I finally came back from Germany!
After around 5 months of working in a kitchen, something I never thought I would ever do, I finally came back home. This entire thing has been quite the experience for me. New job, new country, new language, new people, and a lot of new things to learn.
We left Germany on the 6th of November and got to our destination the next day. We left at around 12 PM and got to where we needed to be at around 9 - 10 AM the next day, so we had an almost 24 hour drive, in which I didn't sleep at all. Apparently I have a hard time sleeping in a moving car.
I was exhausted and all I wanted was to get in bed. Until I got home. Then all my tiredness went away. I started unpacking everything that I brought with me, putting everything where it belonged, and then I sat down at my computer, with a nice cup of coffee.
I ended up going to sleep at around 2 or 3 in the morning, so I was fairly close to being awake for almost 48 hours. To my surprise, my decision to finally go to sleep was mostly that - a decision. I still didn't feel tired. And now, for whatever reason, I can stay awake for a very long time without feeling the need to sleep, which is unusual considering that just a year or so ago I could stay in bed 24/7 regardless of how much I slept. Maybe I just got some sort of an upgrade on being awake after not sleeping for so long on my way back. Or maybe my body is no longer used to me not working for 10 hours every day and running around from one place to another until I feel exhausted, so now I don't get tired that easily if I don't do enough physical activity.
Anyway, for the first few days after my return I was busy getting everything the way it was before leaving. My parents completely renovated my room, and so I had to spend some time getting used to it, finding a place for everything and trying to make everything as comfortable as possible. Then I had to do a lot of work on my PC to make it usable for me again, which involved getting the right files in the right places, updating everything, making sure I got all the software / games I wanted or needed and so on.
And now, just a few days later, I'm done. Now I finally have all the free time I want, until I leave for work again, which will be in around 5 to 7 months.
There's just one small problem with that - I'm already bored.
While I was setting things up to be the way they were before I left, I also spent quite a lot of time playing games. I played quite a lot of League of Legends, and quite a lot of Assassin's Creed Origins. I also have a few other games that I'd like to finish, and a few other games that I'd like to try before I leave again for work.
But after spending several hours into each, I found myself losing interest the more I played. Things were slow, tedious, and I didn't feel like I had as much fun playing as I had working in the kitchen. So I started wondering why.
The reason, I found, is quite simple - gaming is really not that challenging for me any more, at least not the games I've been playing for now. I've been playing League for several years already. I know pretty much all the champions and I can play pretty much any role. And while each game is a new experience, you always pretty much follow the same strategy, with little variations, to hopefully win the game which, in time, can get boring.
Now, when it comes to Assassin's Creed Origins, I found that I've been getting bored whenever I had to get from point A to point B. The action is fine. Getting to it is a painfully boring process. And not only in this game. I found myself feeling the same way about a lot of other games. Walking from one place to another just isn't fun, because there's pretty much nothing in between that can get your attention or make things a bit more exciting.
Even though I couldn't wait to get home to play some games while I was still in Germany, I was well aware that this desire will be gone in maybe two weeks of gaming but it went away faster than I expected.
And so, I switched my attention to something else - YouTube. I've been away for so long and I had so little free time at my disposal while gone that I had to skip quite a lot of content watching. There are a lot of things I didn't have the time to watch, and now it was the moment I could rectify that. But even YouTube got boring very quickly.
And just like that, I got bored of pretty much everything I wanted to do once I got home.
In the end, I was left with one thing only - work.
While I was gone I promised my girlfriend that when I get back, I will help her with a project, by making her some sort of a gif / video loop that would take some sort of an abstract form, like a cloud or spilled blood, and have it move around. I've been doing some research and experimenting for the past two days, and today it's finally done. I won't show you the whole thing moving around, but here's how the design looks like.
Now that I finished this, I feel lost and bored again. Going back to gaming isn't an option, since it will only entertain me for a few more hours, and watching YouTube isn't helping me much.
You see, having too much free time can be quite a struggle. If you've been working for quite some time, or doing something that kept you busy, suddenly finding yourself without that work or without that activity and with too much time on your hands can become very frustrating.
All of a sudden you're the one responsible for the way in which you handle that free time. All your pastimes will, eventually, become boring and frustrating. You will stop getting enough satisfaction from them and once that happens, you'll slowly begin feeling miserable.
