Hello everyone, how has your March been? Wait, no – stop – I can’t hear you. This was an ill-advised introduction. Let’s pretend that didn’t happen, it’s a bit embarrassing for all of us.
It’s the end of March and that brings with it our newest Depth Year Diary. It’s been a month of ups and downs. I apologise in advance if parts of it are more down than up.
Over the course of the past few years I’ve often made reference to Brexit, usually as a joke, and I think it would have been entirely understandable to think as a result I wasn’t actually all that concerned. I’d refer to the post-apocalyptic post-Brexit landscape or the Hunger Games that will replace job interviews in the increasingly likely event of a no deal. I trivialised because that’s what I do as a coping mechanism.
The truth is I’ve felt the day-to-day obliterating reality of Brexit grind me down constantly over the past coupe of years. It’s all so unremittingly awful, and this month it’s been especially hard to bear. We are led by the least of us, and none of them are remotely up to the job of extricating a fractured, polarised country from an increasingly baffled and resentful European Union. Even if our parliament of pathetics manage in this con-trick of leaving the EU it’s the same bunch of utter incompetents that will have to make it work. Currency speculators and sociopathic spivs urge for ever harder forms of Brexit knowing that their own pocket-books will swell even as those owned by the rest of us are dramatically reduced.
At the time of writing we’re mere days away from the Brexit deadline and still nobody has any idea what’s going to happen. Democracy is broken, and I find it increasingly hard to give anyone involved the benefit of the doubt. Sure, it’s politicians whipping the horses to run ever faster into the abyss but they only get into the saddle with our consent and exploitable diffidence.
Coupled to this, I’ve been feeling ever more intensely that I’m wasting my time with Meeple Like Us and that I’d be happier if I just gave it all up and let the hobby accept, or reject, accessibility according to its own timetable. Site hits have been going down, and Patreon support continues to exert an unnecessary and unhealthy pressure on my happiness. Twitter and Facebook comments have started to dry up and even explicit requests for feedback go ignored. Maybe it’s just because the weather is nicer and people are spending more time outside, but that sounds to me like a rationalisation where the obvious answer is also the most convincing, People are just tired of the site, and it has failed to build up the necessary momentum that would lead to meaningful change in the industry, You may have read our pessimistic take on ‘unwon and unwinnable causes’.
I’ve been pretty miserable, in other words, for a whole range of reasons outside my control. It makes it hard to put a jolly spin on a post that is explicitly a diary of how I am coping with my depth year.
It’s been a rough month then from a mental health perspective. It’s hard to deny that I’m in something of a funk and I think the intersection of Brexit and the Depth Year is part of the reason for it.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t at all regret this and I’m still holding strong. I feel more committed to this now than I did at the start. I have been very contemplative this month though – more so than usual, which is in itself kind of weird and surprising. I spend a lot of time lost in my own head. Usually I’m happy enough there – it’s my home turf after all. I control the geography, at least to an extent. This month though it’s been hard to find the way out.
I’ve come to the conclusion that my current recurring low moods are linked up into the culture of consumerism in which we all function. I think perhaps this down-turn in my happiness might be a kind of psychological detox. I’ve been a consumer junkie for so long that I didn’t realise how much the little dopamine rush of acquisition was skewing my perspectives. It’s easy, when feeling down, to rely on the convenience of one-click ordering to give a little boost to my mood. That seems profoundly unhealthy though – probably better than actual drug abuse or alcoholism, but still far from a desirable pattern of behaviour. I worry that for a long time I’ve been buying my way out of unhappiness.
The thing is, I’m not really a miserable person and have no real reason to be. Or at least, historically that hasn’t been the case. I’m in the privileged position of not really needing to be materially affected by the things going on. Brexit will be a disaster but it will be less of a disaster for me than it will be for many others because I’m insulated from the worst of the shocks. By the time the ivory tower starts to seriously shake as a consequence of Brexit I will hopefully have other career options available. I’m in a career that permits a degree of geographical mobility and I can move somewhere to work back my EU citizenship like an indentured servant in Times of Yore. That’s not an option that many people have available, certainly not at the subsidised cost that comes with a university paying your moving expenses to come work for them.
I don’t need the income that Patreon provides – I can just stop doing the site and instantly I get about 20 hours a week back in my life. Patreon is enough to cover our participation in a hobby, provided that hobby is defined as ‘writing a blog’. I could play games instead of writing about them. Even with our diminished site impact we’re still more impactful than many blogs in this strata of the Internet. I started off doing the blog with no expectation anyone would ever read it. I kept on doing it for the fun of research. I’ve lost that somewhere along the way though. Temporarily , I hope. I hope I can find the joy in running the site again. There’s no real reason though to feel aggrieved at anything that is happening to it.
Objectively things are not bad. They’re not even not good. We can’t control how our minds choose to present the world to us though, and sometimes they’re not on our side.
Is this just the side-effect of a consumer detox? I hope so. I’d like to think I’ve become addicted to a the dopamine rush of shopping and that when I get over that my mental health will stabilise where it traditionally has been. That’s ‘pessimistic but generally at peace with it’.
The alternative is that I genuinely do need sociopathic acquisition to maintain a baseline state of happiness and that’s also an important realisation to have about myself.
I did warn you that this would be a post of ups and downs, right? So, let’s talk about some ups.
