Preemptive Retaliation

It’s the end of the year. Time to sit in the dark, christmas-tree lit evenings and hold up a great big mirror on myself.

This year I signed up for an app that recommends a new album to listen to every day. It pulls from one of those 1001 Albums you should listen to before you die or something, and it randomly gives you one of those albums and a box to note your thoughts and some stars to rate your experience. And I’ve been loving it. It has exposed me to so much interesting music that I would never have heard before. I’m listening to one of the albums right now, in fact, and it’s an absolute banger.

But it’s been more miss than hit. Either by recommending albums that I straight up don’t like (which is the way of things) or by encouraging me to listen to albums when I’m not in the right headspace for them. So many songs that I didn’t have the space to process because of stress or tiredness or a need to do something else, but they were pressed onto me anyway and I had to listen to them and I had to rate them because, well, it’s what I signed up for, isn’t it?

Over the last week I’ve been tallying up my books and videogames that I’ve played. It’s been a disappointing endeavour, as the tally of videogames dwarfs the number of books I’ve read, but also when revisiting all these titles I find myself… underwhelmed? I’ve written about Silksong before and how I thought it would be my year defining game, and it kinda was but not in the way that I wanted it to. Previous years I’ve had Celeste and Elden Ring, and 1000xResist, and Tears of the Kingdom, and Disco Elysium and so on. There’s always been at least one or two games that have wowed me to the point where I can’t stop thinking about them, where I buy art dedicated to them. This year there have been some strong contenders, but nothing that really scratched that itch. Aside from Silksong, which I’m still very conflicted on.

Part of that could be down to my current mental state. I’ve not been shy in exploring the idea that maybe, potentially, there might be a small chance, that I get suffer from depression now and then, and this has been an especially tiring year. Tight money, a stagnating office job, and a book that I am having to fight my way through every chapter. Three times, just this morning, three times I considered abandoning it. Throwing it to the sea and start working on something else.

A lot of it comes down to consuming something with intent. I came to a slow realisation of this when I was noting down what books I was reading. At the beginning of the year I had a bunch of books that I was exited to read. I got them for Christmas last year and they sat on my bedside table, and I was so so so excited to read them. And I did! And they were amazing! And then what? Well I picked up another book and read that. And when I gave up on that I picked up another one, and another and so on. I didn’t want to read them, I wasn’t excited to read them. I was just reading them for the sake of reading them. Same with the games. With a few exceptions I just picked another game, and started playing. Hell, when I finished Silksong I threw a dart at a board for my next game and I ended up really not liking it because I wasn’t excited for it. Of course I wasn’t. It feels obvious to say that now.

And there’s a lot of that reflected elsewhere in my life. The biggest being my writing. In other posts I talked about how I was struggling with a certain chapter and it was a pain to work through. Well I got through it! And I still think my novel is bad! But, on the other hand, it is much easier to edit now that I’m in a chapter I enjoy. Even then I’m logging on, redrafting a few hundred words, and then clicking off so I can play videogames or watch a film or something. It’s not with intent. I’m not excited to write. I’m going through the motions.

It’s not the way to write. It’s not the way to enjoy something that I love.

I could go further and further with this, where I talk about my writing, the internal cringe of it. I have a novel fully written that I haven’t sent to agents because I’m scared that they won’t like it. Or, more accurately, I’m scared that it’s not as good as I think it is, because I already think that it isn’t good.

Sorry, this entry has become a bit scattershot towards the end.

I’d like to end this on a positive note. Maybe my new years resolution should just be – do things with intent. Way back when, back twenty years ago when I started my first blog, I called it Sleepwalking my way through life pulling from a Less Than Jake song, and I meant it in an angsty teenage way. But it’s easy to slip into that mentality, to take one day at a time, to just let things happen. It’s easy, but it’s not fun. So that’s what I’ll do going into 2026. I’ll do things with intent.