A Simple Life

            Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to go back to living the simple lives humans lived before we had all this technology. It doesn’t take long for me to discard such a romantic notion; it would be horrible. Yes, my dismissal of it is in part due to the fact that I love video games – not to mention the easy access to writing research offered by the internet – but the living conditions that accompany the lack of technology are dreadful. Yet, the dream of going back to live a simpler life keeps on resurfacing, and not just in me.

            When such ideas keep resurfacing, it’s good to pay attention to them, because they tend to be telling us something about our environments. Frequently, it’s our brains trying to find a way to change something, though it doesn’t necessarily know what. In this case, I believe the important part isn’t so much the idea of going back in time, but the idea of a simpler life – more notably, a life not as cluttered with the technology that our existence now revolves around.

            As much as technology has done for us, and as wonderful as it is, there is no doubt that it has made life vastly more complicated. Almost everything we need to do is easier now, but there’s another type of strain the technology seems to put on us, seemingly offsetting it. We have a responsibility to the technology – to keep it functioning, to continually learn how to use it as it updates and evolves, and to be available when someone tries to contact us through it. In addition, now that we have instant access to the whole world and most of the knowledge in it, many people feel a responsibility to know what’s going on in the world at all times – as if, simply by having that information, they could somehow make a difference.

            I think technology has put a pressure on us that humans have never had to deal with before, and that has awakened in many of us a desire to go back – back to a simpler life. However, that simpler life wasn’t better; in many ways, it was worse. At any rate, backwards isn’t ever the correct direction to travel – we must always keep moving forwards.

            Why should we go back in time to when we had less technology when technology makes everything so much easier? Instead, we should take advantage of what we have learned, and use it to push forward toward that simple life we want. We’ve already made life easier with technology; now it’s time to adapt what we have made to give us the lives we want. It’s either that, or we wait for our evolution to catch up to an industry that is advancing faster that we can keep up with.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

The Easy Way

            My goodness, is it ever hard to come up with something to write about this week. My brain seems to think that, since I cheated on my blog last week, why not this week? Of course, the answer is that, if I did that, soon I wouldn't have any new blogs.

            It makes me think back to video games I used cheats to play when I was younger. The first one that comes to mind is Age of Empires. For those of you not familiar with it, Age of Empires is a medieval RTS (Real Time Strategy) game. That means it’s a game where the player controls an army and moves it around the map, fighting your opponents armies in real time (as opposed to turn based, like RISK or Civilization). At the same time, resources are gathered and spent on buildings, research and troops.

            Not long after I started playing the game, I was introduced to cheats. These were commands I could type to do things such as give me special units, kill all my enemies or give me free resources. The only ones I used very often were the resources ones – it saved a lot of time waiting for them to be gathered and let me build things much faster. It also made it impossible for the computers I was fighting to beat me.

            I actually thought I was good at this game.

            At some point in time, I decided I should play the game without cheats and discovered I couldn't. Without those free resources coming in, I just couldn't keep on top of my army well enough to beat anything harder than the “easy” computer. In the end, I always had to return to typing “powpowpow” about twenty times and destroying my enemies with my army of bazooka wielding, tricycle riding babies.

            The same sort of thing happened with Morrowind (Elder Scrolls III, also known as Skyrim’s grandpa). That game was hard when you started playing it. Before you raised your character to a decent level, worms could kill you. Luckily I once again was given cheats, which made it so I could actually play the game. Unfortunately, once again, without those cheats I can’t play it at all.

            Cheating makes everything so easy and our brains are wired to do everything the easiest way possible. Once we know there’s an easier way, it’s hard to go back to the harder way. But there’s something we don’t realise about cheating until it’s too late – and that is that enjoyment doesn't come simply from winning; it comes from overcoming a challenge. Those games I mentioned? I don’t play them any more because they aren't fun if I cheat and my brain gets mad at me if I don’t take the easy route and cheat.

            Just so it’s clear that this doesn't just apply to video games, in elementary school I was the biggest cheater ever in the game 7 Up – and I was never caught even once. In this game, all the kids hid their heads in their arms on their desk while seven kids that were “it” went around and each secretly tagged someone. Then the seven kids went stood at the front of the class while the seven tagged kids guessed who had tagged them. If they guessed correctly, they switched with the person who was “it”.

            Cheaters in this game were easy to spot and call out because they had to lift their heads to see who tagged them. Then there was me. I figured out that if I positioned myself just right, I could see the floor and, consequently, could flawlessly pinpoint my tagger by the shoes they were wearing.

            After cheating made this game boring, too, I was able to use this skill to always choose the wrong person so I didn't have to leave my desk and participate more.

            Games are meant to be challenging and so is life. There’s only one thing that cheating and taking short cuts achieves and that is getting something done. But just getting something done isn't enough, because if it isn't done properly it becomes empty. Cheating in games makes them boring. Cramming for a test so you can pass leaves your head as empty as when you started. Stealing things makes them worthless. Taking the challenge out of life makes it feel dull and meaningless.

            So, get out there and challenge yourself. Do things and do them right, because in the end it’ll feel more rewarding and you’ll find you've accomplished far more. I know I did and I ended up with a pretty good blog post.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.