What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life?

The idea behind this question is something I’ve given thought to several times over the last 15-20 years. When someone thinks about “living a very long life” I often wonder how my idea differs.

One of the first times I gave any thought to the idea I didn’t fully comprehend the ramifications. I was much younger and fairly naive. I thought it would be awesome if I could be immortal and live forever, then I would be able to see and do so many cool things.

As I got older, “forever” changed to maybe a thousand years or so. Then it became a few hundred.

I’ve watched a lot of shows and movies with vampires and immortality or the like, and it didn’t dawn on me until much more recently that living exceedingly long lives could drastically change the development of humanity. What really influenced my change in mind was much more personal.

I forget where I heard it or read it, but someone talks about one of the saddest things of immortality is watching your loved ones grow old and eventually die. Partners and friends. Kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, and so on for the rest of forever. You would be so disconnected from everything. Now granted you could find the strength to move on, find a new partner and start another family lineage, but you would just be repeating the same thing each time. At some point there would likely be a mental breakdown.

This is why I started to cut back on the length of time I thought I would be comfortable with living. A few hundred years to see where the world goes, and to watch over the next few generations of my family. I want to see where technology ends up taking us, and if humanity finds a way to flourish beyond what we are today. A living connection to the past to offer some guidance and wisdom, so that I might still contribute to that hope of flourishing.

But really, I just want to see flying cars and Full-dive VRMMO technology like Sword Art Online. Maybe I could leave myself as a ghost in the machine…

Anyways, I don’t want to live forever but I think I could handle the mental and emotional strain of a few hundred years of extra life.

What could you do differently?

Where do I even start? There are so many things I could do differently. I could be doing things differently in good AND bad ways.

I could be doing a better job of prioritizing my health. Getting more steps in each day (hard to do freely in the winter) would be a start. Getting back to the gym more frequently, which I have slowly been reorganizing my time and I have gotten my gym bag ready, so I’m actually on the right track there. I could be eating better, making my meals instead of eating out or ordering delivery. I could be drinking more water every day, but plain water doesn’t have caffeine so I’ll just have to figure out an okay balance.

Another thing I could be doing differently is better focusing on my other non-health related goals. Better consistency at sitting down and writing outside of my blog posts. This means cutting time away from my gaming hobbies, but I think I’ll be okay with doing that since I’ve slowly come to terms with the fact that I just have too many to play. Same with reading books, actually.

I’m sure that I could be doing things differently to be a better friend. Reaching out more often, asking how things are going, trying to socialize more (but darn my naturally introverted personality, oh well). Similarly, I could be going out more and meeting new people. Kind of hard to find romance when you don’t go anywhere. Still, maybe someday. Getting to the gym could be the first step.

So many other things that could be different. I mentioned that I could be doing things differently in a bad way. Consider the fact that I used to smoke. I could go back to doing that, but I won’t. I could be drinking alcohol everyday, but I don’t because I just don’t find the appeal and can’t justify the expense. Which is silly considering the money wasted on games I’m not playing and overly priced fast food. Still, it could definitely be worse.

Well, these are just a few things that come to mind, which probably shows where my priorities are currently. Wish me luck!

Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?

I’ve talked about this topic here on the blog a couple of different times in different ways over the last few months, and I don’t feel like rehashing the same information. So instead, I’ll keep today brief and invite you to read one of those previous posts

In particular, should you feel inclined to, please read my post Past Forward where I answer a prompt regarding what historical events I find fascinating. It’s a short read, I promise, but maybe it’ll help you understand even a little bit more of my perspective on things.

For those who would prefer I provide SOMETHING of substance in this post that isn’t a totally obvious plug for my own blog (I have to try, though), I’ll give the short answer.

The future is always my primary concern because time only goes one way. That doesn’t mean I completely ignore the past, because that’s where we came from and it can help inform us of many things that could still happen again in the future. I won’t spend a lot of time thinking about the past without some consideration of what the future will look like because I don’t like the feeling of dwelling there and possibly being miserable. I don’t want to get stuck there, never moving on or getting over things, constantly obsessing over “what if” scenarios. Being stuck in the past means we don’t improve ourselves because we often fail, or straight up refuse, to acknowledge our existence in the present or be concerned with how things will look tomorrow.

The future is always coming, whether we like it or not, and it’s better to face it and not be caught off guard by wallowing in the past.

