I’ve been bouncing between a lot of different activities in Final Fantasy 14 lately. A solid chunk of my time goes towards leveling (and supplying) an alternate character who will head up my storage and resource generation FC. Another solid chunk is going toward general play on my main character. A third, smaller chunk is going towards activities for the rolaplaying wrestling league I’m part of. And any other time goes towards the general maintenance work of my various crafts, monitoring my various sales attempts, keeping an eye on the housing market, and general maintenance work that I don’t really want to do but occasionally feel like doing anyway. I’m also back to taking Tuesday nights off of the game and while I’m writing this on my second (and posting it on my third), I think I can stick with this for at least a while. After all, while it is possible that I’ll make a lot of sales on weekly refresh days, I don’t really expect to (I’m playing a long game with most of my sales, waiting for the cheaper stuff to run out and positioning myself in the middle-to-middle-top of the pack so I can get a good price for my stuff but still get sold) and there really isn’t anything in the game that is so urgent that I’d need to play on refresh night. Wednesday is my weekly island night, that I also often fill with roulettes and working on my own weekly refresh stuff, Thursdays are a grab bag of whatever, and now Fridays and Saturdays are wrestling nights. Wednesday will also be a wrestling night on occasion, but it’s mostly Fridays and Saturdays, so all the plans I can make for those are usually pretty last-minute and focused on whatever I feel like doing. It’s a nice place to be in at this point, even if I still feel a tugging at the back of my mind that I should focus up and get more done with my time.

This is a familiar feeling. Any time I do anything that I’ve settled into in a way that has made it routine, I often (maybe even “always”) wind up fighting the feeling that I should be pushing myself again. After all, if I’m comfortable with this, then certainly I could do more if I stopped resting on my laurels and worked harder. This is the exact sort of attitude that lead to me increasing the monthly challenges I used to give myself back when I was doing National Novel Writing Month (back before it collapsed into a black hole of scandal and “AI Writing Tool” promotions), like writing 60k words, 50k plus daily blog posts with writing advice and prompts, 50k in two writing projects on top of daily blog posts, a whole draft of a single story project, and then eventually 100k words on top of daily blog posts. All of which was not terribly conduscive to healthy writing habits. Those came about when I stopped trying to do as much as possible and focused on effort I could sustain in the long term. Which, to be honest, is probably true of Final Fantasy 14 as well. Sure, it was fun to do as much as possible during some short-term bursts and incredibly rewarding in certain regards, but the stress and burnout that came my way as a result weren’t terribly good for me overall or in terms of enjoying Final Fantasy 14. So trying to be more moderate in what I’m trying to do and actually sticking to that seems like the perfect way to practice long-term sustainability.

Which means I’m absolutely not going to shotgun content in order to level my brand new Free Company. I am going to pace myself and take my time, even if it means waiting a while before I can bid on a house for the FC. Which, to be entirely fair, I can’t do until March 17th anyway, since you have to have been a member of an FC for thirty days in order to bid on housing. Since I hit level three during last night’s weekly Level Our Alts hangout, I suspect that I’ll get to the requisite level 6 in time enough. After that, I’ve got a laundry list of additional stuff to do for it, but mostly I’m going to try to keep myself from getting TOO invested in it. It’s supposed to be a passive thing to help my main game experience with my primary character (and an escape hatch in case things go poorly with my main character’s FC, which I have no reason to expect I’ll need), so putting in too much time and effort won’t help anyone. Instead, I should focus on my goals for my main character and advancing all of that stuff. My goals are pretty simple, since it’s just continuing to work my way through all the side quests I can find in the game, but that’s still a lot of effort and not always something I feel up for. I mean, sometimes I just want to do combat stuff and fight things that aren’t really difficult but still rewarding to do because pressing buttons is fun. Big numbers make that even more fun. It’s a great time to just go out and fight stuff, as long as I do content that’s high-enough leveled for me to actually have all my fun abilities unlocked.

Though, that said, there is an upper limit on this: doing the same few dungeons over and over again isn’t particularly fun, and that’s kind of the situation I’m in for high-level content. There’s only like four dungeons I can wind up doing at that tier since I’m not doing any of the savage content available to me. I’d really like to get back into that with a group that’s actually willing to take it seriously and be focused on doing it well now that I’ve left both my FC groups so I can have fun doing challenging stuff instead of needing to be on my guard with a weirdly hostile group or constantly stuck with a group that doesn’t care about everyone clearing, just being able to say the scheduled activity cleared stuff. I don’t know if that will happen outside of using the party finder function, though, or doing the work to develop a group, neither of which I’m particularly interested in doing right now. Soon, maybe. I do miss the challenge and the need to be on top of my game. But I kinda am also enjoying being a “slacker” (I had to go back and add the quotes because I am so “producitivity”-minded that I can’t even talk about having a fun, chill time without being judgmental of myself) and not having a bunch of commitments to tend to constantly. I mean, I’ve got wrestling and editing the wrestling recordings and whatever work for it that will crop up in the days between events (I’m actively trying to get people to do stuff with me), so that’s probably enough for now. Between that, activities with my friends, and generally working on my broader game goals, that’s really enough. I mean, this is supposed to be fun! Why would I try to do more than that? Don’t answer that. I know. It was a rhetorical question. Maybe I should have phrased it as “I mean, this is supposed to be fun and relaxing! If I keep finding myself more work to do, I’m not going to ever get to the ‘relaxing’ part of this.” Which, to be honest, is what I really need. I’ve got enough other stressful stuff going on in my life as it is.