If you could do any work you wanted, would it be the work you're currently doing?

If you had asked me a few months ago, I would have definitively said no. I suspect many of my friends would say the same. There's just something about the idea of work in general, wherein it's taken for granted that it's not something anyone wants to doit's just something we have to do.

When I was a kid, my first exposure to programming was via BASIC on a Commodore 64. It was the 90s, so the Commodore was already outdated in the age of the first Pentiums. But that's all I had. I spent hours and hours programming silly things, for no other reason than that I found it fun and interesting.

And now I'm making a game. And to be honest, I'm having fun making it. But I still struggle with the idea of selling it. In a perfect world, I'd be giving away everything I made for free, hoping that people enjoying it would be a nice bonus. But when I told a friend that I was making a game, one of the first things she said was, "I'm totally buying it!" Naturally, I loved her enthusiasm. But implicit in it was the assumption that the only reason for doing any of this was to sell what I was making. And the conversation continued like this:

Me: "I'm thinking about just giving it away for free."

Her: "But why?"

Me: "I dont know if it's a 'sellable' type of thing."

Her: "How long would it take to make it sellable?"

That last question made me kind of... sad. It's the idea that if I do something creative, by default, it has to be monetized in some way. And more importantly, it implies that wanting to do something in life rarely correlates with needing to do something in life.

But I'd be lying if I said the thought of selling games for a living hadn't crossed my mind. There's that insecure part of me that says, "No one is going to buy this crap!" I suspect, as a first-time developer, that I won't be selling a ton of copies, and that ultimately, my game will disappear into the deluge of Steam's catalog of games with 0 reviews. I wonder if other game developers feel this way about what they make.

And I know that, deep down, I'll most likely have to find a "normal" job again.

I'd always been on friendly terms with my ex-girlfriend.

I met her some years ago, through a mutual acquaintance. It wasn't intended to be a matchmaking setup; we were just in the same line of work, and she wanted some guidance with something. I wasn't actively looking for a relationship. Online dating had jaded me beyond belief (it still does). But after our first meeting, I knew there was potential there.

So we got together.

Back then, I was fiddling with game engine frameworks and libraries, and she was my reluctant beta tester for all the crappy and awful prototypes I had made. Feedback was varied; though she wasn't a gamer, she tried all the stuff out anyway. One day she joked, "This feels like a game made by someone with a bad personality!" I found that was hilarious. I think she was joking.

And then we broke up a year later.

It's funny how things work out sometimes. In retrospect, it's hard to describe what she meant to me. All I have are my words, and I know they won't come out the way I want. But here goes.

We remained on speaking terms and texted each other occasionally. I remembered her birthday. She would tell me about her new job. Life stuff, small talk. And we even hung out every now and then.

I really didn't have to, right? I could have just not replied to her anymore, moved on with my life, and not much would have changed. We shared something special at one point in time, but it was gone, and not a meaningful part of our current lives anymore.

Eventually, she moved to another country. The physical distance seemed to accompany the emotional distance. And the time difference. I didn't meet her again for several years. Still, we kept in touch.

I stopped by her country in 2019. It was the first time we'd met in nearly three years.

When we met again, it was great. It almost seemed like we never separated. But when a friend asked me, "What is she to you?", I didn't have a good answer. I suppose how I'd describe us: have you ever met someone where, no matter how much time you spend apart, as soon as you're together again, it feels like no time has passed at all? That's how it felt whenever I was with her.

I went home. And then 2020 rolled around. The year 2020 needs no introduction. During that time, the country she was living in completely disallowed all travelers coming in on a tourist visa.

That was then. This is now. Everyone's vaccinated, and borders are open now. Being unemployed has afforded me a ton of time, so I texted her casually, "Hey, I've got some time. Want to hang out?"

Her response was something I did not expect: "Hey, sorry I never said anything to you, but I met someone, and I've gotten married. Still, if you stop by my city, let me know, and we can hang out."

Why had I always been on friendly terms with my ex? I think a part of me was like, "HA! Look how mature I am! I'm emotionally intelligent enough to be friends with someone even after a bad romantic relationship. HA!"

In reality, a part of me still believed we had a chance to be together again. And my virtue signaling was just a hypocritical play at the long game. Otherwise, why would I have been so devastated when I learned she had gotten married and essentially moved on without me? And "best" of all, she probably already knew. She was always smarter than me.

So I was building my game prototype, and I thought, "Wonder if I should have someone test this." It occurred to me that I never talked to her about this, so I texted her, "Remember when I tried making games? I'm trying to make games again." She replied, "Oh cool! Need help testing? I'll get my husband to test too!"

