20 Dec 2021 - Graham
previously: play
Rachel T. shared this lovely poem from last year.
Sidetracked featured Moby’s Play last week.
Tomorrow (2p AKT, kruaradio.org) we’ll listen to the best xmas album of all time.
To quit, all I had to do was not play. As simple as that was, it felt impossible.
Not playing made me feel bad and playing seemed like the only way to stop that bad feeling. I’d neglected my other habits of well-being for more than a year. For more than a year, I’d made a habit of playing video games whenever I felt bad.
Now, just a few months later, it’s difficult to fully appreciate this dilemma. The simple way of describing it is this: I was bored. But boredom can be awful.
During some of my earlier, failed attempts to quit, my boredom veered into anhedonia. Anhedonia is when the abyss stares back. It is an absence of feeling, which is, arguably, worse than feeling bad. Anhedonia tends to pass quickly in terms of objective minutes. It’s hard to sustain a total lack of feeling without slipping into, say, anger at the pointlessness of it all. Of course, it does not pass quickly in subjective time. The abyss feels endless.
Even so, the way out is not out, but through. The key to addiction recovery is distress tolerance. Distress tolerance is the capacity to not solve bad (or no) feelings. This negative capacity is crucial for addiction recovery because the easiest way to escape bad feelings of withdrawal will always be the addiction itself.
To quit, I had to practice paying less attention to my feelings. I had to ignore what I felt like doing because I only felt like playing video games.
This has been a revelation. Or rather, like many revelations, it is a reminder of a common sense truth: Emotions can inform but they can also lie. Emotions are bad predictors of the future and thus bad drivers in the present. Practically, it means that instead of asking: “Do I feel like doing this?” I try to ask: “Do I want to have done this?” For this improved perspective, at least, I can be thankful for my 936 hours of Warzone.
With all this talk of nefariously profitable game companies and intermittent rewards and frustration and addiction you might think I’m trying to shirk responsibility.
In fact, I mean to do the opposite. These missives have been an attempt to claim responsibility. Playing video games was a choice I made over and over again. I must believe it was a choice. Because if it wasn’t a choice, then how did I stop?
Then again, I only stopped after I admitted that I was powerless. This is the first of AA’s twelve steps: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” While I believed playing video games was a choice, I deluded myself into thinking I was in control. I allowed myself to play just a little. But I never played just a little.
So playing wasn’t a choice. It was a habit. Then again, habits are choices repeated. So it was a choice.
This is the paradox we all face all of the time–our choices are both free and forced. And we will find ourselves stuck whenever we pretend they are only one or the other.
Thanks for reading! This is the end of Vol. 3. Perhaps Vol. 4 will start in the new year. Happy Solstice!
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