Games and projects that really give you a sense of life, in terms of $$ / time? (0093)

Mass Effect. Dragon Age. (I suppose this means I should play more BioWare?) I appreciate Megaman X for the narrative. I enjoyed Simcity’s progression, the idea of building a city from scratch still has a certain allure about it for me. I never quite got around to building an amazingly beautiful City in SimCity 3000– or did I? I would get tired after a certain amount of progression. [1]

Poker is supposed to do this to some degree, and I appreciate that intellectually, but it feels like the amount of effort I’d have to put into learning it is so vast that I ought to build a more ‘leveragable’ skill set instead. That sounds a little bullshitty. I think the short answer is– I’ve read about people who got really good at poker, and while I appreciate the benefits, I can’t imagine making that sort of commitment. And I’m not very interested in being halfway good at that. I’d rather become a doubly good writer than be a decent poker player. I can just avoid games where I can’t afford to lose my buy-in, and play purely for social reasons. Or not at all.

What other games? I suppose we could talk about sports. I think I enjoyed basketball when I used to play it. I used to watch Slam Dunk on Anime, and I’d even try to practice a few drills at home… and I’d sometimes go out to the court and shoot a few hoops. I was never as methodical as I would’ve liked to have had been. I never did the strength training I would’ve had liked to have had done– though I do remember Googling a lot about it, reading a lot about it. Watching videos about it. I found the idea of it entertaining, but maybe it didn’t sing to my soul the way writing does. (All of this is very affected by hindsight bias. Maybe if I had more athlete friends, if I had better eating habits, nutrition, etc, who knows. I’ve since sorta burnt out a lot of of the other maybe-plausible narratives that I started out with. I’ll find them intact in old notebooks.)

The question involves money and time, which I haven’t addressed yet. I suppose I wanted to talk about learning to allocate resources better by playing around with variables and seeing what the outcome is. (Or, in less stodgy terms, learning how to manage your money by playing starcraft and realizing that you don’t have enough mineral, you have insufficient vespene gas.)

Which makes me think– pricing pages should be interactive, as my wife once suggested to me in conversation. Interactive sliders are the best thing ever, because by playing around with the variables yourself, you develop an understanding of the relationships betwen things. It’s a lot easier to learn things when you can see the outcome of your decisions clearly.

Oh my god, there ought to be a website that very simply allows you to input your installment plan and see what the interest is like, what the compound interest is like, what the late payment is like, etc. We ought to be able to see things things in very clear visual terms, because we’re visual creatures. (99% sounds like it’s almost perfect, but 99% safety on plane flights mean over 250 plane crashes a day!!)

I wish I had been able to compute what would’ve happened if I saved my NS money better, if I had saved money in JC better… I doubt I’d have done it, but it would be very powerful just to help people visualize these things. “What is your allowance?” “What do you spend money on?”, etc etc. I’m guessing that there are people who have tried to make elaborate games and stuff that teach kids about these things, but really, people ought to be able to simply input their own real-life situations. That’s what people really care about. Not abstractions. Real life problems. [2]

Let’s zoom back out– the point of this vomit was to think and talk about games that allow me to have a better sense of how to spend my time and money. How am I currently spending my time and money? More randomly than I’d like, less deliberately than I’d like. Like a child playing Grand Theft Auto just by mashing the buttons. (Oh god, we’re all button-mashing through life.) The goal is to figure out for myself how to frame my life in a way that allows me to do better, live better.

I feel like I’m starting to get warmer. I frame it as an energy maximization problem, pleasure maximization problem. (Regret minimization problem, says Jeff Bezos. Climb out of your current box, says Tobias Lutke. Be Less Suboptimal, says Dinesh Raju.) I want to be happier. I want to make more people happy. I want my wife to be happy. I want to enjoy more good moments out of time. To afford those things I need to be more focused and razorsharp in the work that I do. I need to be proactive, begin with the end in mind, and do first things first. So that motivation I think is pretty clear. Life is short and it ought to be pleasant. Sitting on my ass is not pleasant unless I’ve first done some good work. So I need to do good work to enjoy sitting on my ass, and I need to enjoy sitting on my ass so I can do good work.

What are the next steps? (next post)

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[1] Which I think I was feeling guilty about for a while– it’s like I pick up all these video games, start getting semi-good at them, and then I stop there. I never MASTER any of them. I could probably master Metal Slug X if I wanted to, but the final nuances are the most difficult and the prospect of it somehow just doesn’t satisfy me. As I get older I think I should trust my nose on this more. I went through a phase where I felt like I ought to complete every single thing I started, otherwise I must still be a failure. I’m realizing now that that was kinda flagellating. I was punishing myself to the extreme– why? I must have inherited these ideas from somewhere– maybe family, maybe school, maybe religion, pop culture, who knows.

It’s clear to me now that I really just ought to quickly run through my interests and focus on whatever excites me the most, within the frames that I’ve developed for understanding what’s practical and what’s not. I do still think that it’s worth doing a reading of LKY’s memoirs, but is it the single most important thing I should be doing with my time right now?

Nope.

[2] Speaking of real life problems, I’m reminded of how tickled I was when keywordtool.io pointed out the vast number of ailments people Google for when searching “What is the cause of …” or “How does …” or “how to cure …”. You look at the world around you and it LOOKS like people have their shit together, but it’s all an illusion. We’re almost all nervous and anxious and scared. Almost everybody you see needs to poop and pee, and was the consequence of an ejaculation. I feel like we don’t talk about that enough.