Now, this was a curious development. On the one hand: I had unintentionally doubled my pool of beta testers. On the other hand: did she have a good enough relationship with her husband that he wouldn't mind helping out her ex-boyfriend? Maybe that's why she married him.

As unhappy as I felt that we didn't work out, I'm glad she was able to find happiness. It was a weird feeling as I sent them both the Test Flight builds. Much to my chagrin, he's a pretty decent guy, it seems.

Argh. And the feedback he gave was not bad. Double argh.

But, remembering one of my former co-workers' favorite platitudes: "Feedback is a gift". I never really understood it, but now, I have some inkling of understanding of what that means -- despite all the personal feedback regarding the source of said feedback. I'm still not a fan of platitudes though.

So, yeah, my ex-gf is now a beta tester. Hopefully the game will be better for it.

For the most part, my last job was not so bad. I was good at it, and it paid well. On the other hand, it sucked. See, that's my coping mechanism: telling myself "things could be worse," thus I should be content with who I am now and how my life is. But that still didn't stop me from blaming work for the general dissatisfaction in my life.

I was a workaholic when I was younger, playing into the insecurity of having to prove myself by being a good worker. So much so, that I had built an identity and self-worth around it. It was many years later when I realized how much this sucked and what a dangerous game it could be. If I based my self-worth around something external to myself, my identity was basically beholden to something I couldn't ultimately control.

And it made me hate working. And hate myself for putting up with it. And angry at the world for requiring me to work to make it. It was a scam of the highest degree. And if you're listening to economic indicators and seeing the price of groceries nowadays, it just feels like the whole world is against you, pushing you into this perpetual social contract of giving up the most valuable part of your life just so you don't die and starve to death.

So, I made sure I was in a relatively good spot, and I stopped working. And then all my dreams came true!

Ha, not really.

I had some preconceived notions that work was strictly about the transaction of selling my time to any company who wanted to buy it. But then I'd think about the first thing someone would ask me if I were meeting them for the first time: "What kind of work do you do?" It's so easy to conflate your work with who you are. But is it really conflation that's happening here?

When I stopped working - when I got rid of this "icky" thing in my life - I assumed that it would generally just improve on its own. It did not. So, what the heck was going on here?

Maybe it really wasn't work that was making me generally unhappy with life. Granted, I can't change the economics of society (I still need to pay rent), but for a short period, I could at least control what I did when I woke up each day. I started thinking: what does it really mean when someone asks, "What kind of work do you do?" Maybe what they're really asking is: "Who are you, as a person?", because there's an underlying assumption that what you do and how you spend your time defines you as a person... right?

And that's where I'm stuck. I'm not really doing anything. I am learning to make a game, but considering I haven't released a single game yet, I still do not have the confidence to call myself a game developer.

Maybe one day.

I got "the talk" at work, and they were going to put me on a "Performance Improvement Plan". That's corpo-speak for: "We're going to let you go, but we have to make it look like we tried to help you improve so that you don't sue us for any wrongdoing later. Thanks."

So, I quit. It was quite underwhelming. I just stopped working, and they stopped paying me. I wish I could say there was a blaze of glory and destruction of property involved. Nope. I was working from home at the time, and then the next day rolled around, and I didn't log into Slack anymore. That was it.

For weeks after that, I merely lived on instinct. When I was sleepy, I slept. When I was hungry, I ate. But one can only live that way for so long until the realities and implications of a dwindling bank balance force one's hand to spur into action.

Still, I had some time. And I knew that I didn't want to work. So what did I do?

I bought the complete "Slam Dunk" manga series.

What did I do after that? I thought about making a video game. Call it a flight of fancy. I'd even dabbled before in the past, but nothing ever came to fruition and coalesced into an actual game. Surely, this time will be different, right?

Right?!

The armchair internet game developers provided this nugget of wisdom: start with something simple, and work your way up. But, I really shouldn't get too wrapped up in what other people say. Because, fundamentally, the thing that bothers me most about my life is: I've done nothing for myself for years.

I've made nothing. I've consumed a ton of stuff (junk food, video games, media, etc.). I can't speak too much of other people, but I've gone through life holding on to something inside me, something amorphous that I want to put in discrete form. After the stupor of my post-employment decompression malaise, I started thinking, what would it take to actually produce something. If not for other people, then at least for myself.

So, here I am. I'm going to try to make something. And it's going to be a video game.