EPT
Lately nowadays though my mind is elsewhere other than StarCraft. The moment came to me when during a game I had a soft jolt of revelation come over me. Why do I play StarCraft? Do I really want to win? Why do I want to win? Shouldn't I put all of my effort into playing? That's a strange feeling, to not have a strong urge to win but I was sitting on my chair thinking about how empty the whole affair was. Winning I felt was an empty pursuit in the greater scope of life.
I've been thinking about what I'll do in my future, but I'm not sure if I find great purpose in the future or life or anything existing. It's hard to feel motivated to study or perform any hardworking tasks when you feel ultimately all of the accomplishments you've made will amount to nothing. In a hundred years, my name will become a distant figment of the past, in maybe a thousand or tens of thousands of years everything about me will have been forgotten, and possibly the human race.
I'm also no more significant than any other person living in the world. I can accomplish much, any human can. The human can inexhaustibly churn out a productive lifetime of hard work and studying. The mind is powerful and brain cells can be easily trained to perform better and optimize in certain tasks and fields. Yet, at the same time the work makes no sense. Feeling happy has no meaning, feeling sad has no meaning, the very state of existing feels devoid of meaning.
The trials I go through aren't unique. Undoubtedly many, possibly millions of humans that have lived before me have thought the same ideas and posed the same questions, citing how humans before them had the same questions.
I've tried to understand other people's perspectives better, but in the grand scheme of things I guess everyone thinks of themselves as the main character of the universe. I feel the world is a lot more interconnected now. People have grown up with different childhoods, memories, interests, lives that are shaped differently with different outlooks, I can never truly understand intimately what another person thinks. One can only delve so far into another's mindset, from the irrationally insane or the extraordinary genius.
When I go about trying to study I think about leaving my options open, going up the narrow path of higher education in American society into college. Thinking what I want to do in life I think about Day9's words in his podcast, "Having a Good Mindset" where he lists five key ideas to improving in StarCraft, ideas, he briefly mentions in the beginning, can also be applicable to real life. In one of his ideas he mentions in roughly similar terms, "Always have a game plan."
The game plan is meant to be an overarching plan that can provide the framework that you pursue in all of your actions. An example of such a game plan is starving your opponent out. One such way to go about the game plan is to siege your opponent with siege tanks, effectively containing them. As long as your game plan, a decision you make before the game is started, your gameplay will be solid. Day9 cites that the player who is purely talented mechanically will have less success than the player who has a game plan because their learning and gameplay isn't guided by this pregame decision. Otherwise, in the absence of a game plan people can have nonsensical armies made at nonsensical times that prove ineffective. People have haphazard play that bends every which way at the whim of what the opponent does without a goal they themselves are working towards.
In the same way, I must have a game plan to guide my life decisions and learning. The monotonous problems about life is that there are always permanent unknowns, and you go into a string of why's trying to find the ultimate game plan that provides the whole of the framework that tries to encapsulate life.
I ask myself why I go to college, why I want my options open, why I want to get a job, why if I ever do, would I want kids, to start a family, be happy, have a stable living environment, why do I exist, why I want to continue living, and other drivel.
Sure, I guess it's easy to encase life into smaller game plans. You can say if you want your options open as a game plan, you go to college or some form of higher education. I'm also motivated to have direction in some way.
I've forged my thoughts through my years of living, mostly in StarCraft where I've met extraordinary individuals who I would otherwise not have met in real life as they live far away and in extraordinary circumstances. I've also just read and scrounged up whatever bits and pieces are lying around. I know what happens when life is going "nowhere."
There's a period of stagnation that easily happens. Somewhere between the transition of high school education and having to direct your own life people get lost in the shuffle sometimes. I've seen a lot of dreams that never amounted to anything because the bitter reality of the person's work never reaching those heights finally materialized at the critical point in their lives where all of their work came to fruition. There's never a moment where all the pieces to the desired goal magically fall into place, the journey is what makes for the ending.
In a way for ages past I see mistakes repeated and I often say to myself I shouldn't fall into the same mistake yet at the same time I go ahead and make the mistake. There's a certain aloofness to a long term danger because the urgency of the situation and the danger of disaster never directly affects the person in the moment. The theme of only acting when the situation is in too dire of straits to fix is common among humans all of the time.
All the time I'm thinking to myself in certain situations, do I write this blog and feel horribly tired the morning after or do I wait to write this blog post until the day after and get plenty of sleep? I have a moment of self awareness and predictability of events considering I've seen this scenario and many others play out hundreds of times, each time taking note of them. Do I study now or do I play StarCraft and then deeply regret not studying and have a hard time in school the day after? Do I study and prepare for the SAT's, for college, or do I goof off and regret not studying more when I was a high school student when I become an adult?
In the end I feel life really is a repeated journey that many others have taken. No doubt I don't think people's lives are terrifically extraordinary, only the mere treading of roads that have been worn by many others.
