socialization – Philoquialisms

Weekly status update [0055/????]

Running a little late this week, but it’s for a good reason, honest.

Most of my spare time was spent playing videogames, primarily Horizon: Zero Dawn. I’ve been enjoying that game quite a bit. Its controls are (mostly) less janky than the Assassin’s Creed titles I’ve been playing recently, and although I thought I knew where the story was going, it took a couple of unexpected twists that I’ve quite enjoyed. And Aloy is a delightful main character, a smart, self-assured young woman who is supremely competent at beating the tar out of robot dinosaurs. More like her, please.
Evening EDF4.1 runs continue apace. I’ve still been streaming several of them… but no one comes to watch, so I’ll probably stop doing that sometime soon.
I’m a little over halfway through the third season of The Expanse, which continues to be excellent. It’s without a doubt the best “traditional science fiction” show I’ve seen in a very long dime.
Thursday night’s Tabletop Simulator play went quite well. The big game was Aeon’s End, a game I had only played once before. I still think it’s a very good game, if a touch slow… but presumably that slowness will abate as people get used to, y’know, playing the game.
The reason I’m running late with this: I spent most of Friday hosting Inverse Phase, one of my favorite chiptune musicians and an old online friend/acquaintance. He lives out of an RV now, and parked at my place while we went to JD’s Barbecue for some killer brisket and hit up several thrift shops looking for old tech. (The best thing we found was an original NES controller in good shape, alas… but those are pretty rare.) It was nice to visit with someone, for sure! And you should check out his music. I’m particularly fond of his cover albums; his Pretty Hate Machine song-for-song covers are amazing, and his version of “Drive” I find almost as affecting as the original.

Now to get back to HZD. I’m so close to the end. So close.

Socializin’ and shootin’

For the last week or so, I’ve been playing Earth Defense Force 4.1 online with friends almost every night.

The game itself, as mentioned before, is kind of a mess. But it’s a ton of fun to play online, and I’ve found myself really looking forward to the nightly sessions. (I missed last night due to a very late nap, and was disappointed when I finally woke up to see that it was too late to get started.)

Part of that “looking forward” is definitely just the joy of running around and shooting giant insects with rifles and lasers, but a big part of it is the socialization that comes with the game.

Neither of the other two regular players are that chatty¹, but there’s a certain amount of camaraderie that comes from playing a game together. EDF is the sort of game where, for most of the missions, we can work independently, running around on the map and doing our own thing. We call out the big events and talk about movies and television while we pew-pew our way to victory.

Sometimes, though, the mission requires greater coordination. I usually call the shots on those levels, and that engenders a completely different type of joy from socializing: working together on a thing, doing that thing, and coming out successful at the other end is the sort of results that we are biologically hard-wired to really enjoy, and a hard-fought virtual battle tickles most of the same bits of our brains that surviving the real thing did back in our just-past-the-primates distant past.

And, really, it’s just nice to hear other people’s voices for a couple of hours every night.

I’ve mentioned before that a lack of regular social interaction the biggest issue I’ve had since I retired. Maybe the solution is as simple as getting a regular online game group going. I’ve never had a lot of success with this over the long term; usually one or more of the people involved get tired of whatever game we’re playing after a week or two and the whole thing falls apart. The last game we stuck to with any seriousness was the original Destiny.

Fortunately for this group, though, Earth Defense Force 5 just came out, and is waiting in the wings for when we get tired of this one. Hopefully we’ll last that long, and if not, maybe we can find another game to play the same way. Goodness knows there are enough out there. Surely we can strike gold a second, or third, time?

I can only hope.

Reeling, in a year

Today marks a year since I retired.

Here’s one of the questions I get asked the most: do you have any regrets about retiring so young?

I have to bite back the glib answer, which is, man, do you even know me? I have regrets about everything. I’m pretty sure that there’s no major decision in my life I haven’t questioned furiously before, during, and after making said decision, for hours, days, months, or even years. I still feel bad about the way I answered some Very Important Questions¹ when I was sixteen, and those were twenty-three years ago. Regrets? Yeah. Yeah, I have them. I have them all the time.

Another common question is this: does being retired make you happy?

(It’s worth taking a moment here to note that, while I’m never angry with people who ask me these things, they seem to be coming from a place of mild bewilderment that someone can retire before the age of forty without the excuse of being makes-cigar-wrappers-out-of-hundred-dollar-bills rich². The world at large is still very confused by us lean-savings early-retirement types.)

And, to be honest, sometimes I’m not happy at all. I lead a pretty lonely life, and one of the biggest things I lost when I stopped having a job at a vibrant company was a large, easily-available social circle. Getting people together to hang out when outside of work is hard, and I still haven’t cracked that particular code a year in. I went from always having a person or two I could chat with in a moment of downtime to sometimes going for a week or two where the only people I speak to face-to-face are the cashiers at Walmart. They’re nice and all, but it’s not exactly high-level social interaction.

But.

Let’s change these questions around a bit, starting with the last one: are you happier, now that you’ve retired?

The answer to that question is an unequivocal yes. I had a rough time at work the last couple of years. The social aspects were great, never mind the food and the board games, but I didn’t find the job itself very satisfying, and could feel myself getting unhappier by the day. There were times when I had to take vacation for a week or so, not because I actually went anywhere–if you’ve read much here you know I’m not much of one for travel–but because I needed to get back the energy required to actually be able to show up for work again.

(There was a coworker of mine, a younger person who I regularly chatted with in regards to our careers. They were unhappy with their position, and I told them that they needed to grab hold of one of the many opportunities the company offered to move upwards and outwards, that being unhappy in a job was one of the most exhausting places to be in life, that they had years of working professionally ahead of them and they needed to make the best of them. Their usual response was: great advice, buddy, but have you ever thought of taking it for yourself? And they were right, of course. I was one of those jerks who didn’t practice what they preached.)

So, sure, some days I wake up and feel like I’ve made a poor decision… but most days I wake up and go: Yeah. Yeah. This is right. This is what I want to be doing right now. Am I happy? Maybe. Maybe not. Am I happier? Abso-freaking-lutely.

Let’s go back to that first question now, and take another stab at it: Do you have enough regrets about retiring early that you’d choose not to if given a chance to do it all over again?

And the answer to that question is as easy as the answer to the last: Absolutely not. I made the right decision then, and I’d make it again in a heartbeat if I had to. Retirement’s not regret-free, but nothing is, at least for me. That doesn’t mean I won’t change my mind in the future, of course, and one of the things I intentionally planned for is the ability to change my mind if I need to³. But regrets are a part of life, and every decision made is another decision unmade, every road traveled a path not taken.

And my footing is firm.