The inertia of still things
Not long ago, I was discussing something with my wife. Probably my love of games, I couldn’t say, though that does come up often. Anyway, she opined at the time that I should have become a game designer, which I understand is an off-the-cuff comment based on her understanding of what I love to do more than anything else. Still, it bothered me. Because I should have become a game designer.
I was fairly certain at one point that I would do just that. I had no illusions about the reality of game design, of course, but even the opportunity to be associated so closely with something I’m so in love with had a negating factor on all the negatives, and there were plenty – would have to move to find a studio, would have to claw my way out from thousands of applicants as eager as I was, fairly terrible pay, etc. But it was easy to forget those things, a lot of the time – those few opportunities I had to actually code, as rudimentary as those codings were, made me forget. It was the one “productive” activity I had ever undertaken that affected me in the same way games did – I would be creating something in class and realize that class had ended an hour ago, all the time. And, like as not, I would realize this and bend my head right back to it.
I loved it, as much as I loved gaming itself. But what defeated me was something I hated, something I learned was as married to computer science as death and taxes (at least according to my college system) – math. As a child, I loved math in a similar way, had no issues with the grounded mathematics that measure reality. It was my first experience with Algebra that taught me to hate math with desperation. When I found that computer science carried with it a hefty load of math classes, I did what I was used to doing, what I’d so often done before and so often done since – took the easier choice.
Instead, I completed a Mass Communications degree without ever having any clear idea what to do with it, or any desire to make real use of it, and when I stumbled into my first professional job, I clung to it, and remolded my dreams around it. I assumed in the absence of a tangible goal, unbridled ambition will do the job for you. And it does, for awhile.
But ever since that casual conversation with my wife, it reoccurs to me. I made a casual choice to avoid hard work when it touched on the reality of my future life from that point on. This was not a lunch where I decided on a Philly over a Reuben. I chose to prune off from my possibilities an entire discipline that I loved, because to be certified in it was more difficult than to avoid it.
Ugh. How disgusting that is. And that’s just one of the choices I remember where I looked for the easy path. It probably wasn’t even the most influential. With a few notable exceptions I have unhesitatingly trod the path of least resistance. Now I shy away from anything that results in work of any kind instinctively.
So how does a standing stone choose to roll?
