Growth

Chronicling my journey towards the goal of ‘happiness’ has led me to writing this post, as I find myself growing more comfortable and confident with myself. At first I thought it was just a journey of ‘do these things and you will become happier’. ‘Contribute to society and you’ll be happier, grow your relationships and you’ll be happier’. While it is true that I have indeed become happier, I am pleased to say that it is more than just happiness that I’ve gained.

I originally thought that the end ‘goal’ of what I was aiming for was what was going to make me happy; you finish the race and you feel good right? But I’m finding so much enjoyment in the act of the journey itself I feel like I discovered something entirely new that was hidden from me this entire time. I’ve gotten exponentially happier just from simply chasing after my goals, even though I haven’t actually accomplished any of them yet! The satisfaction from seeing progress, from knowing that my efforts are actually amounting to real-life results in things that I actually care about feels great.

On another note, I thought it was interesting how once I was able to step back and look at my situation from a third person perspective and ask myself “How would I address my situation if I were treating it as a video game?” things just seemed to fall into place. Treating my situation like a ‘problem’ and the creating a plan and appropriate course of action almost came naturally to me. In a game (especially any time of RPG unsurprisingly) the most natural thing to do to improve in areas that you are lacking is to grind the to raise the statistics of that specific trait. And funnily enough, that works in a lot of situations in real life too! The amount of experience that you get is determined by how hard you are pushing/challenging yourself relative to how good/experienced you are at the task at hand. For example, my ability to approach girls is next to nothing; one would probably call it a level 1 trait. However, I forced myself to go to the club this past Friday and it ended up working out well; I have a lot more confidence in myself now and feel that it wasn’t as Herculean task as I had made it out to be. I’m actually still in contact with the girl that I ended up connecting with somehow, but even if that doesn’t pan out as well as I’d like I feel like I’ve pulled essential experience from the entire scenario. I guess grinding the ‘club dungeon’ for experience is where I get the most benefit for this talent.

I always thought that video games were sapping my time, effort and life away, but it almost feels relieving in a sense that the knowledge I gained from playing so many different types of video games can be applied to real life in some situations. The fact that I’m actually good at figuring out how games work and making it work makes me think that I can actually drastically improve my life by trying this new tack on life. I never thought I’d actually say this before, but the future looks hopeful!

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