So in my day, I played a lot of video games, whether I play Fallout or The Sims or RuneScape, just to make it clear, I'm not playing RuneScape anymore.
I've found that pretty much every game is common and that's the idea that you get to unlock new abilities, new opportunities, fly to new areas of the map and use better things when you upgrade your character, your characteristics and your skills.
You know, if you want to wear rune armor in RuneScape, you've got to grind it out, fight like a billion goblins or guards, and grind your level of protection to level 40. If you want to make some money at all in the Sims, you have to choose a talent, max it out, and then you can start making money.
And in Fallout, New Vegas, you'll be absolutely controlled by a flying bug if you try to make it to New Vegas before you update your character and your stats and your perks and everything. Even though this is a kind of shower idea, it really made me think about how life works exactly the same way.
It really opens up a lot of new possibilities in life by improving your skills, growing your abilities, gaining positive character traits. You're going to move to new areas of the map and you're going to start making more money and you're going to be able to use more things.
And while this is pretty clear, I feel like we forget this a lot as human beings. We rely a lot on performance. We want to pay off our student loans, or we want to have a girlfriend, or we want to move to a better part of town from our shitty apartment.
We get really wrapped up in all the positive things we want to see happen to us, totally ignoring the fact that in order for these things to actually happen, or at least have a better chance of happening, some kind of personal change possibly needs to happen.
We're often tempted to look for solutions to our issues outside of ourselves, but we forget that our situation is always just a sign of our character, the character we're playing as. Sometimes, our ever-growing debt is just a symbol of our bad spending habits and our unwillingness to postpone gratification as an individual.
Our lack of friends may be a result of our lack of trust and low self-esteem, but that's not something we want to realize. We don't want to admit that we may be the ones that need to be worked on. Imagine going to the hospital one day, when you wake up with pain all over your body.
You may have, I don't know, a history of bone disease or something in your family, and you're very worried and afraid. So, you go to the doctor in search of answers and the doctor says, "Hmm, pain, right?"
"Here, have some painkillers. "You consider him a pretty lousy doctor because he doesn't even want to analyze what the root cause of the problem is.
He's just treating the symptoms, but that's exactly how we sometimes cope with our own problems and ourselves. It's like you're standing on the beach, trying to drive the waves away and stop your hands from touching the shore. It's just so pointless.
Maybe you can avoid a few of them, but the waves are just going to keep coming. To say all of this, one basic concept that really helped me trend my life upwards is to concentrate on internal change rather than external improvement.
That will make me feel more secure and give me a little bit of swagger in my step instead of shopping for a trendy new wardrobe, I stop myself and I wonder, what is something that I can focus on internally that will help me achieve the exact same objective?
You know, without having to buy anything or get anything, how can I feel confident? That typically implies getting off my ass and developing more gym discipline, having a great workout, starting to eat healthier.
These are things that will help me feel a sense of success and make me feel proud of who I am, which will make me feel much more positive than I've ever been able to do with a new shirt.
Typically, the best solutions to our issues are inside us and they're very inexciting and they're not as stimulating as buying or having anything, but they're the real way to solve the question.
And the good thing about concentrating on internal change rather than external improvement is that you are building a kind of resilience to life's turmoil, because the reality is everything you get or gain or any external upgrade you may make can be taken away from you in the blink of an eye, whether it's a nation-weeping pandemic.
And you end up losing a job you've worked really hard to get, or maybe the economy is collapsing, and you're losing all the savings you've made, and if you've spent all your time putting your eggs in the external basket, and it's all gone overnight, then there's almost nothing left.
But if you've invested your time internally investing in yourself, even if you lose all the stuff you've focused on externally, you've built a character to come back from turmoil. You've built skills that make yourself and your family important to your society.
You can create something out of nothing and you can be someone who generates successful results naturally, rather than someone who only focuses on altering the results themselves without developing the requisite character to actually produce them consistently.
So just remember this relationship between building your character and upgrading your life, to wrap up this whole thing. If you concentrate on upgrading your character, then the results seem to take care of themselves naturally.
Thank you for reading my blog, and I'm going to make my life more interesting. And I hope I can find some friends here who are interested in stuff that I'm also interested in.