Not playing Final Fantasy 14 for a few days has been a weird experience. I wrote Monday’s post about taking a break from FF14 before I actually put it into effect. I stayed up pretty late on Sunday night to wrap up the Dawntrail expansion and solidified my decision to take a break betwen then and writing my blog post the following day during breaks at work. Then I left work early so I could participate in my Monday night Ultimate raid practice, spent a few hours making alternate characters on my now-open server to combat my anxiety, spent a few hours last night working on the final raid in the Alexander Savage raid series my group is doing, and then spent another hour and a half after that hanging out online and unlocking an activity that I was planning to do tonight. I haven’t really played all that much less than normal, at least looking at it on the basis of daily participation. I did, however, stop playing FF14 every night with time enough to still do other things before bed, which I didn’t used to do. And tonight I’m not actually doing the activity I unlocked because I was at work until my personal cut-off time (8:30pm, a time I will not work past except in the case of emergencies) and had to do my grocery shopping after that because my car is going to be trapped in my apartment’s underground garage for a few days while the parking lot is filled up by the roofing company that will be spending the next few days replacing the rooves of my apartment building and the one next door that shares a parking lot. So I got home super late, ate dinner late, showered late, and was too miserable and tired to want to hop online for thirty minutes or whatever. So I’m writing this instead.

It really doesn’t feel like I’ve taken much of a break from the game, but there was a patch this week that added a bunch of content that people have been flocking to. It is creating an incredibly powerful feeling of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) as I try to scale back my play time for at least a couple weeks that is being compounded by the fact that I’ve been having a rather difficult week at work. I’ve been dealing with stress and my work problems from this year by living a bit of an alternate life online, in this game, where all my efforts are rewarded, hard work pays off eventually, and I understand how things work well enough to actually succeed at them. It’s a very invigorating feeling, competency and accomplishment, when most of my working life seems dedicated to denying me those feelings (mostly by a lack of recognition). So I see all my friends playing the game a ton more than usual, my heart yearns to bury itself in the game, and there’s a bunch of new, interesting stuff I can finally do once I clean up the post-Dawntrail expansion stuff a bit, but I am keeping to my plan to stay off the game. It really feels like I’m denying myself a treat or comfort right now, as I think about it and fight off the heavy-hearted weariness that has been building this week, but I know that this urge to play is not necessarily an innocent or safe thing. It is easy to become addicted to things and while I’ve managed to balance my life and work responsibilities with playing this game, I can feel a gnarled, twisted kernel of stress and need sitting at the core of this desire to lose myself in the game that tells me some time and space are definitely a healthy thing for me to get right now.

This won’t be permanent, after all. It’ll only be a couple weeks and I’m sure people will still be doing this new content when I get back to playing the game regularly again. I just really need to take some time to do other things, to get myself hooked on other things, and let this slowly clenching part of myself unfurl [though, following a therapy appointment the week this goes up, I am pretty confident that the clenching part of myself is unrelated to FF14 and instead tied to something else I’ve been purposefully ignoring]. I don’t know what kind of thing that might eventually blossom into if left unaddressed, but I can’t imagine it would be anything good. After all, part of my emotional turbulance this week has been the strange reaction I’ve had to playing Final Fantasy 14 as much as I have despite deciding to take a break. Typically, discipline and self-control are not things I struggle with. I’ve been practicing them for decades and have no problem denying myself in the moment for future gratification, so I’m fairly confident that these past few nights haven’t been me trying to find excuses to keep playing Final Fantasy 14, but I do think I’m a little frustrated that the goal I picked months ago (in early August, actually) that I was going to take a break after wound up overlapping so completely with this new patch that has a lot of things I’m personally interested in (that new Deep Dungeon looks fun as hell and I am mildly desperate to get some of the rewards from it–desperate enough to play the game eventually, not enough to play now or spend my in-game money on them). I’m annoyed by my decision, annoyed at the fun content that I’ve decided not to participate in, and annoyed at everyone who gets to participate in it while I can’t. Which isn’t super rational, sure, but it’s a lot safer to feel that annoyance and frustration than to continue letting myself feel my workplace frustrations. I can keep my FF14-based annoyances to myself without a problem. My work ones tend to leak out a bit more, since they’re so much bigger and so much less temporary [or I can be annoyed and upset about something entirely unrelated and just project it on to FF14 because it’s safer to feel annoyed and emotionally shriveled by the prospect of 2000 hours put into that game this year than to confront the fact that I’m upset at my family over a birthday card I got sent that I can’t stop thinking about no matter how hard I try].

Which just contributes to why I need to take a break. Escapsim is good, but I can’t continuously escape at the cost of actually doing the work to process these feelings [which is why I’ve spent time this week working on my familial feelings]. I need to do other things, I need to stop having quite as many of my emotions tied up in Final Fantasy 14 as I do, and I need to recenter myself emotionally after the past nine months of changing antidepressants, difficulty living in an increasingly hostile and fascist country, increasing frustation with and discomfort in my work environment, and really good storytelling in FF14. I need to do some stuff with lower stakes. I need to change activities multiple times a day. I need to read, to sit in different chairs, to spend time on a different floor of my apartment, and to decide to do the dishes because I’ve got nothing better to do with my hands while I listen to a podcast. I really need to spend some time not doing anything at all. I don’t think that is going to help with my burnout, I don’t think I’m really at risk of imminent burnout from FF14 either, but I know that I would be if I kept going indefinitely. Variety is the spice of life, as they say. Which they say for a reason. As I learned all too well during the isolation of Covid, I need to do a wide variety of activities to keep myself from sinking down into a mire of same-y-ness. Which is probably what that kernel was at the heart of my thoughts about not playing FF14: the beginning of recognizing that I was just doing some variation of the same thing over and over again. Sure, I’ve been working pretty hard lately at introducing a wider variety of things to do in-game, but all of it is mouse clicks and button presses in the end. I need to do other things with my hands. So I’ll keep untangling this mess of emotions and try not to shift from playing FF14 almost exclusively to playing Switch 2 almost exclusively. That wouldn’t be better. I need to keep doing different things.