Games can be thought of as belonging to two broad categories: open-world and linear. Club penguin and GTA: san andreas are examples of open-world, and half-life 2, age of empires (aoe) (when you play it offline on campaign mode) are examples of linear games. In linear games you get to plan ahead, save coins/lives/points/gems/wood whatever to help you get ahead. Open-world games require a sort of ‘presence of mind’ to be able to ‘win’, if you care about winning that is. How much I cared about wining in video games depended a lot of how I was doing in life. In the summer of 9th std. holidays I played GTA to be point of hating it. Even now, the very thought of playing it make me feel yuck. This is not how I feel about aoe or half-life 2. I remember almost considering steadily dating people with a Windows laptop so that I can install and play aoe. Fortunately it never came to that. Browser games like farmville existed (Adobe Flashplayer zindabad!). There were assignments, laundry, depression, entire TV seasons to finish over a weekend, and college students are very touchy of their new laptops.
Looking back, I realise that life itself used to feel like an open-world game. School certainly did. Nothing I did was planned or linear. The other day, a bunch of us met at a schoolmate’s father’s retirement party and, to the chagrin(?) of the spouses, drifted into school stories, as we generally do when school folks meet. I remembered that back then I simply did whatever fancied me at the moment. It could be literature, science, art, maths, or sports. There was no planning, no grand thought behind it, no intention, no strategy. I just followed whatever interested me.
Somewhere between college and adulthood, people started asking the “where do you see yourself in five years” question. I learnt that, “I don’t know, depends on xyz, I want abc, so, if I get pqr, I will be doing ijk, if not, I want to do lmn” was apparently not considered an acceptable answer. So I unconsciously started planning my life as a linear game. This also meant that more times than not when things don’t go as per plan I would sulk in a well justified depression.
One of the first times linear gaming did not work was when covid hit. My PhD applications weren’t going through. The plan was that I take an year’s break and decide what to do. I had done this sort of taking an year’s break after school so I believed that it was alright to do before major jumps. Covid was an unforeseen element in the linear planning. None of the coins/lives/points/gems/wood I had saved could help me get ahead.
I kept postponing sending PhD applications to the next application season. I got myself a job. Fortunately and in some sense unfortunately for me, I get to do something I like to do for work. Last month it hit me that I may not get to continue long like this. Somewhere over the last five years I stopped planning ahead and simply let things happen. Partly this was exhaustion. This might sound unrelatable to some readers. I will elaborate. I was spending so much energy surviving each day that there was very little left for planning the next one. This is my circumstance and this is the best of the circumstance I could be in. My doctor would console me by saying, “don’t worry, you’ll get there but maybe not in the same way or pace your colleagues do”.
Now I am back at the crossroads, wondering where to go next, what to do next. When i consider going into the open-world mode of doing things I fear that I will be dropping/diluting everything I have done so far. I see that I have put myself in a box and I feel bad for me, never thought I would do it to myself. Every option I consider seems to misunderstand what I actually want. I tell a colleague that I am seriously considering farming for a while, they console me, they mean well, they tell me that it won’t come to that. I tell people to give me referral to a quant finance role and they get back to me with HR roles, the whole point of quant finance was so that I can bank on all my maths/physics/computation skills and avoid too much human contact and spend time with my cat. I get edTech consultancy requests. Most of them seem like I am asked to be part of a scam. I have communist ideologies about education you see. There is only so much cognitive dissonance I can handle a day.
I have a shelf full of what the crochet/knitting world calls WIPs. Every time I look at it, it hurts a little. I am planning to put a curtain over the shelf. I tell myself it is for the dust. At this point, fixing things would require creating a ‘stretch’ in time, a fairy godmother, and an unlimited supply of snacks.
