Having played through the main story in Final Fantasy and consequently feeling a bit lost as what to do next since the story was the driving force keeping me engaged with the game, I decided to take a closer look at leveling the other jobs I was interested in and had already started on earlier, only to not really feel that feeling of purpose that kept me going. I still intend to level those jobs at some point, and have been doing so sporadically, but the thing that ended up really catching my focus in recent days was crafting and gathering, primarily because of some cosmetics I ended up wanting that were gated behind those activities.

I have to admit, despite having heard that the crafting and gathering in Final Fantasy XIV is supposed to be great, I was very skeptical since it isn’t usually something that I find overly interesting in games; it has for the most part just felt like extra steps from having something simply be a drop from a mob or a quest reward, and despite having studied a bit of economics the market aspect of it hasn’t really captured me either. Then again, I notice now, the problem might be that the implementations I had seen before were made either in a way that I find boring (i.e. Assassin’s Creed) or simply poorly (i.e. World of Warcraft), where crafting is naught more than getting the ingredients and pressing a button.

Yet here, crafting and gathering both, are separate classes (or jobs, as the game tends to call classes), with a good 20+ skills. Sure, especially for gathering which I have done more of, there are a lot of skills that end up doing the same thing with different cost and efficacy, but it is still a degree of actual decision-making that I have yet to see from any such system before. In World of Warcraft, the biggest decision is simply where to gather, the rest is more or less running in a circle and hope something interesting happens to be on the way while dodging enemies and hoping not to get dismounted; in Final Fantasy, you have skills that point you to the nearest node and make you permanently stealthed to the local fauna meaning you can focus on the actual gathering of things instead of getting derailed by annoying things like combat with trivial mobs.

Sidenote: I’m one of those probably strange people that actually kind of enjoyed archeology in World of Warcraft—but I was also lucky enough never to be forced to do it to get any relevant power increases, due to not playing during a time when that was possible—with the only thing really annoying me about it was all of the trash mobs one tended to have to deal with while working on the digs. Sure, it was a lesser problem when one went back to do it in older content, but it was really annoying in current content.

The gathering itself is also a lot more engaging and involved, in that while the nodes are common what’s on them might not be, and even if it is especially for the quests one tends to need to gather it in high quality meaning the different skills one has at one’s disposal tend to come in very handy. Then come the decisions of when to use those skills, since while they do not have a cooldown you do have gathering points—mana, essentially—which regenerates somewhat slowly, so you can’t just blast out all of the skills on every node, meaning you have to think how to achieve whatever goal you have in mind in the most efficient way possible. This then also extends to things like collectables, that have their own separate mini-game allowing you to try to make their collectability as high as possible, and while the primary skills there do not require any GP, boosting them does, and maximizing collectability without them is rather unlikely. Gear also helps all of this along, increasing chance for HQ items or GP or merely the chance to gather something in the first place, meaning there is some real actual depth to it all.

Now, I am still a very goal-oriented person and I don’t think I would end up running around gathering things just for the fun of it, but I have to admit the time I have spent gathering has been going by surprisingly quickly and I find myself looking for reasons to keep going.

It really is a strange feeling, realizing that I didn’t dislike some activity, but that I merely disliked it when it was implemented poorly and having only seen such implementations I couldn’t really imagine what it would be like to do it when it was implemented well.

The past month or so has been very, well, not busy but self-indulgent, in that I have chosen to prioritize my time in Eorzea over other concerns, even personal goals such as keeping up with this blog. It has been equal parts freeing and exhausting; on one hand it has been lovely not to have to think too much about other concerns and properly engross myself in a story and another world so completely, on the other hand there is always a toll taken when not tending to one’s obligations or goals: the feeling of failure.

Considering it has to a degree been a conscious choice for me to ignore those other concerns that feeling is somewhat dampened through me having chosen it, yet at the same time I can’t help but look at the things I feel I should have done and feel dejected having not done them. What doesn’t help it that I find it difficult to pinpoint to which degree it was a choice of mine, and to which degree it was my obsessiveness—not quite sure this is the right word, but I’ll come to that—taking over.

You see, it is all fine and good to frame something as a choice, yet when the alternative seemed to be almost a paralyzing unwillingness to act due to a desire to do something else and the sadness resulting from not doing it, how much of a choice was really made? More importantly, what does this say of me and my mind that I have such a overriding need to fulfill my current want that I become all but incapable of taking care of other things? Is this all merely learned behavior from having the opportunity to indulge myself for so long, or is it a symptom of a low degree of mental energy available to override this more instinctual behavior in favor of more long-term thinking? Am I merely unlucky, and need a higher degree of mental energy in order to override these instincts?

Now there are things which I have managed to keep running during this time, with more or less difficulty, and as always keeping them running has been what has provided some measure of accomplishment and relief to the whole situation for me—even though in many cases the whole reason they have been kept running is external supervision or support in those endeavors which means a social cost to not doing them instead of merely a personal one—which makes it feel all the more strange that I should sabotage myself in such a manner.

Overall, it is a strange situation to be in, being aware of what is going wrong to a certain degree yet being unable to stop oneself, thus a feeling of having failed making it yet harder to stop oneself since what is the point, I’ve already failed? Doesn’t help that staying focused and indulging in the obsession is what keeps such thoughts at bay, further reinforcing the desire to keep indulging.

A strange spiral to have been in, one into which I will doubtless fall again in due time, but for now I think I can see the end of this incarnation, and the opportunity to enjoy my adventures in another world in a more productive manner.

Still adventuring in Eorzea, not found the time to really sit down and write. I know, already happened last week without notice or mention, but I simply do not have the energy for it at this time.

