Slow the Hell Down
Article written by absurdpirate
A while back I started wondering why I'd get super motivated to participate in my hobby, only to quickly crash out and then never touch it for months. This happened most with Minecraft, but also happens in my other favorite games. I would get into this mode where I would try to min/max my playthrough, beat the Ender dragon as quickly as possible, get diamond everything as soon as possible. Hell, I'd even only mine 5 diamonds, enough to get a pickaxe and an enchanting table, then wait until I got fortune III before going back diamond hunting. By the end of it, I'd be fully kitted out, farms for a bunch of resources (all while listening to some 2nd monitor content), and now I'm ready to take my creative pursuits wherev- aaaand I'm burned out.
Maybe you've found yourself in this position, you get really inspired to recreate something you've seen on YouTube or Pinterest, and you get burned out halfway through the creation process. Or you start a new playthrough, and within an hour you've made tons of progress, but now you're burned out and don't want to touch the game for a while.
Why?
I think we get into this mindset where we see how other people play a game, and think that's how we need to play it too. We see these guys who are essentially playing to hold an audiences fleeting attention. Of course they're going to do some elaborate build, or get through the game as quickly as possible. It's their job. So, now you've found yourself in this nasty habit of being hyper-productive in our games, or really any media.
The solution? Slow the fuck down.
Seriously, you don't need to beat the Ender dragon in the first day of playing. Hell you don't have to beat it within the first month. So, why rush?
Recently I started a Stardew Valley playthrough, and to try and recapture the magic of my first playthrough (after several failed attempts) I decided to nix trying to complete the community center in the first year. I've actually basically made it impossible to do in the first year by the nature of the remixed community center setting on a new playthrough. And wouldn't you know it, that subtle change in mindset is what lead me to getting farther in than I had in YEARS, and I'm only just now getting into summer. See, rather than trying to min/max what I did with each in-game day, I maximized my personal enjoyment with each day. Once I completed what my main goal for that in-game day was, I just kinda filled the time with whatever else I wanted to do rather than quickly going to sleep to get to the next day.
In other games, it's tempting to fall into the "meta", whatever that is. Following the best whatever to accomplish X feat. This is a one-way ticket to the rut. If you find yourself being pulled into following a best loadout, path, whatever, consider what you're actually doing it for. Do you actually enjoy playing with the meta? Or are you just doing it to quickly skip over aspects of the game? When I play Cyberpunk 2077, I play a cyborg ninja modeled after Raiden from Metal Gear Rising. By all accounts, the way the character is built is the "meta" (best weapons, implants, etc.), but it is SO much fun to play. When I get bored of slicing people like I'm making ground beef with a knife, I opt for a fun weapon... a rubber dong that sounds like a lightsaber when you swing it. It's not the best weapon by any means, but it's funny as hell to crack people over the skull with a vibrating Johnson. If you're gonna follow a meta, let it bolster your enjoyment not use it as a crutch.
I've had the same shift when playing Minecraft, I started taking my time with the game. It was about a week before I even found my first diamond. I've fundamentally cured my "2-week Minecraft phase". I still have my big projects, building a big ass castle, but I'm not going to throw on a video and mindlessly place blocks. That's fucking boring, and I end up enjoying neither the video nor the game.
If you find yourself unable to play a game without some background noise, that's a problem. I was always someone who had something going on in a 2nd monitor (or on a laptop if I was playing a console game) and it always left me missing something about the game. By just avoiding that, I get 5x more enjoyment because now I'm fully enveloped in the game's atmosphere, it's soundtrack, its dialogue/voice acting.
I'm also something of an achievement hunter, I'd try and 100% games I play or some aspect of the game (even if I don't particularly care about the game). Skyrim in particular was a recent one I tried to get all achievements in, but I would again find myself not really enjoying playing the game simply for playing the game, but rather that dopamine surge from getting an achievement, so when that surge was taking too long, I inevitably quit. Rinse and repeat.
This sort of "gotta go fast" mentality doesn't just limit itself to games, it can also extend to other forms of media, I notice it particularly in the reading scene.
How many times have you seen a video on teaching you how to read a book in a day? Or some challenge to try and read X books in Y number of days? I know I've seen plenty. There's even people who make courses on this sort of speed reading. The secret? They're fucking skimming the damn book. WHAT?? Look, this may be all well and good if you've gotta read a lot for a class, or trying to get to the gist of a self-help book, but this is actively hurts your enjoyment if you're reading say a biography or a novel.
I can kill about 50-150 pages in a day, sometimes a single few-hour sitting barring any distractions or depending the density of the text. My secret? I naturally read faster the more invested in the book I am. By letting myself fully be immersed in the story, I actually read pretty quickly. I don't read to put add a tally to "number of books read", though I do like to log the books I've read in a year for later reflection. It's kind of a paradox, by slowing down I actually get faster and comprehend more.
I guess really what I mean by slowing down is: cut out any background noise, let yourself by immersed in whatever it is you're doing, stop trying to min/max, stop following the meta (unless that meta supports further enjoyment), and enjoy the game at your own pace (i.e. not the pace of others you see on youtube).
You don't have to go this extreme, but I've personally sold my 2nd monitor. This forces me to focus on one task at a time. Granted, I'm on Linux where I can just use a hotkey to switch between virtual desktops with ease. However, this change has lead me to be more mono-task and thus get more done, or enjoy whatever media I'm partaking in more.
As therapist has said, "multitasking isn't real, people are just switching from one task to another really quickly, not doing multiple tasks at the same time).
So, maybe consider this as a sign to make some small changes to how you approach your day-to-day. Maybe it'll help. If it doesn't, maybe take a break from the thing you're doing for a bit and allow yourself to mentally reset. "Stop and smell the roses" is a common saying for a reason.