I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore. I mean, if you told me to fill any number of hours with Final Fantasy 14 stuff, I could do that easily. There’s so much to do. But now, after severe burnout a couple weeks ago and the discord silencing of last week, I just don’t feel as directed as I once did. Which sucks, because I do still care about it. I do still abstractly consider it fun and interesting. I’m just… caught in a period of heartbreak that’s impacting my ability to enjoy the game. Now, when I log on, I often find myself thinking about the stuff I should be doing “just in case.” Leveling alts (alternate characters), preparing my personal Free Company (player guild) for my alts in case I no longer have access to the workshop I currently use to make a bunch of my money, and the endless nebulous grind of daily and weekly tasks. So much to do, but nothing my heart is really in right now. There won’t be a new stage for my relic weapon any time soon. There’s always more crafting that needs doing for one workshop or gathering for the other, but I have enough in-game money that I can’t really make myself care about earning more. Which means maybe I should spend it since there’s a lot of specialty mounts that are expensive for no other reason that to brag about how much money you spent to acquire them. There’s leveling, side quests, society quests, and infinitely so much more. I just… My heart isn’t in it right now.

The pragmatic side of me won’t let it go, though. There’s enough limited resources that I really should be spending some time every week making sure I get them and then spend them when I run the risk of hitting the cap on said resources. There’s tons of things I could be doing that will be useful in the future or that future me will be thankful I did, but doing those isn’t going to give me the break from the game that I probably need, given how little time I wound up spending away from the game over the last couple weeks. I also don’t want to surrender this game to the bad feelings that have been piling up due to things around it, rather than because of it, but I am also at a low enough point that I can’t just push through the bad feelings until they finally fall away. Not that this way of doing things is working for me particularly well. There always seem to be more bad feelings, no matter how long I push forward, but that’s kind of just life these days. It’s difficult not to think about the fact that the government is considering legislation that would make it illegal for libraries or schools to have any books I might write, and even that’s setting aside the impossibility of making a living as a writer anymore. Or any type of creative person. So when my last bastion of complete escape is now surrounded and drowning in tangential negative feelings, what am I supposed to do? I can’t even convince myself that it’s worth just idly passing time until things improve or I feel a bit less raw about them.

I wish I could go back to weeks ago, maybe a couple months, when I was still capable of aimlessly puttering around and doing endless silly side quests to level a job (which is a dumb way to level a job but a great way to have a chill time in Final Fantasy 14). I still possess the capability of doing that stuff, but the rewarding idleness of it all is gone. Now… I need to be engaged to keep my mind from dwelling on stuff and puttering, by definition, does not do that. Puttering is for listening to podcasts or talking with friends or keeping my hands and eyes busy while my mind works on something. Now… I don’t want my mind to work on anything. I’m pretty sure I know what will happen if I let it work on stuff right now and I’m not sure working myself up into leaving my current FC and related discord (or at least leaving the discord) is the right choice. I’m still very upset about it all and I know I’d spiral around it until the only thing that seemed reasonable would be to leave the discord or both the discord and the FC. Which is probably the emotionally honest thing to do, but maybe not the most sensible, much less the best in the long term…

Which is why I’ll probably just poke my head into the game now and then, when I’ve got a goal or can convince myself to stay focused on something specific. Like capping my resources for the week or doing all the recent alliance raids to get the stuff I need to upgrade some gear later. Or farming for mounts with my group of farmers, assuming we ever get a group of eight together again. Or gathering for various workshop projects. I don’t know. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just let my attention wander to other things for now and just… deal with the consequences of skipping a week in my long-term plans. Not like those really matter at this point. I doubt I’m ever going to bootstrap a reliable EX, Savage, and Ultimate group together given how much I seem to struggle to get enough people to even do weekly wing farms. If things keep going the way they are, though, the choice is going to get made for me by my inability to actually do stuff right now. Either I work my way past that somehow, or… I just do nothing I guess.