I was showing my wife Splinterlands tonight and the look on her face when I mentioned how much I have spent on cards over the last two months was pretty priceless. but then, so was the look when I showed the current value and then the value of people's accounts that started back in the day.
She asked me -
Why didn't you start playing?
Interesting question - considering that when we met a decade ago I used to game a bit and she really didn't like it, so before she moved in with me, I stopped cold turkey. I actually didn't mind at all though, as for a while I had felt that I wasn't getting much out of playing anything.
It was because of this that I didn't get into Splinterlands originally, because I both knew that I used to game a lot and didn't want to fall back into the habit and, I felt I wasn't going to get anything out of it. After all, I was earning through writing and doing okay at it, so I didn't have time to waste playing. Silly me from a wealth perspective, but I am not disappointed that I was able to spend all the time writing instead of battling on Splinterlands.
I have always been pretty keen to see SL do well though and I am glad it is, but it wasn't for me and I never even logged in to see what it looked like. Actually, I still hadn't when I bought my first packs and it took a month or more before I started playing at all. Now, I play a bit each day (most days) and I get my ass kicked. I don't do it for the rewards though, as if it was for that, I would do far better just renting out my entire deck.
This is not a post about gaming though really, it is more about how our feelings impair our thinking. Rather than me looking at Splinterlands seriously as a potential investment opportunity, I chose to ignore it as much as I could, even when friends were telling me to buy a few packs here and there. If I had?
But I didn't.
However, we are all colored by our feelings about various things and this stops us from trying, even if we do not have any idea about it at all. I tell my daughter all the time to try new foods and every time before she tries it she says, I don't like it.
how do you know if you don't try?
Yet, I am the same and perhaps we all are. Many people say they like to try new things, but there are many conditions for most people and what the major one is, is the cost. The cost might not be money, it might be injury or pain or something other, but there is always a cost of some sort to take an opportunity.
When it came to investing into Splinterlands, I was cost averse, as I am a tight-ass and don't like to spend money on anything and most of the time I have been on Hive, money has been very tight. It seemed counter-productive to buy into a game I wasn't even interested in playing. Back then, the cost of getting invested was much, much lower than it is now and if I had put in the equivalent (which I wouldn't have) I think I would have owned the game - now, just a bit player.
We hold ourselves back and at the time, our rationale is sound, because our feelings tell us that we are doing the right thing. Every bad decision we have made, felt right at the time and we felt okay making it. Some people just make bad decisions over and over again - *like the people who have a "relationship type", keep picking assholes, and blaming them when things go awry.
Our choices are colored by our past experiences and as such, we are guided through life making decisions that hide much of the world from us. If we aren't interested in horse riding, we probably don't spend our time in riding stores looking at riding boots. Though, we might go in for a riding crop to satisfy a kink. This means that things that we do not prefer, we actively ignore, even if we don't know anything about them yet, making preference of them impossible.
But, it isn't possible to pay attention to everything, which is why we have preferences to act as filters in the first place, so that we can get more of what we want (even if it isn't) and less of what we don't (even though if we knew, we'd want it).
This is also the problem with our attention being directed to so many things at the same time, getting pulled this way and that so we don't have the attention or time to spare to investigate something thoroughly enough to see if we prefer it. Plus, we end up getting drawn into low-value activities that are often quite passive, because we are inherently lazy and our brain wants that good feeling of doing the right thing, without having to do any work for it.
There is so much noise in the system that it is very hard to pay attention and single out individual sounds that we want to concentrate on, let alone commit to following down the path and investing into it, with a guaranteed cost and the potential for loss. This is also the loss of opportunity too, as investing into one thing, means not being able to invest into another.
I think I am not the only one in the world who struggles to stay abreast of everything that is going on and I don't spend much time looking at what most people spend a lot of time looking at. I hardly read the news, don't spend any time on centralized social media, don't game (a bit now), don't watch a lot of show... And still miss the majority of things that have value, because my preferences are what they are.
If I had made "all the right" decisions over the last few years, I would be a millionaire many, many times over - but, so would we all. The thing is, most of our decisions are made out of our awareness as a consequence of those we make in our awareness. Each decision we make, excludes countless others that we likely have little to no visibility on. Once we do get visibility at some point in the future, we can say "I should have" but that just isn't the way it works.
What I do "know" is that part of the reason that so many of us in this world struggle, is that we pay attention to the noise rather than what we should be paying attention to. I know people who are unhappily struggling to make ends meet, but know what is happening on seemingly all of the reality shows - noise.
In a world where we are constantly connected to a conduit of information being fed to us, plucking from the stream what is truly important becomes a battle.
while my wife looks back at what could have been, if I had started playing back then, would she have seen the future potential for us both to retire early - or would she have been pissed off at me for wasting my time?
Why didn't I start playing.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
The noise in this post is a picture of the living room carpet.
