Never Play Solitaire Again.
Read an interesting
article the other day, by Tom Hanks of all people. (Sorry if the link is paywalled, I tried to find a free one). Anyway the TL;DR is that while he was stuck in COVID quarantine Hanks developed a Solitare habit - not the phone game, but the physical cards - the essay is a meditation on what a waste of the moments of his life that was. And it is making me think all sorts of thoughts.
First off is thinking of my adoptive mother, which is... weird. There's a lot of context I may not have written enough about
here - she was quite possibly one of the most trapped by her life people I've ever known, and I never knew her as not depressed. (Not sure she ever WAS not depressed, truthfully, like literally in her entire life - and honestly she had a lot of reasons to be.) Her trauma and anger made her emotionally abusive, so I cut contact at 19 (mostly, with minor exceptions) and she died when I was 24, though I didn't know until a year or two later.
So... Whether it was depression or a quirk of aging and physiology, she used to get up at 4 in the morning because she literally couldn't sleep anymore, and one of the things she would do to pass the time is play hand upon hand of solitaire. It started, I think, as physical therapy for a broken wrist (the shuffling), but got to be a habit, and I remember at the time being very confused by why she did it, it seemed so boring... while at the same time burying myself in computer Tetris for similar habitual and psychological reasons. And really, therapy aside, it was just something to fill the time until she died. That sounds like a terrible thing to say, it was a worse thing to watch and know that your mother really didn't think she had a reason to live and probably would have died by suicide were it not a sin, and were it not for me. (Knowing someone thinks that you're the only thing between them and death is not something anyone should ever live, as a side note, especially not at age 10.)
I never realized that the silence in the background of my childhood was the... "
cut-flower sound of a {woman} who is waiting to die."
So... that. And that was a bittersweet memory enough.... but then there's the part where I think about how I acquired my Tetris (and other similar games, Minesweeper and Pinball and whatever else ran on a x486 computer... and yes digital Solitaire) addiction back then. I wasn't waiting to die. But I was waiting to leave home, whether home referred to my house itself or the small town I grew up in (being the overly intelligent and didn't-realize-I-was-queer-yet atheist kid in an Appalachian mountain town is not something I'd recommend to anyone), and those things filled that space when I couldn't stand to read any more.
And maybe that set some pathways in my brain, or maybe that was just pathways that would have already been there (see also: ADD dopamine cravings)... but I still play too many of that sort of game, whether it's Candy Crush or {list of games I actually play deleted as it's not the point}. The better times it's just something to do with my hands while I listen to an audiobook, and that's fine... but I end up playing too much before I got to sleep or right when I get up, in a "not quite ready to be human or too late to" sort of way... and if I'm having a bad mental health day as far as motivation and ability to DO the things I'm suppose to be doing? the number of hours I've lost that way are uncountable and thankfully uncounted.
Part of me wants those hours back, which clearly isn't gonna happen. Part of me says I should just delete all of those games now, but I won't as to think about doing so makes me ridiculously anxious - much like the idea of time-blocking when I can interact here or Facebook or Fetlife. Still, I'm pushing 40. And the idea that it is possible that I have fewer hours left to me than I've been alive (I don't come from good genes and I'm not good at taking care of myself even when I mean to, and I often don't mean to because I'm a hedonist who lives for the now, I'm sort of gonna count myself lucky to see my late 70's). So is playing _insert game here_ *really* something that ought to take up those hours? But what else should I do with the gaps in my day?
Lots of thoughts there.