It’s funny to think back to my early days of playing the game. Putting around with side quests, gathering whatever random crap I could, crafting more random crap with what I gathered, fighting low-level mobs, and generally just not being super focused on the game. Then I slowly dialed in more and more as I started to run into the boundaries of what I could do with a free account and, a month into my playtime, bought all the expansions and a subscription. From then on, I was basically all-in. I still had occasional nights off and spent time doing other things on the weekend, but I mostly stopped playing other games and completely stopped being “relaxed” about the game. I had to catch up to my friends, after-all. I had so much stuff to do in order to make up for the months they’d been playing while I was off in Dragon Age Land, playing through that franchise and it wasn’t going to happen if I didn’t focus. Plus, it gave me goals to pursue and I love having goals. I love having targets to aim for. So I spent a lot of time driving myself forward in the Main Scenario Quests for weeks at a time and then took a break to do crafting and gathering stuff before ultimately returning to MSQ. The cycle repeated itself for almost six months when I cleared the final pieces of Endwalker hand-in-hand with my friends and then we all collapsed in exhaustion. I resolved to get back to puttering, my friends resolved to pace themselves, and the rest of our Free Company hinted at what exciting stuff awaited us in Dawntrail whenever we finally got to it. Which, for me, took about four or five weeks. I was content to rest for a while, catch up on some leveling of other jobs and personal projects, explore my island sanctuary, and mess around in a variety of other types of gameplay, but eventually I felt the itch to get moving forward again and let that lead me into the post-Endwalker patches, Dawntrail, and not to being caught-up with the Dawntrail patches.

My friends are still behind me, playing in their own time as their interest and business allows, but I’m still up to my hairline in Final Fantasy stuff. I’ve got an alt I’m leveling, I took on some work for one of my FC mates–to help get them stocked up with the latest in crafting and gathering gear–who just returned to the game, I’ve got one crafting workshop keeping ourselves supplied with gear/consumables, another one I’m slowly ramping up to help folks in my FC make money, I’ve got an RP Wrestling season starting in a month and with two bonus events between now and then that I will be officially recording video for, and I’ve got the various roleplaying tidbits I want to keep working on. There is no end to the stuff I want to do yet, only a derth of time in which to do it. It will be a very long time before I’m out of stuff to do, even if I wind up spending some real-world money in order to help speed things up (by buying story skips and maybe level skips for some of those alts), but I’m not sure I want to rush. I like having stuff to do and while this is an impossible amount of work to get done in any kind of reasonable time scale, it’s not impossible for me to rush some of these less important alts through stuff while my main focus stays on my primary character and only do the actually developed alts once I have less going on and can split my attention without feeling like I’m neglecting my primary.

That said, I don’t really have a lot of actual plans. Some of the things I used to spend time on every week are in flux right now as we try to figure out more reasonable expectations for the crews involved in them, so most of my nights are pretty open. That might be good for a little bit since I’m still coming down from the huge crafting cram of the last month and I’ve got a pile of additional crafting to do at the moment anyway, between the gear for an FC mate, my mostly-consumables workshop, and the usual stuff I do to keep the FC supplied with food and consumables for our various activities, but I doubt it will last for long. I’ve already got a raid group of mostly FC members that will be swapping to every Sunday soon and while I’m a bit on the fence as to whether or not I’m a good fit for this group (my energy and attitude don’t really mesh super well with theirs so far), I don’t know that I’m going to find any better raid group without trying a bunch. I don’t have the energy for that right now, especially since it all kind of dovetails into something else I’ve been thinking about a lot lately (which you can read about on Monday of next week), and the lesson I learned over the last month about needing to be more precious with my time and energy than I have been. I don’t know. It’s exhausting just to think about some of this and I need things to be less exhausting, not more.

Sometimes I wish I could return to my early days of more lackadaisical playing. I miss not taking things seriously and just puttering around instead of being so laser-focused on all of my goals, but I can’t really go back to that life considering the commitments I’ve made, the people relying on me, and the expectations I’ve engendered by my level of drive, focus, and activity up to this point. I don’t know that it would leave a hole in the FC if I disappeared or went largely inactive for a while, but it would definitely be noticed. I’m online almost every day and constantly doing things for people, so I imagine it would take a while to adjust to my absence. Or, well, the absence of the work I do, anyway. I don’t really want that to happen and I don’t really want to play less either, but I can’t help but miss the much simpler early days of “well, do I go collect a bunch of twigs and logs so I can level my botany job and then my carpentry job, or do I go hunting for whatever weird creature my hunting log tells me is next on the list or do I forget all that and just do sidequests so I can learn a bit more about the world and its people (and, often in those early days, their incredibly racist attitudes towards outsiders or people who didn’t look exactly like them)?” It was nice to have such a small scope of possibility, to be limited in what I could do such that puttering around didn’t feel like a waste of time. Nowadays… There’s so much to do every single day that just standing around or hanging out somewhere doing nothing feels like an inexcusable waste. I really need to do that more, in and out of game, but it’s difficult to convince myself of the value in spending my time like that when I can see just how much stuff there is to do if I ever want to get “on top” of everything. I know that’s basically an endless cycle of effort since the only way to stay on top is to keep working at it constantly and that kind of effort is only going to burn me out, but finding balance is difficult and it will be a while yet before I get there while I slowly settle into whatever the hell my weeks are going to look like from here on out.