surviving, not thriving

i have a couple weeks blogging (more-or-less) daily under my belt and i’m surprised i haven’t yet referenced who i consider my godfather of blogging (blogfather?), Austin Kleon. i’ve been subscribed to his newsletter and following his work for years, but it was a recent reread of his book trilogy—Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work!, and Keep Going—that finally sparked this effort.

a recent blog post of his led me to to this article in The Atlantic by Ellen Cushing reflecting on how late-stage pandemic is affecting our brains.

and as someone who watches Sims 4 speed-builds on youtube as a form of comfort while sheltering-in-place, i loved (read: was devastated by) this from Cushing:

Sometimes I imagine myself as a Sim, a diamond-shaped cursor hovering above my head as I go about my day. Tasks appear, and I do them. Mealtimes come, and I eat. Needs arise, and I meet them. I have a finite suite of moods, a limited number of possible activities, a set of strings being pulled from far offscreen. Everything is two-dimensional, fake, uncanny. My world is as big as my apartment, which is not very big at all.

“We’re trapped in our dollhouses,” said Kowert, the psychologist from Ottawa, who studies video games. “It’s just about surviving, not thriving. No one is working at their highest capacity.” She has played The Sims on and off for years, but she always gives up after a while—it’s too repetitive.

Earlier versions of The Sims had an autonomous memory function, according to Marina DelGreco, a staff writer for Game Rant. But in The Sims 3, the system was buggy; it bloated file sizes and caused players’ saved progress to delete. So The Sims 4, released in 2014, does not automatically create memories. PC users can manually enter them, and Sims can temporarily feel feelings: happy, tense, flirty. But for the most part, a Sim is a hollow vessel, more like a machine than a living thing.

woof.

horizontal thinking

i bookmarked an instagram post by writer Elizabeth Gilbert in which she decries the dangers of “horizontal thinking.”

“The most dangerous place in the world for me was lying alone in bed — not sleeping, not reading, but THINKING. And the most dangerous part of my day was that time period between when I woke up and when I stood up. And the longer I extended that time period — the longer I stayed in bed, captivated by what I came to call ‘horizontal thinking’ — the worse off I would be. The disease of my depression wanted me to stay horizontal for as long as possible, where it had me hostage.”

comedian Gary Gulman, who shares mental health and comedy writing tips via his twitter, once said:

or take Gilbert’s advice:

“I created a script to say to my mind: ‘If you are awake enough to tell me that I am history’s biggest piece of shit, then you are awake enough to start the day.’ That empowered me to stand up. And sometimes, standing up is the biggest victory of all.”

business as usual

we’re coming up on one year in a global pandemic.

the other day, a friend passed along these reminders from their therapist:

“… so that you can anchor yourself in how exceptional these life circumstances are right now for nearly everyone: that traumatic stress takes a toll, that new trauma brings forward old trauma, which means that everything gets magnified, that grief is a normative and healthy reaction to trauma and loss, so you will notice it coming up more the longer this pandemic goes on and perhaps even more so once we sense the virus' containment, that regression is an instinctive reaction to uncertainty/change/transition/fear but also how we conserve our energy before growth, and that the social isolation and circadian rhythm (ie, sleep) disruption of winter along with the myth that most of us have internalized to greater or lesser extent of a ‘new year’ being a ‘new beginning’ or a ‘clean slate’ exacerbates rather than relieves symptoms when it feels like just a continuation of the same.”

i pass this along in the hopes that it takes some of the pressure off, as it did for me.

“We want to pretend that, other than the obvious, life is still business as usual. It's not. Many of us are trying to hold ourselves to standards that are unsustainable in these circumstances.”