I hate patterns.
I hate patterns and somehow everything around me seems to fall into a pattern. We, in fact, follow something worse than a pattern, schedules. We have body cycle schedules, we have sleep schedules, we have work schedules, we have office schedules, school schedules and every other thing we do has a schedule.
I’ve seen patterns in places I never expected. Even pests in a house follow patterns. The pests come out at night, they leave trails at the same spots every single day, and come back after counted months after a pest control.There seems to be nothing that does not follow a pattern.
“Be like water-” even water has a pattern. It rains in specific months, it flows down the same rivers and goes into the sea following the same route every year. You know what you are going to see when it rains, the same areas are going to be waterlogged, and you know there is a pattern to it. The only thing that changes is the quantity.
Though having a pattern reduces the need for thinking and it makes your life easy. But life is supposed to be fun and not easy. Life is supposed to thrill you and not be easy. It’s a long ride back home every single day only because you travel the same route every single day. No one otherwise complains about long drives, or long drives for good trips, because it breaks the pattern.
Take long ride, make wrong decisions, do what you want to do, but don’t have a pattern. Patterns look good only on paper, and not on the big screen.
All of us are messy, we are all insane, all of us have our own fears, and our own weaknesses. We are all flawed and none of us were created perfect. We don’t do things we are supposed to, we go halfway through and never know what to do next. While someone cannot do the first half but knows exactly what to do next.
Just like pieces of a puzzle we are all chipped from the sides. Chipped, dented, grooved, cut, damaged. We are all incomplete with everything we have around us and anyone cannot fill up the void. We were born with it and we are meant to live with that void until our last breath.
But then there is someone, not anyone but someone, here around us, somewhere. Someone who compliments us in every possible way and the only problem is, they are hard to find. There is someone who loves how messy you are and has already fallen in love with your insanity. They have the same fears as you are they are going to hold your hand through it.
While most of us are afraid of the consequences of every action we take, this so randomly fitting puzzle piece, is the one who makes choices easy. The choice is, keep the puzzle piece with you and never lose it, and then select everything else that you can.
This one so perfectly fitting puzzle piece is someone who falls in love with your chaos. The way you are chaotic about the things you do and the way you panic when something goes wrong. The one who fixes your life from all the mess that you ever had and calms your soul. The One; compliments your chaos, to make it beautiful.
I haven’t read a book in a long time, I haven’t worked out, I haven’t been working, and I am not even close to the targets I had set for the mid of the year. We are halfway through the year and I haven’t met a single goal I had in my mind and I owe everything to my gaming addiction.
Yes, I’m addicted. I spend mind-numbing hours on gaming every single day and it just won’t stop. I used to be more active and used to be a lot more productive, but now I sit on this chair, have my mouse flicking and then banging on the desk when I miss my shots or mess up by a fraction of a second.
I’m not getting better either. I play exactly the same as I used to a few months back when I first started. The only thing that changed is the number of hours I put in the game now. I’m still a potato at life, at gaming, but now, I am also a couch potato.
Sadly, this is not the first time gaming addiction has taken over me. It was about 7 years back when everything around me was changing and I never wanted it to change. Everything did change though and I think if I tried to stop it instead of gaming, things might have been different. The rush lasted for 6 months and then it was all calm.
It took over me 4 years back as well. When everything seemed to not be stable. Everything was so volatile that even before I could try to hold it and keep it for myself, it vanished. 4 years back, the rush lasted 3 months but was intense. I was a couch potato for 12 hours every day.
And now it is here again. This time, I want the things around me to change. My lack of interest in everything around me is overwhelming. I want the things to change, and I tried for a decent 11 months before I gave up and stopped waiting. I am still trying but I don’t wait no more. It just seems worthless waiting for replies for months just to hear a ‘no’. You could have said that months ago! Some, don’t even reply.
I’ve been in the rush for a good 7 months – on and off – but lately, it’s just capturing me and pulling me down. I used to go for about 1 hour when it began and then it went up to 5-6 hours a day and then the surge stopped, but then it came back in and it is just getting worse. All the blog days I missed were to gaming.
I’ve tried uninstalling them, I just reinstall after a few days, I’ve tried telling my friends to stop calling me over for a duo game, I called them a few days later. I’ve tried limiting my hours, I’ve tried playing offline games to reduce my hours, I’ve tried cellphone gaming, it just doubles my hours. Nothing works.
