myself. I would be in a worse situation than I am now.
But that was then, and this is now. Having dropped out of the school after being accepted and paying the deposits, I'm in the situation I was trying to avoid in the first place. Why? Life. Lack of funds. That Ego-shattering moment when reality bitch slaps you in the face and says "NO SCHOOL FOR YOU!" in a booming, God-like voice.
It's similar to how I would be able to dominate the competition in the Gameboy version of Pokemon, but the moment I transfer my killer team to the N64 game and enter them into a stadium tourniment, I get my ass handed to me. Powering through isn't enough. I needed to reanalyze my tactics and then retrain my Pokemon, or catch new ones that could fill in the slots in a better way. Eventualy, I would find a strategy that would work, albeit it still fell on the whole "hit them hard and hit them fast" mentality I have with battling games like these. But I set no real long-term goal with myself or the game. All the choices I made were on the spur of the moment, which is kind of the point of the episode when they illustrate that the cycle between choice and consiquence is shorter in games than in real life.
What they don't really talk about is the fact that the consiquences in the game aren't nearly as impactful as the ones in real life. In a way, you have more to lose from failure in life than you do in a Pokemon game. But the key is to know how to start over again. The Game Over screen isn't the end of it all. It just means you need to try again. For some people, they can do that in life. Their Game Over moments may be big disappointments, but they don't last long before they try again. For a normal person, it could be a week or a month or even a year before they try again.
For me? I don't know if I'll ever try again. My sense of agency is so low that I just learned that I had one today when I saw this episode. That's how small it is. At least with self-confidence, I had that and knew when I was starting to lose it. The idea of a scaling sense of agency is new to me, but it makes sense. It goes hand-in-hand with self-confidence. The more of either you have, the better your life can be.
For now, however, I need to find out what gives me motivation in general. The SCAD thing was out of urgancy if anything. The want was there, but never the drive. Which, surprisingly, has always been the case. I need to find that one want that is actually in the driver's seat with the key in the ignition just waiting for me to say "Fire it up."