What is the greatest gift someone could give you?

I woke up early today, much earlier than I’m accustomed to, and I thought I would check today’s prompt before I fell back asleep. I had what I thought was a great idea to start my answer but I didn’t want to get started writing it out because it would only further wake up my brain. Now, my first thought is there are so many ways I could pick this question apart. Needs versus wants? Material or immaterial? Monetary? Time? Space? Flexibility?

I had to stop myself before I did the mental gymnastics down a rabbit hole on the philosophy of gift giving. When I spun up my thoughts again I told myself to consider what it is I’m missing in my life, what I feel I need most, and how that could be provided to me.

So, what COULD be the greatest gift someone could give to me? If I start by looking at the goals I’ve set for myself, what am I missing to achieve them? What have been my biggest struggles or challenges towards them? The more I looked and analyzed I came up with the same problems and similar solutions. To a certain extent I, myself, am my own problem. My struggles and challenges towards achieving my goals stem from my own inability to manage myself in various ways.

Sometimes the problem is my drive for success. I WANT to succeed, to achieve everything I set out as a goal for myself. I’ll start out strong and really get going but then the drive runs out or I get busy with other things that I (probably) could have just not engaged with in the first place. Sometimes that leaves me questioning if I ever really wanted to achieve that goal in the first place, then later on I’m reminded why I set it as a goal in the first place.

Other times the problem is caused by my own self-doubt. There could be no end to the drive or passion I want to put into something I really enjoy, but I hold myself back for some reason. I consume media left, right, and center all day every day and generate idea after idea. Then, when I feel like I’m on the cusp of DOING something with that drive or passion, a little voice in the back of my head says something along the lines of “don’t bother, they won’t like it anyway.”

Jumping off of the problems to the solutions leads to what I believe is my answer for today’s prompt. What I believe to be the greatest gift someone could give to me.

Support and companionship.

To be clear, I have amazing friends who are positive and supportive of my goals and dreams, but for me there is only so much it can do to bolster me when they live so far away and are busy living their own lives and chasing their own dreams. I can’t ask them to give me what I’m about to describe next.

The greatest gift would be that kind of person who not only can give me that push I might need, but can also pull when needed. To give of themself to walk through life alongside me, providing encouraging pushes and reassuring pulls to keep me moving towards the things I enjoy, and that I can reciprocate back to them the same encouragement and reassurance when they need me. To be each other’s greatest gift.

What colleges have you attended?

Sometimes things in life don’t go the way we expected. Certainly for myself, I didn’t expect to be blogging.

I love reading science fiction and fantasy, and creating my own worlds and stories. I enjoy writing to some degree, I say knowing that probably sounds weird WHILE blogging and talking about wanting to finish a novel (that hopefully gets published someday), but my education doesn’t exactly match up to what I’m saying. Sit down, strap in, and I’ll explain.

I failed my Freshman English class.

Not college Freshman English. High school Freshman English.

Wait, what?

Surprise! Yes, I failed my high school Freshman English class. Not because I was bad at English, but because I was just overall a bad student. Always have been, and probably always will be when it comes to regimented and structured education. Anyways, if this prompt is asking about college education why am I bringing up high school? Because this led to me taking an online class to try and make up the grade before I would be allowed to graduate high school, and oddly enough it was provided through BYU. So, closing in on 20 years ago, I was TECHNICALLY a college student, if you want to count it this way. Guess what happened next…

I didn’t finish that course!

So, how did I get out of it and why was I allowed to graduate at all and subsequently move on to ACTUAL college education? Well, this all happened right around the time of my Dad’s tenuous job situation that ultimately led to my family moving from the suburbs of Colorado to small town country living South Dakota. I finished my Junior year of high school taking roughly the same classes I had been in before the move, and I discovered that the curriculum out here was behind what I was learning in Colorado, so I was ahead of my classmates. Senior year of high school I had gotten out of gym/P.E. classes which left me open to take the last Freshman English credit I needed to graduate. I lucked out there, but I do feel a little bad that my Dad had to spend money on that online remedial class I never finished.

So, there’s part one, I was a BYU student for a couple months. Technically.

