I don’t want to be this anymore. Being inside my mind is not a fun place to be. I’m tired, sad, lonely, and full of regret, all the time. My life sucks. And I’m not blaming anyone else for that, But it feels so past the point of repair that the urge to give up is overwhelming.
There are certain kinds of videos games (I’m thinking mainly of strategy/tactics games) where it becomes clear you’ve messed it up, long before you hit a game over. Where the mistakes you made early on are now sabotaging your every move, making just keeping your head above water hugely stressful. Or where you’ve fallen too far behind your opponents to ever hope of catching up, and the only question is how long it takes them to finally put you out of your misery. You can keep playing, often for a long time, and maybe still score the odd point. But it’s not fun, or interesting, and you just want to restart so you can learn from your mistakes.
That’s where I am in life. So far behind in every regard that I could never hope to catch up. Stressed out over finding ways to keep my head above water. As far as I know there’s no do-overs for life. If I ended it, that would be it. But it’s still alluring, to not have to live as this failure anymore. To not be me… even if it means not being anything at all.
7 comments
Out of curiosity, who would you want to be, if not yourself? I wonder about this sometimes. Your game analogy makes sense. Some people keep falling after the first time. It sucks. Hope you figure something out. How to improve your life and all that.
Hard to say, as “the grass is always greener.” Probably someone better looking, with much better social skills. But I’d settle for being anyone that doesn’t have this level of negative shit on their mind 24/7.
I would have said someone with a bunch of money= )
lol the title…all i could think about was celine dion’s “all by myself” song. (“i don’t wanna be all by myself”)
Heh, guess that’d work as theme music for most of of my posts.
contrarian that I am, and player of strategy games; survival is an underutilized asset. Thinking about one of my favorites; Age of Empires 2. One thing I’ve noticed is the more opponents you have, the more valuable your survival. If you can just hold on, making marginal progress, there is still a path to victory. That path is watching your foes beat each other up. Then when the stronger is at their point of greatest victory..
that’s when you strike, prying away territory and resources.
There was another trick I’d often use, sneaky attacking resources no one takes seriously. In AE2 if you captured a certain number of relics, and held them, you’d win. So sometimes I’d deliberately underdevelop my defense, but secretly capture relics, and by the time I had enough of them to win, the other guy is too busy fighting it out over territory.
Or maybe that game isn’t a particularly apt metaphor. It’s fun though. People who win often are prone to arrogance, being a “loser” gives you the advantage of expecting to meet strong resistance.
Never played AOE, but did play something similar back in the day. I suppose I was thinking of making far more fundamental mistakes, when you’re less familiar with a game’s mechanics. For example, playing Civ as a kid, I didn’t really understand how to optimize city locations, which tech discovery to prioritise etc. It’s easy to waste your time and resources focusing on things that don’t really meaningfully benefit you in the long run. By the time I encountered my opponents, I was often so far behind in terms of tech that it was a matter of bows & arrows versus guns. There was no way to possibly catch up enough in terms of development to ever meet any of the victory conditions. It was just a matter of trying to pacify the AI to delay them squashing me like a bug.
Or right now, I’m playing XCOM 2. There’s an optional mission where once you complete it, it triggers a group of extra-strong enemies to chase you throughout the other missions in the game, until you defeat them. I didn’t know this the first time I played, so I took that mission as soon as it appeared, before I had developed stronger armour for my squad. As a consequence, all my strongest units got wiped out, and I was left throwing rookies into the more difficult missions later in the game. It changed it from being a fun challenge to a relentless struggle with no hope of victory.