for the love of the game

why do any of it

I’ve been trying to be more productive and long term goal oriented in these past few months. What that looked like for me was picking something and trying to become really good at it. It’s been going way better than expected!

happi

A thing I have noticed in this process is that subconsciously, I smuggled in the assumption that doing this required me to become “less fun”. I would forego video games for working very late. Would stop laughing at jokes I used to find funny. This was not really a conscious process. I’m realizing quickly that this is not preferable or sustainable.

Pain is not the unit of effort

I was raised in a very judgemental household. And I was taught, quite directly that suffering = effort = results. But pain is not the unit of effort.

And when I look back at what I’m proud of, all of it has been made in a state where I have simply enjoyed the process.

These are the things that I actually enjoy doing. I love this. Yet knowing that it’s sort of an obligation tends to make these things less fun. the job-ness creeps in. If I ever drag myself to do things, I start to hate them.

I am feeling it now for MATS and I have felt it for my exams as well.

And I do not want this to happen, so I’m trying to leverage what I loved about all this in the first place. I sit at my desk and when I notice “oh I wanna do that”, I do it.¹

But it’s hard to balance, because if I don’t clock into MATS & school, there will be consequences. But the problem is imaginary: I never actually do not want to clock in.

it’s everywhere

People suffering to get to where they so desperately want to get is everpresent in media. It’s no wonder then that so many people learn to conflate success with suffering.

When there’s doubt to what being “good” looks like, I retreat to things that have fed to me in movies and youth, and that is an image of someone dedicated and persevering.

This is then my best guess to why I got this attitude. I feared that having fun would make my ambitious values drift.²

But the opposite is true. Not allowing myself to take breaks, is leading me to procrastinate.³ Lack of social contact is making me less happy, and this negatively impacts my productivity. Even just doing nothing is sometimes a great idea.

I make no illusions: unlearning this is hard and will take a long time.

The whiplash gene

I do want to hedge all this by saying that it definitely runs in the family. Me and my brother are kind of both addictive degens.

As you are probably bored to death of by now as a frequent reader of this blog, I used to play league for a full year 10 hours a day and grind all day

Wel, my brother did the same with poker. Which I mean, this is probably scissor statement-y, but is very much a skill based game with stochastic elements.

I would hear him utter “bro hes pushing non-suited 3 duice on 23 bb man what is he doooooing I have him marked on my overlay ofcourse thats not the push fold chart (he has a term for it i forgot whatever) ok whatever cash game to blow off steam” with 4 poker tables open at all times. He used to wake me up at 2 am if he got to a high stakes final table. I worried about him sometimes.

But he was cracked. Cracked enough to on average beat house odds and make a profit. And he fucking loved it. My brother and I differ a lot on things, but things like this are great reminders that we are cut from the same cloth.

I think it can be most accurately characterized as the difference between minds that view the movie whiplash and respond “what the fuck damian chazelle this is not an accurate portrayal of jazz music” and people that exit the theater thinking they have never heard anything more divine. The latter runs in the family.⁴

128px rendition of my favorite scene in cinema

Pressing the “try harder” button

So I know I can kind of thrive like this. I was genuinely happy during my league addiction. But real life doesn’t get to be optimized for fun. You have to handle a lot of different things, and some of them you simply will not like.

And when trying to press on, I’ve noticed myself pressing the “try harder” button. And it never works. I need sustained happiness over a long time if I want to do good work.

This post is an old draft, I’m finishing it up now because I want the feeling of having done something today. In a lot of ways, I’m being the antihesis to my own manifesto.

When talking to friend of the substack tutor vals about celeste 2027 a couple months ago, I asked them what they thought the main failure mode of my plan was. They thought it was not valuing mental health enough, not enough emphasis on making friends and burning out. I was initially super confused by this. But Vals is right. What I want (and need) right now is a friend. ⁵

Yet paradoxically, a lot of it is literally just mindset. I keep asking myself why I do any of this: blogging, tweeting, rooting my phone even though it fucking breaks every 5 minutes, mechinterp. I could just not.

But the answer is obvious: the love of the game, of course.⁶

1. If this leads me to less productive study patterns or research directions! So be it!

2. I had little role models to show me that this isn’t the case

3. even when I know it causes this behavior

4. my brother and I both watched whiplash and both came to the conclusion that dad is kind of like jk simmons. That’s… that’s not good (sidonote: i DO NOT CARE what some white guy video essayist thinks about this movie. this is between me, jk simmons and my fucked up childhood)

5. I also need to meditate.

6. I believe altman when he says it