There is so much fun I was not having while I was frantically trying to fix everything. Sure, I made enough personal time to get in some good collaborative storytelling, but boy howdy I was not doing nearly enough of it. I cannot wait to see the look on my players’ faces when I tell them about the absurdly ambitious new campaign I’ve cooked up, and it’s only getting better from there now that people will actually have time for things.
People ask me, but Joe, won’t you get bored of writing books and running RPGs? And the exciting thing is, I don’t know! Maybe I will! And then there will be so many new cool things to fascinate me. Having kids! Teaching people stuff! Learning seven different martial arts styles and fusing them into an elegant rainbow of practiced violence! Visiting beautiful places with people I love! Debugging my own thought-patterns to fix problems that have annoyed me for years! Maybe as a personal project I’ll climb every mountain on Earth that begins with the letter G. Then I’ll have more stuff to write about! It’ll be great!
I expected to have more or less this reaction, but in the event, I actually have found it rather demotivating; many (though not all) kinds of fun genuinely were more fun when we had to fit them in between dealing with the big problems.
I think, when you get down to it, part of my motivation to have fun and make art and so on was based on the feeling that it was in some sense important to do so—not as important as averting global crises, sure, and maybe only important to me, but still, in some sense, important. But, well, now everything is going to be okay forever, whether I do any of that or not! If a story really needed to be told, if a song needed to be written, if a game needed to be played, it surely would have already happened, seeing as we’ve solved all possible problems.
So it turns out that a surprising amount of what I’d hoped to get around to after all the problems were solved just seems unnecessary at this point; I think that instead of an approach to life oriented around trying to make or change things, it’s time to turn towards appreciating what’s already there.
So all in all, I’m enjoying the future very much—just not in the way I’d expected!
I expected to have more or less this reaction, but in the event, I actually have found it rather demotivating; many (though not all) kinds of fun genuinely were more fun when we had to fit them in between dealing with the big problems.
I think, when you get down to it, part of my motivation to have fun and make art and so on was based on the feeling that it was in some sense important to do so—not as important as averting global crises, sure, and maybe only important to me, but still, in some sense, important. But, well, now everything is going to be okay forever, whether I do any of that or not! If a story really needed to be told, if a song needed to be written, if a game needed to be played, it surely would have already happened, seeing as we’ve solved all possible problems.
So it turns out that a surprising amount of what I’d hoped to get around to after all the problems were solved just seems unnecessary at this point; I think that instead of an approach to life oriented around trying to make or change things, it’s time to turn towards appreciating what’s already there.
So all in all, I’m enjoying the future very much—just not in the way I’d expected!