Also:
I miss the old Kanye. I also miss Sea of Thieves, For Honor, Grand Theft Auto Online (this concludes the video game portion of this listing), Facebook, Twitter (social media), two cups of coffee a day, a beer every day (mind altering substances), and falling in love (top 3 feelings in the world along with orgasms and sleep). I have been fortunate enough to never really have any serious addictions in my life. I puffed my step mom’s cigarette once when she wasn’t looking and decided that was gross. I watched my weed-head cousin go from my favorite cousin to having no direction in life and 3 whole ass children with the most psychotic woman I have ever encountered in real life. That and anticipated anxiety of possibly having to fake a drug test for a job has kept me far far away from marijuana.
I have never been exposed to the hard stuff. The closest I have ever come to cocaine is finding a straw in my step-mother’s car after her alleged coke-head boyfriend had driven it (a lot to unpack there, but today aint the day). The closest I ever came to crack was encountering individuals whose lives were clearly deteriorating because of it. No exposure to heroin or any opioids outside of television ever. So all in all, I have been fairly privileged in avoiding real addiction. But everybody is addicted to something.
Most people either don’t know or have not admitted to their addictions. Some people prefer to view themselves as above addiction. That to me is one of man’s most fatal errors. You can’t solve a problem if you don’t see a problem. If you are fat, you are probably addicted to food. Aside from the opioid crisis in America, we live in an age where epidemic addictions are to seemingly mild things such as the coffee or social media, and thus we don’t pay them much mind. They usually aren’t killing anyone and at the most are just making people’s lives a bit more difficult.
Anyway, this isn’t to be an analysis of addiction in America. Really there are just two things I want to talk about. One is the addictions I most recently have decided to kick and two is yet another genius invention I have come up with.
For Honor is a medieval multiplayer fighting game. It uses unique controls to provide an unparalleled experience of medieval melee combat between 3 factions: Knights, Vikings, and Samurai. This game fed my competitive nature. It took me all the way back to previous fighting games I once wanted to be good at including Fight Night and Street Fighter. When I play a game like this, I want to win no matter what. So of course there are ups and downs. I can’t always win and being the best in the world at a video game is unlikely for someone in his 30s with a full time job. But I played this game every single day for an entire year, taking a month break in between (relapse). The last open-ended game that had me this heavy was Grand Theft Auto Online, which I managed to kick when I made enough money to buy and pimp out all the cars I wanted before heists came out. I stopped playing For Honor about a month ago. Why?
Sea of Thieves is a multiplayer open-world XBox/PC cross platform exclusive pirate game. It allows you to take on the role of a pirate with a ship and a crew of real players and explore a map that contains other real pirate players. The gameplay is actually quite limited but for me, Sea of Thieves was Grand Theft Auto on water. Ultimately the game became about grinding to the highest possible levels and making as much money as possible to buy the best customizations for my ship and my pirate. Not to say that I wasn’t having fun, but grinding in this manner was less about the fun and more about optimal leveling and banking. If I were a Twitch streamer, it might be ok. As a regular dude with regular responsibilities, eventually you ask yourself “why am I putting this kind of time into this?” It’s my addictive nature, which I actively ignore sometimes.
When I was in college, everyone was playing World of Warcraft. In the demanding environment where I got my education, addictive gaming was a means of shattering the entire process. This was ironic considering the education was geared specifically toward video game development. Clearly we were all gamers and one of the biggest and most addictive games of all time had come out. I refused to touch it. To this day I have still never played WoW or any MMO for that matter because I have always been self-aware enough to know that diving into that world would be like signing up for The Matrix.
The MMOs never got me. But the almost-MMOs did. And that is where I fucked up. I spent the last weekend actively not playing Sea of Thieves because I have decided to no longer play games that are not finite. Playing a game that has an end allows me to dive into my addiction as needed but ultimately have to come back to the real world when there is no more game left to play. Yes yes, I know. That’s like not smoking crack and instead smoking some kind of unique brand of crack that is going out of business. That is the curse of introspection. You know yourself well enough not to expose yourself to the worst things, but being so in tune with yourself means you will walk the line because you are confident that you know the line. Fortunately with such mild addictions, rock bottom is just looking up after a year and realizing I haven’t done anything constructive with my free time all year.
I usually end on a cool line like that, but I also gave up another addiction. Facebook. To continue with the crack metaphor, I didn’t give up on this one because that crack was just too much. I have just slowly been realizing how much this crack sucks and don’t really want to put up with it anymore. Facebook’s news feed is designed to keep you scrolling for the rest of your life. Facebook shares what other people I follow are doing to excess. I don’t want to know what anyone has liked or commented on and I damn sure don’t want people to know what I am liking and commenting on. Facebook recently started giving me notifications for friend suggestions. I love notifications. I HATE notifications for things that I do not want to know about. I have always had a love-hate relationship with Facebook since I first joined it in college. That relationship has become significantly more hate than love over the years. Hopefully this is the end..
I hope Facebook goes out of business and Mark Zuckerberg goes to jail. I know that sounds harsh but if Zuck did go to jail it obviously would be super awesome comfortable jail, not butt-rape anal heroin jail.
Ok..
Now that I have expressed my hatred for Facebook, let me pull a complete 180 and expose myself as an admirer of Fuckerberg’s genius (this nigga is my age and has a made approximately 70,000 times what I will make in my lifetime). I want to create an addictive app that essentially helps people kick their addictions. The app would essentially play like a game on all of the things that make other apps and games addictive. Notifications. Gifts. Progress statistics. A feed. But the entire purpose of the app is to note your addictions, be them food, social media, drugs, alcohol, etc, and essentially allow you to set goals and mark progress in getting rid of them. The evil genius of it is that it is basically using crack cocaine in order to help a heroin addict recover. The humanity of it is that the app can’t really do that level of harm. That’s the theory at least. Aside from my many basic addictions, another one of my problems is that I don’t follow through on ideas. All of that in another post tho. Go read that then get off the internet and go do something constructive you loser..
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