It was fantastic! I woke up at my own convenience, time was in abundance, and I could indulge in my hobbies as much as I wanted. I went on a tear, first with a trip to Vegas, spending the longest and strangest night of my life playing penny Poker machines, shared a wild night with a bunch Canadians, and drank at the classiest, flashiest bars the Strip had to offer.
After I got home, I inhaled any piece of media I could get my hands on, devouring all three seasons of Game of Thrones, finishing off the latest runs of The Walking Dead and How I Met Your Mother, completing entire anime series, watching dozens of movies, and even reading a book or two. It was an opportunity to clear out my gaming backlog, but the depths of my laziness knows no bottom, and after completing the Yakuza series and Valkyria Chronicles, I settled for watching other people play games, and spent 100 hours watching Jeff and Vinny's legendary Endurance Run of Persona 4--that's not to mention beating The Last of Us four times and watching it being beaten by two YouTube personalities, spectating Evo, the biggest fighting game competition in America, and last weekend's Summer Games Done Quick, a five-day long marathon of master game players showing their stuff to raise money for Doctors Without Borders (they raised $250,000!).
After all this, I've come to realize something, something that I've actually realized long ago but didn't want to think about lest my daily life be disturbed beyond recovery. If there are no peaks or valleys, but only a straight line, how could I possibly tell the difference between fun and boring? I no longer did things for enjoyment, but rather, I did them to pass the time. There was no meaning in what I was doing. I was a zombie, consuming everything and anything, and the more I ate, the less I was satisfied. I sought constant stimulation. I wanted to lose myself in media. All of sudden, I wasn't living anymore. My life had been transplanted into the internet, jumping from one show to another, into multiple manga series, stretching out into pointless hours on a message board, and it was no longer mine to claim. I suppose you can call it an existential crisis.
I can see why people come out of retirement and return to work. People need purpose. Without it, we wander aimlessly and don't know what to do ourselves. We requires goals to motivate and propel us forward. Without dreams, what are we but unconscious? Ignorant as the world passes us by. That feeling of doing nothing, of producing nothing, fills us with only nothing. I don't expect someone who's never taken a break in their life to understand this. Perhaps it should take only a week, not months, to come to this conclusion, but I'm quite good at staving off the truth. This was an opportunity to enact the biggest act of procrastination my life has ever seen. Now that I've done it, it's time to come back, back to days where I ground my fingertips into nubs, pooling all my concentration, and allow myself just the slightest bit of creativity to liven up an otherwise droll task.
All that consumption--it can't be for nothing. There has to be a point to it, a lesson learned, a moral, a valuable skill acquired or something. Did I truly waste my time? I can't say I didn't enjoy it, and in some ways, I think it was a necessary experience in order to grow. Or, this could all just be one big attempt to paint my wasted five months in a better light. There were tons of things I could've done: like volunteer, freelance, or pursue my own personal projects. I deliberately stuck my in the sand and shunned any opportunity before me... until now.
Deep down inside, I know that this will be the last time I'll enjoy an extended vacation like this. Maybe, that's why, with all my heart, I embraced oblivion and all its forms. But that road's just a dead end, and it's finally for a change of direction.
