I have less money now, but I don’t care. I’m much happier being where I am now.
People underestimate just how much work life affects your entire life.
Typically when I play a game I like to explore every nook and cranny, trying to find secrets and glitches and stuff. Lately it just gives me anxiety to start a new game when I know it will be on deck for years. I've been playing through Tomb Raider since 2019 and I'm not finished yet... I think I need to consciously change my play style and expectations, and just barrel through main story lines.
I went over to a younger coworker's apartment last night to play video games, which is a very rare activity for me. Left 4 Dead was a lot of fun a decade ago. He loaded up whatever the latest call of duty zombie horde shooting game is, and it was more stressful than fun. I have an interesting anecdote about stress and Tomb Raider. In 2020 my heart AV nerves all stopped working. My effective heart rate got down to 20-30bpm, and wouldn't increase with demand. A few days before I ended up in the hospital, I tried playing Tomb Raider just to see what would happen. After about 5 minutes my peripheral vision started to black out and I felt like I was having a panic attack!
That also made me notice that, even though I played quite a few single-player games when I was younger, most of my fun with games was on multiplayer/competitive games, it could be a grind to get better but there was a practice and I could feel myself leveling up my skills and playing them better, some up to competitive levels. That's always been more satisfying to me.
Newer high budget single-player games (feels like in the past 10-15 years) also feel much more like an interactive movie than a proper game, I don't want to be clicking to interact with a movie, I like mechanics and figuring out the metagame, I realised that watching something unfold with some interactive action in-between is not really my kind of gaming.
For the last 10 years I've basically stopped playing videogames, my gaming nowadays is mostly getting together with some friends and playing tabletop, it's social, it's fun and you always get to see a different persona of the people you know.
Where else in the world people dont spens most of their lives at work?
I've worked in some manufacturing domains where unions negotiated the ability to essentially opt-out of large amounts of the work year. There were people who would take off Nov-Feb to essentially focus on families during the holidays, hunting, etc.
I think, to a certain extent, the fact that we're highly productive yet have an expectation to work constantly is a measure of our value systems. (Obviously, highly context and culturally dependent.)
I work for a large swedish company in USA. None of my coworkers in sweden work less than 40 hrs, like not even one.
So is having that choice really relevant and does it really make it different than USA.
We need a four-day (32-hour) workweek. Give me a 20% pay cut, I don't care. Most of us here make well over $100k/year. What we need is TIME.
It would be interesting to see how cultural aspects affect this. In the West, it seems like so much of our life/identity is focused on our job. "What do you do for a living?" is one of the most common opening questions upon meeting someone. I wonder if the impact of work life on one's happiness more muted elsewhere.