One thing I’ve really been enjoying over the past month is a sense of deepening. You’d expect that, it’s a depth year, but I think the proposition that I forward to begin with was a kind of shallow depth. It was to engage more with my possessions, but not necessarily engage deeply with any. Many of you already know that over the past year and a half I’ve been engaged in a Big Discworld Reread – Terry Pratchett has been a massive positive impact on my life and I wanted to go through the entire series from start to finish yet again. I’m coming to the end of that project – only four more books to go. Despite this being well worn ground it has rekindled my love of the books and the Discworld universe itself. While the bulk of this reread happened last year, it might have been the spark of why I wanted a depth year in the first place. It’s a chance to recontextualise beloved things in a way that ensures they remain a part of an older and hopefully wiser, worldview. As you might expect from someone who is at least partially ‘doing games for a living’ I have never bought into the idea that we must put away childish things. That always struck me as a terrible indictment of adulthood. An adulthood without frivolity is one that I don’t wish to have, thank you very much.
I’ve recently been feeling the same way about Disney, and I suspect my next recontextualising endeavour is going to be to re-experience Disney from start to finish. That was sparked off by watching the movie Saving Mr Banks which, while obviously hagiographical and self-serving, was also absolutely joyous and made me feel quite warm and settled in an unaccustomed way. I wrote about Mary Poppins in a recent Patreon newsletter and it is a genuinely remarkable movie. Saving Mr Banks is an equally remarkable movie about a remarkable movie. Seeing the deeply familiar from an unfamiliar perspective was wonderful.
Disney is obviously a problematic corporation – I’m not sure it’s even possible to be non-problematic in this day and age – but life is complicated. It’s possible for a company to exert a negative distortion on human rights, copyright and intellectual property while still being a source of refined magic. The songs of Disney were the backbeat of my childhood – the soundtracks to movies I’d watch again and again for the simple love of the artistry. I still watch the occasional Disney movie (you may remember how much I enthused about Moana for example) but it’s been a long time since I went all the way back to the start. Maybe it’s time.
As to the depth year goals, I’ve held strong to the principle of ‘no new media’ but I didn’t appreciate how difficult a birthday would make that. I got a birthday Amazon voucher and was struck by two competing instincts.
- You don’t want the temptation of credit hanging over your head. Treat it like an unexploded bomb and detonate it safely and quickly.
- But remember you can’t buy anything new until you’ve run out of things to read, watch, do and play.
Luckily I had built an escape hatch into my Depth Year plans – I’m allowed to ‘format shift’. That means, for example, games I have on my ‘to play’ list on Steam can be legitimately bought on Switch. That’s why, despite saying I wouldn’t be buying Civ 6 for the Switch, I did exactly that. Honestly, I had forgotten that birthdays were a thing – I don’t celebrate the day for reasons that will likely become apparent when I publish our review of Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr next week. Suffice to say though after more than twenty years of ‘not having a birthday’ I have given up trying to get my mother to toe that particular party line.
The thing is, I could have justified buying something new because, you know, ‘it’s a gift’. However, I ascribe to the Sam Vimes view of obligations – if you break a promise for a good reason, you open the door to breaking it for a bad one.
Did I mention how much Discworld has shaped my world-view? If you wanted a pretty good feel for how I would view myself as a person, as viewed through the lens of Discworld, I think I’d be a blend of Granny Weatherwax, Ponder Stibbons and Sergeant Jackrum. Make of that what you will.
As I said last month I want to make a regular feature of the half-life of enthusiasm I have for things that took my fancy during the month. So, this month I was tempted by:
- An anticipation for the television series of Good Omens, which is coming in May. Good Omens is one of my absolute favourite books, and the combination of Michael Sheen and David Tennant is pure genius. It could I guess be considered a format shift but I think that’s massively stretching the definition. I think this one has to be held off until next year.
- The television show Derry Girls, because I’ve heard a few people talking about it and it sounds Pretty Okay,
- This blog of Discworld analyses that Vivienne Dunstan pointed my way. I didn’t have a hardline stance on blogs in my depth year goals but I think ‘If I’m not already subscribed in some way, it’s not quite in the spirit of the thing’. Read it on my behalf.
- Into the Spiderverse is a movie for which I have heard nothing but praise, so I’d like to check that out even if I don’t actually care about Spiderman as a character. It was recently released in home media formats, so that’s why it’s pinged once again on my radar.
- Captain Marvel is upsetting all the right people, and I suspect as a result I’m going to love it.
Last month I indicated that I wanted to watch the rest of the Purge films, and that desire has thankfully left me. I’ve resolved to buy Tiamat’s Wrath because it’s not new, but rather a continuation of a series I already actively consume and have done every year a book has been released. I honestly haven’t thought about Russian Doll since I published the last diary entry and while I did buy Civ VI I’m not really interested any more in getting the expansion since I haven’t even really played the base game enough. I mentioned that I’d like to read more in the Laundry Files series and it turned out Past Michael had already bought the second entry so I read it. It was okay. I might read future books but if I don’t I won’t feel like I’m missing out too much.
From January, I still want to watch Sex Education so that might well be a keeper. I’d also still be interested to see how Bird Box makes the transition from novel to movie.
I apologise if this instalment of the diary has been a bit of a sobering read, but I don’t think it’s in the spirit of documenting this process to sugar-coat anything. Next month at least we should have either at least some final clarity on Brexit or the sword of Damocles will have yet again been moved a little bit up the road. In any case, hopefully I’ll be in a better frame of mind to deal with the world however it presents itself.