My ACTUAL college education was through CTU (Colorado Technical University) which weirdly had a campus out here in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

I was still a mediocre student at best. I tried in the beginning and then found ways to coast through some classes (no, I didn’t cheat or plagiarize anything) and other classes I did end up failing. A couple of them weren’t entirely my fault, though. Anyways, I did okay at my writing assignments for actual college level courses, and did even better when it came to business documentation. I ended up switching degrees at one point and landed more courses that were business focused, but I was still in an IT-related degree track so I was stuck in the IT Capstone course. I ended up capitalizing on my writing ability for my IT Capstone final, which was a group project, because my peers were more focused on IT/programming degrees and they hated writing out business documentation.

I’m not sure about anyone else, but for me writing this post and going down memory lane was more of a mild memory rollercoaster. I’m sure I could share more as well but this post would probably get way too long for some people’s patience. Anyways, here we are, with me going from “bad student failing English” to “still a bad student but college writing was fine” and finally “I write more documentation for a living, and want to write fantasy novels.”

Well, let’s see where 2024 takes me.

Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?

When most people think of playtime they probably think about toys, games, and sports while also associating those things to specific age groups. Sports for any age, toys and games for kids, things like that. My perspective is looking at things with a hobby mindset. My hobbies are all investments of my money and time to bring myself entertainment and joy. So naturally, any time I get to spend on my hobbies is my playtime.

Take Magic: The Gathering (or Disney’s Lorcana now, thanks to my siblings) as an example. Playtime for this isn’t exclusively the time spent actually playing the game against someone. I could spend dozens of hours trying to build a deck or researching cards for new ideas, and there’s also the time spent discussing spoilers for upcoming set releases. There is so much to do that I could be “playing” even at work when I take a break and do that aforementioned research. Layering in the game of Lorcana now, I spend time on the daily for my “playtime” just getting lost in thought thinking about how to play this new game.

Video games and painting miniatures for my tabletop games should be a given for “playtime” but with other hobbies and responsibilities I just don’t spend time daily on these two things. Video games are kind of a weird area for me these days because I don’t have the time I used to for picking up a new game, only playing an hour or two over the course of a few days, and sticking with it. Miniature painting is a combination of space issues (the holidays really threw me off, all kinds of things shifted around and occupied my usual painting spaces) and time because I don’t want to waste paint. I use a wet palette to try and mitigate wasting paint between sessions, but I always feel like I need more than just an hour or two in one sitting to paint. So, not as much daily play in my life in those areas, but I try to fit them in when possible.

Thinking about all this reminds me that I need to not pick up new games or hobbies. I’m going to need to be more firm and assertive with people when they try to drag me into new things. I just won’t have the bandwidth for new things to “play” with.

What are your biggest challenges?

Well, the new year has started and my vacation is ending. I’ll be going back to work tomorrow and have no idea what challenges I’ll be facing there but I’m sure everything will be just fine. I am instead concerned with personal life challenges.

I’m not doing new year’s resolutions because they’ve never worked for me but I’m going to do my best to keep working toward my personal goals and the challenges that come with them.

In the financial space, challenges are fairly straightforward. Save money, don’t spend too much unnecessarily, and hope for no unexpected expenses. Unfortunately, hobbies cost money, so I either need to cut spending there or find a way to earn more money, which ties into one of the other goals and its challenges.

Writing requires time, and usually a lot of it because of all the tasks that come with trying to do good work. Some challenges are fairly obvious here, but others may not be if someone isn’t familiar with the publishing process. So, on the subject of time, if I want to make it through writing a complete novel then I’ll have to sacrifice hobby time for writing time. Sadly, hobby time is often part of my social time with friends, so I’ll have to strike a balance somewhere. If I can manage that, things should go fairly smoothly, right? Then I’ll have a novel and can focus on the publishing process, but depending on the direction I end up going it won’t guarantee success. Do I try to find an agent and go the route of traditional publishing or try to go indie? I’ll have to keep that in the back of my mind and worry about it when I get there, but that’s a major challenge in itself if I hope to make it a viable source of income.

The last major challenges are associated with personal health. I definitely need to lose weight and get in better shape, for several reasons. The challenges there require consistent dedication to all the facets of the process, which means I need to seriously consider lifestyle changes. Getting through all that is going to require time, which is just another thing I’ll have to balance with hobbies and writing, and finances because of better budgeting for groceries and eating better.

So many challenges that need balancing. Well, let’s see where 2024 goes!