There are a lot of things we as humans do, that we do out of convention or habit, because it is the “way things have always been done”. These conventions tend to be rather slow to change, exactly because once they take hold they are somewhat ingrained in the way we do things, and change is always difficult, especially when a larger amount of people are involved. Change means all of them have to agree to some level on the new way of doing things, otherwise you risk any potential gain from the new and hopefully improved way of doing things being diluted by the increased difficulty in connecting with the people who prefer the old way, for one reason or another.

Because changing these conventions is so difficult once they have been established, education plays a huge part in either maintaining them, or when talking about large scale efforts to standardize on something new, changing them. If you are able to educate children in the new way of doing something, the old way will eventually die out as the practitioners of it age and die. Depending on what exactly the convention is, something like legislation may also be enough, if the official way of doing something is changed—like say, currency—people will generally adapt to the new way of doing things because of the other mostly established convention of following the law and societal rules in general.

That was all a long way of prefacing what I have been thinking about, namely currency. Or, to be more specific, the denominations of it, and more generally the way we have structured our numbers with the decimal system.

Pretty much everyone outside of the USA—who cling on to the imperial system for measurement—has become rather accustomed to viewing most things from this base 10 mindset, both when it comes to things like the metric system as well as the separation of currency into the currency itself and cents or something like it—I am sure there are other exceptions to this as always, but I’m looking at this from what I know. This is of course rather convenient, since we can apply the same type of shorthands for many different types of calculations and approximations we do, and don’t have to learn different ways of thinking for something like measuring and paying, but is it really optimal?

I admit, I like it rather much and find the imperial system somewhat annoying to work with—not that I have to work with it much or at all—and find that doing things like multiplication on base 10 is much easier than with most other things, but is that merely because that’s what I’m used to and have learned? Many people don’t seem to have any problem working in the imperial system, and it has survived this long despite the derision it at times receives from the outside, so is there some hidden merit to it?

There was an interesting video I saw a while back about old currency, specifically in England, and one of the things pointed out in it was the to modern sentiments strange thing of being partially based on steps of 240 instead of 100, which on the surface feels a lot less convenient and confusing, yet does come with the advantage of making things like division by 3 a lot easier. Of course, for most applications, merely using a repeating three is accurate enough, so it’s not really a problem necessarily, but it is still something that has caused me to question more the reason behind some of the conventions that we hold, or more so made me more aware of the potential value in having different ways of doing things available and keeping a more open mind. Because I admit, I was very much in the “the imperial system is dumb”-crowd, and now I’m not quite so sure—even if having to convert from imperial to have a better gauge of the size of something in our modern US-centric world does get rather annoying.

I sit here, reveling in the feeling of accomplishment of having once more folded and put away my laundry, and am left pondering on why these most mundane of tasks seem to take so much energy and effort to get going on. It is, once more, something I had been putting off for several days, a personal record in speed really, usually it remains undone until I have finished dirtying the pile of clean laundry again and it goes back into the washing machine—the filling of which, itself, is also a task left to the very last moment.

It is such a strange thing, feeling the overwhelming pressure of effort that is required to start such simple tasks, and then every time rediscovering the feeling of elation and accomplishment at having done the task and not being pressured by needing to complete it anymore. Even before starting, I most of the time know how minute it is and how quickly it goes, yet the feeling of impossibility remains always, preventing me from even starting.

It seems to me, this experience cannot be an universal one, for then almost nothing in this world would get done, yet looking at others it seems still to be rather widespread, which leaves me bewildered as to how the world runs as well as it does, or is it all merely a façade? Perhaps it is, as some say, a sign of some sort of neurological divergence on my part, and the masses have a easier time with it; but how am I to know, I know only my experience, my reality, and can relate to the realities of others only through this lens. Whatever someone describes to me, will be distorted by my own perspective, my own experience.

I take a sip of water, and ponder.

Is the problem perhaps even the opposite? While there is certainly a pressure to accomplish such tasks, the postponing of them also works for a rather significant while—for some definition of works—and with the distractions offered by modern life to take one away from such unpleasant pressure, there are precious few opportunities for the mind to get to the point of actually starting such tasks. Once the postponing has been started, it tends to become a self-perpetuating cycle, since one knows it is something that should already have been taken care of yet remains undone, and a certain level of shame of having put it off for so long makes starting that much more difficult.

Strangely, even now, writing this, I notice some of that very same resistance, some of that effort of forcing myself to do something, and finding it all the harder because I am for once actually writing this well ahead of time. It feels so strange, that even for things which I do enjoy doing—namely, writing—there is so much resistance to actually doing so, and my mind keeps wanting to do something lighter, easier, more distracting. Is it merely because I am struggling to find what I want to say? Another example of my mind wanting to flee adversity, instead of confronting it and dealing with it? Is this why, when wanting to write a book, I ended up stopping so soon, because it felt like this pressure was popping up all too often, and I don’t know how to handle it with such frequency, and it ended up causing me to be stressed out by the whole process of writing creatively?

Perhaps, in the case of the book, I was trying to do too much. Perhaps, I need to train myself to handle such pressure better, and it was coming from too many places at once. There is no real reason for the book to be a completely lost cause, merely because I have not written anything in the last while; the foundation is there, I can pick up and continue when I am ready. Maybe being kinder to myself was the key all along, not creating a standard for myself that I cannot achieve, and accepting myself and what I can achieve as I am, being happy when I go beyond what I thought possible, and kind when I do not; nobody is at their best all of the time.

I go and put the kettle on, tea would do nicely after this excursion into my mind I think.