It’s not exactly something I experienced recently, but it still affects me to this day.

Back in 2021, the new expansion for one of my favorite games came out:  Final Fantasy XIV, Endwalker.  Unlike a lot of my friends who played at the time, I had a job, so I couldn’t rush through like everyone doing it non-stop all day, and I ended up taking my pace and really paying attention to the story and the overall message of the arc:  To live is to suffer, but there is also no joy without suffering.

 

We’ve all experienced some really tough times in our lives.  The loss of a loved one, getting laid off from a job with no savings and nothing lined up, and even just struggling with mental health issues like depression.  And I’m sure that many of us have had the thought that “Life would be so much better if things like this never happened”.  If nothing bad ever happened in life, then everything would be perfect and we’d always be happy, yeah.

 

One of the things explored in this expansion was that exact question, and the answer that they got - and that really opened my mind - was that in a life with nothing but happiness, eventually you become numb to it all, and you’re no longer happy.  You need the perspective of the bad times to be able to enjoy the good, otherwise your life will simply become stagnant.

 

Around the time of the expansion release, I was struggling with a lot of depression and anxiety-related issues - the ongoing pandemic didn’t help with that, of course.  I had a lot of negative thoughts, even though I was managing to push through most of them.  I struggled a lot, and I’m still very thankful to the patience my friends had with me during that time.  At the very end of the expansion, after you’ve lost all your companions but are still pushed forward to everything through and you get them back, my friends all surprised me once I got out of the last cutscene by standing around my character and literally cheering me on with glowsticks.  I won’t lie, I broke down crying in our voice chat, and that’s when the theme of the expansion really resonated with me.  I was just so happy, and I could really appreciate what I had with my friends after all the troubles I’d gone through the last two years.  It really changed my mentality about life, and a few weeks later I managed to ween off my depression and anxiety medication and didn’t have to go to therapy as often.

 

Is it a little silly that a game helped me figure out a way of thinking about life to manage my depression?  Maybe.  But even today, I still think about it quite a lot.  To live is to suffer and entrust unto tomorrow.

Comments

  1. Style & EditingSeptember 5, 2024 at 11:19 AM

    This is a beautiful post, Eos. You really have an authentic voice that works very nicely for engaging with a public audience. I would imagine this post could reach and touch many people who need to read it.

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