the missing piece

I have to be very careful about gaming. Selective about when I pick up a new title. What kind of game is it. I might stop caring about everything else for a while. Used selectively enough, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it mostly is. I've thought a lot about why gaming in particular, comparing it to other vices and interests. It's not simply an addiction or an escape. There's something more specific that hooks a certain type.

I'm an "achievement" type player to a great extent. That is, I'm most drawn to playing a game in which my character is always getting stronger, progressing in some way themselves, not just passing through a game world or story. I like games that start out ridiculously difficult, but I get to the point where I can walk around their fantastical hellscapes pretty safely, with no more challenges to grow stronger overcoming. The game loses something, and I return to reality, having achieved nothing at all.

Aforementioned feelings of learned hopelessness are all about achievement. It's the feeling there's nothing I can do that's going to get me anywhere. To be obsessed with a game is to be starved for feelings of achievement. Gaming can be especially addictive for the type of people who feel hopeless about making any progress in their own lives. So unlike real life, games promise progress. Just play them and you'll get somewhere. 

What can I achieve in life? Why did I stop doing any kind of art or music? Never striving for anything academically or vocationally or socially or anything at all ever? 

Nothing felt like an achievement. Thus, no achievement seemed possible. Nothing I did would be of any value to anyone. Nothing I strive for will matter.

There's a logical chain to it, but I'm still just trying to put the pieces together. My life's work of trying to figure out why my brain doesn't work. I've long compared it to feeling incomplete, like a car in which the wheels are not connected to the engine. The drive shaft, should I say? The metal turnie thingies? I don't know cars very well, but I understand that everything has to be causally connected. Engines don't turn wheels just because they really want to.

I hesitate to even volunteer help for people, for fear that the help from me would be unwanted. I'd be inept, in the way, whatever the framing, nothing I do will be of value to anyone. Applying for a job means tricking someone into thinking they'd want to hire me. An endeavor, like all endeavors, I'm sure to fail at. I don't know why I feel that way, but it makes some sense to me that it could be the sort of missing piece needed to make the wheels turn.

It's like the reward axis manifests on a psychological level. The psychological characteristics may be more immutable than they should be, if they're the product of an underlying neurochemistry, brewed by the interplay of environment and biology. This is why we can be aware that we feel a given way, and that it's problematic or even wrong, while being unable to choose feeling differently. It's not that simple.

Yet, other people seem to go about their lives as if they're in a video game, in which if you want to do something, you go do it. If something makes sense, act on it. Doesn't matter that they mostly fail every which way and very little they do makes sense, if a person's sense of self-worth is functioning properly. 

That the missing piece would be one's own sense of self-worth just seems obvious now. Mine's been crudely stitched together with delusions of exceptionalism my entire life. Twice exceptional, even. I'm not sure how to actually fix it. One might say I've learned that I'm helpless to do so. Maybe I am.