Designing a Well Lived Life: Checking In (July 2020)

Checking in for July for my "Designing a Well-Lived Life" blogging. This is about making small changes during the year to make larger changes.

This month was a bit hard for me. I felt like I had to re-learn a lot of epiphanies that I've had over the years (Repiphanies? Apparently I'm not the first one to use this word). One of the realizations I keep coming back to is about game development and the reasons I want to do it. For some reason I've attached an inordinate amount of self-worth to the notion of being accepted as a game designer / game developer. I've been interrogating a lot of my beliefs about game design and game development to figure out which are true and which are fantasies that I put there. It's not easy to realize that some of what you've wanted was there because you believed it would give you some credence or cachet in certain circles. It's necessary, though, because in order to do the work that's needed I've had to reassess why I'm designing games at all. I don't expect that I'll be free of this any time soon, but at least I'm making some progress.

With that out of the way, how did I do this month?

  • Dropping expectations: This got a lot of attention this month, in part because of the expectations I've had around game design / development. It also got attention because PyOhio happened this month and I went into it with no expectations of how it would work. I'm finding that when I drop the expectations of how something will play out that I enjoy it more. I've found this with things like reading Gloranta RPG books, as well as how long it'll take me to do a task. Definitely going to practice more with this.

  • Physical Health: Not so great. I've let this slide. I'm getting some walking time here and there, but breaking 2500 steps is a good day.

  • Writing more: Not much blogging, but some writing on the Pepper&Carrot RPG. Still need to work with this.

  • Programming more: I had an intention of doing more with this over the month but that never materialized. This gets back to the "why" question I posted at the top of this post. There's something that I'm not quite able to motivate myself to do and I'm not quite sure why that is. I'll get little spurts of inspiration, but they fizzle out within a few days.

  • Mindfulness: Not really practiced with this as much as I would have liked.

  • Decluttering: There's a section of the basement that needs to go out, but as of yet I haven't been able to take it anywhere. I'm thinking about options.

  • Deeper work: Some days I'm able to manage deeper work, but I've also found myself being rather mindless with social media this month. I think that's in part because there's a lot going on in the world and I'm feeling the need to peripherally keep up with it. This needs more work.

  • Getting out of debt: Making some progress, but it's always slower than I would like. Plus I've noticed myself getting into retail therapy again, though I've been trying to be mindful about not getting sucked into Kickstarters and the like.

Definitely some practice area for August. Will try to post something during the month.


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