Video Game Mentality

In a comment on my post yesterday, my man, Yi-Fu, used a really neat phrase: "video game mentality." He was referring to how he wants to just get through the Rangers regular season to get to the playoffs, in a way that you just breeze through a season in a video game to get to the end. I'm right there with him. I just want to close my eyes and boom, it's playoff time. But as he noted, we have to endure and live through all the highs and lows that a baseball season can bring us.

I can remember doing that with video games, growing up. In particular, I remember a friend and I would play a football video game and just let the game simulate a season so that we could get to the playoffs and begin there. Doing that sort of took the fun out of it. That made winning it all sort of lackluster, took some joy out of it.

It's the same with life. If we try to simulate life to get around the hard times, we rob ourselves from much of what life has to offer us.

Doing a baseball season in video game mentality means that we want to steer around the difficult times . . . like the past month for the Rangers. I'm to the point where I just turn it when the Rangers are stinking the joint up . . . like the third inning last night. Had I stuck with it, it would have been an incredible feeling to watch what eventually happened in the tenth inning.

In the same way, when we try to steer around life's obstacles, we miss the incredible feelings that come with getting through the difficult times to the not-so-difficult times. We're better off to try to get through the difficult times. If we try to go around hard things just to get to the good stuff, the good stuff doesn't mean nearly as much . . . and it isn't nearly as enjoyable and worthwhile.