Even the things which you used to love doing before, that were also fairly productive, such as reading, writing, taking care of a hobby or going out with friends, will begin looking like nothing but useless activities that require energy from you that you no longer have. I managed to read 14 books in 5 months while I worked 8 to 10 hours a day. Now I can barely make myself pick a book and read 10 pages.
There are, as far as I can tell, two main reasons for this, and two ways in which you can make everything better.
First reason is stagnation. We are, by design, greedy beings. We are not satisfied with the place in which we are, with our status, with our money, with our possessions, with our lovers, with anything that we currently have. We always want more, and we always want something better. We always strive to do more, to make more, to have more and to improve our lives and our relationships.
This is not a bad thing. While greed can be associated with bad habits and actions, it is what kept humanity moving forward for such a long time. We want to have more, to be more comfortable, to have better sex, to feel better and avoid staying where we are. It is in all, or most, of us, and there's not much we can do about it. We can fight it, but that might take all our time and make us even more miserable. Or we can realize that all that greed is a part of us, and use it for good.
The second reason is difficulty. When things get too easy, they get boring. When our job stops being challenging in any way, and we just do the same things again and again, without even thinking about it, we get bored. When the hobbies we like taking care of in our free time lose their challenging aspect, they become boring. The moment that we find ourselves unable to find something that can challenge us in our job, hobbies or daily life, in a way that can make us excited to work and improve, things get boring. It is why certain games stopped being fun for me - they are too simple, they lack the challenge I need, and I have a hard time finding something worth pursuing in them.
Those two things can transform our free time from an enjoyable aspect of our life, to a boring and frustrating one. One type of people that have been telling me this for a long time have been those who finally got to their pension, and finally stopped working. It's great for a few weeks, or even months. And then things get boring. That is why you see a lot of old people try to find something to do with their free time, like building small things, or crocheting, or gardening.
And so, now that we know what the two problems are, finding a solution is fairly simple. The difficult problem is finding the right solution for each of us. To generalize it, here's what needs to be done - you need to find something that is challenging enough to arouse your interest, but not too challenging as to frustrate you so much that you give up, and you have to make sure that the thing you'll do will result in something that will allow you to make progress in an area that you care about.
You can take those two principles and then apply them to multiple activities if you'd like, and try to make everything you do more interesting.
In my case, when it comes to games, the key to getting more enjoyment is to both play new genres that I either never tried before, or don't usually play, such as horror games (which I rarely / never play) or shooters (which I rarely play), or try to play the games that I already have, but in different ways, so as to make things more challenging / more interesting.
As an example, I could play a different role in League with champions that I am not good at, in order to learn something new in the game and get to a result that I care about, such as a higher rank, or a new champion mastered.
In RPGs I could try playing with different classes, such as assassins / rogues, which I never play, instead of always picking a wizard / sorcerer. Cranking up the difficulty could also make things more interesting, although it could also make them more frustrating, so I'm gonna have to be careful with that one.
Now, when it comes to my work, I must learn to do something new that captivates me. Right now I find myself enjoying using Blender once again, after getting a break for 5 months, but instead of going back to making environments, which is what I like most, I can try to make more abstract art, which I did before, but is always fun to do, because you don't always know what you'll get.
Writing will remain unchanged for me, since it is more of a process of self analysis and a thinking process that I use to figure things our about myself or my working habits, and so I don't want to change it.
I could get back to working in Photoshop and try to make a few things to see whether I enjoy it or not. Then make a few things using the little programming I know. Maybe I'll start using Linux for a while as my secondary operating system once again, to spice things up a bit.
Overall, the main idea is to try to change things and make them more entertaining. I have to find new ways to make gaming fun and challenging, new ways to work and new things to work on so that I can make progress and not stagnate, while also trying to keep some sort of a routine and some activities that will remain unchanged, such as writing, in order to have some stability in my daily life that I can always rely upon when things don't work out well enough.
And finally, I will have to change other things about my daily activities that I didn't mention here, such as trying to watch a variety of movies instead of what I know I will like, trying to discover new types of YouTube videos that I never watched before, trying to discover new and interesting software, and so on.
Having free time can be a struggle because you can get into a boring loop really quickly, one in which you get bored of everything you do, so bored that despite wanting something new in your life, you don't feel like you have the energy to do it, a loop that is very hard to get out of without enough willpower or luck. Knowing how to avoid such a loop and how to keep things interesting as often as you can will help you ensure that your free time will always be fun and interesting, not only relaxing.