Self-Recrimination and 8-Bit Level Caps

The winds of change are blowing again. I'm fairly certain I know why. Certain recent events are typically coupled with rexamination and restructuring. While I'd rather not discuss those events in much detail here, I can at least say that nothing stops the march of time. That's cryptic.

This rexamitation of my life is long overdue. What I find odd is that lack of motivation that is still riding along with it. My brother once referred to himself as an idea man. Great at coming up with wonderful ideas and notions simply brimming with potential, but when it comes to actually making any of those imaginings into a tangible reality? Eh, not so much. The interest is there, but the motivation to get started is missing. Perhaps it's not even the motivation that's missing, but rather the knowledge of what step one is. I have always suffered from a similar issue. While not quite the idea generator my brother is, I've always been good with the beginnings and endings of things. Mostly I applied that self-realization to relationships, but I'm finding it true of other things in my life. Simple and seemingly small things as well as other, um, not-so-small things.

Comes a time in life (let's say 30, for the sake of arguement) when doing something with yourself becomes very important to you. The writers of Jarhead summed this problem up perfectly in referencing Metroid. Sitting up all night trying to get through that last level, and you know what happens when you get there? Nothing. Nothing happens. Hours upon hours, days upon days spent struggling to achieve a goal that effectively amounts to near nothing. Numbers on a screen. A congratulatory picture (Samus is a woman? Cool). Maybe a vague sense of accomplishment, but really, who cares. I started looking at my own life, and while I'm still very early in this process, I have several of these moments in my life to look back on and wonder if I've been wasting my life. A question that is more and more frequently being punctuated by people younger than myself doing things that I have never and will never aspire to.

A word or two about level caps. In the bygone era of 8-bit there was a numeric limit to the amount of information that could be contained per bit of...well, I'm not learned enough to know exactly how all of it works, but the bottom line is there were a lot of games, RPG's in particular, in which a character couldn't be leveled past 255. Or individual stats could not go beyond this number. Meaning no matter how hard you tried or how long you worked at it, your game avatar could only ever be so powerful. There was only so much that could be achieved in that specific preprogrammed universe. I'm not sure if modern gaming still suffers this issue or not (I assume not), but still...even in the constructs of a limitless level/stat environment, in that world, there is only so much to be done.

I suppose the real world isn't like that exactly. We don't level up and stat boost the same way. Although I do seem to remember a time when the 4-minute mile and the 10 second 100 meter dash were the end all for human physical achievement. Now world records get broken at every single Olympics. Some part of me hopes this is Darwinian theory at work. A smaller part of me looks suspiciously at my steak. But I digress.

This is ultimately part 1/step 1 of a much longer rambling. A blog aimed at looking at myself on a very real level. Another idea that may or may not come to fruition. It's more than possible, likely in fact, that I will lose my drive to complete this task as well. Partially because there is no real end goal here. No level or stat cap to reach and be done with. Just another endeavor that could go on and on till...