I guess uninstalling them today after a nice 11-hour run, and after being burdened with work, wasn’t the best idea. I should have done that 11-hours ago. It won’t last long. But as long as it works, I’m down.
P.S. If I miss a few more days in a row, then send help.
All of us run on pure cynicism. We are driven only by our own self-interests and we aren’t bothered, moved, budged or affected by anything else. We do what we wish to do and hardly ever bow down to the wants of someone else.
Lack of interest in schooling and giving up on the idea that education is going to be beneficial; the idea of comparing education with one’s credibility and ability to run a task always eventually leads to being treated like a machine that prints out currency and that is what makes it so uninteresting. Most of us already have a source for income – we are streamers, bloggers, singers, YouTubers, artists and even freelancers – even though our path won’t pay us for the next few decades, it still will pay someday.
We use multiple small doses of dopamine to run away from our responsibilities, true achievements, and real success. We use social media likes, page followers, drugs, cigarettes, sex, and alcohol to fill up that dopamine void. We are giving in to our addictions.
Horrible sleep schedules, lack of exercise, numbing our minds with video games, running away from reading, watching videos to learn, listening to audiobooks, sitting for lectures from our home, and replacing everything that took some efforts with something a lot easier. Poor diet, bad attention span, depression or rather the ‘self-pity’ we call depression because it makes our life easier and people start expecting less out of you. Everything ruins our internal monologue, it ruins the way we talk to our own self.
Everything kills our thought structure and is going to affect us, we will see it soon. Slower mental calculations, slow processing of ideas, blanking out, not keeping up in a conversation, feeling left out in a discussion, not being the witty and quick old you, everything we do today, will affect our tomorrow.
Psychomotor retardation, slowing down of physical movement and mental thoughts. The way we are working, we might see it soon, in ourselves, around us, and everywhere.
The only way we can stop today– well, we cannot stop it today, we will always start it from ‘tomorrow’. Things are changing and so are we, but the way we change, is it constructive or is it destructive? Do we rise like the little saplings? Or let someone or do “I” step on the sapling? You don’t know, but for once, let’s listen to a piece of really wise advice.
“Hopefully, your symptoms are nothing more than an indication that you’re not really interested in the life you’re currently living. If you’re having difficulty learning, it may be because you’re not inspired by the things you’re trying to learn. Sleeping lots and thinking lots may indicate you’re going through a process that will ultimately help you restructure your life in a way that gives you more happiness and more motivation. Your inability to easily follow instructions could simply mean that you’re quite naturally distracted by your inner process of change.
Perhaps it’s time for you to quietly and patiently assess your current circumstances, and to come up with a simple plan for changing the way you live. It’s not uncommon for people in your age group(22-28) to go through this sort of process, because it’s a time of reevaluating the assumptions about life that you learned in childhood. Best wishes”
– A wise man on Quora
I had a dream.
All of us, all the people I know, all the people I spend most of my day with, people I hang out with, all us were sitting by a bonfire by a lake, on the sandy-rocky lakeside. We had our tents set up, and marshmallows cooking on the fire. A cup of boiling hot water by each one of us. We were drinking something, I don’t know what it was, I don’t know it’s taste and I don’t even remember if any of us had a sip of it. It was just… there.
It was chilling cold and the fire was just enough tall and red, to be comforting warm. We sat there and one of us just started speaking something. I was too lost in the smoke rising from the fire, to be hearing what he said. But it just sounded, pleasing. There was a melody in it.
I heard a rhythm running in the background. It felt it was too loud because I could feel my chest thumping, but it might just be my heart racing from all the caffeine I had through the day. But I felt it more towards my back than my chest but it was loud and it was in perfect sync with the melody I heard.
“Hey, hey! Are you with me?” I tried to turn around but couldn’t. She hugged me from the back and kissed my neck, as I sat with my knees curled up. It was her heartbeat, that I felt.
I looked around and there was everyone I knew. They were talking and… singing. The ‘cooldude76@gmail.com’ was playing the guitar and everyone hummed, as the ‘luckiest one’, shared his love story for the 17th time in all the years that I had known him. He still said it with the same passion.
“Yeah, yes, I’m here,” I said, but I wasn’t. I don’t know who she was, it might be the one I was thinking about all along, but I had lost her, years ago.