Hey I’m Sam, I don’t know many of you too well, and that’s alright. Unintentionally or not I happened to continue the family line of “Not liking people”: my father is a, and I quote, “. . .a forever thirteen year old, doing my best to not adult.” who worked from home a decade before it was cool. And my mother, having been a student up until five years ago, now asks us to call her Dr. Meine when appropriate for the work she put into that. 

Regardless, in that time not talking to you guys, I have had a bit of time to explore my interests. Now that I have no social bindings to stop me from yapping, I figure it would be charitable of me to vomit up my manifesto, list, commandments, the things that I have learned or somethin’. To save yourself a moment, know it boils down to: do stuff, stop being bored, take my meds. You have a moment? Well here’s my thought:

After some trial and error, I am confident in saying that you can never be happy by doing nothing. By nothing in this case I mean having no interests, sitting around all day consuming media, food, opinions, without any passion to supplement it. I have seen myself fall into this pit over covid and summers, playing video games 12 hours a day and all that, it’s fun but in the end it doesn’t fulfill the part of you that needs more. I have seen others also fall into this pit: I am saying this with love when I say my family is white trash, more of us have gone to prison than graduated high school, and heading back west to say hello only reinforces that. My mother is a prescriber, and I hear the secondhand stories of people who never go outside, have no hobbies, eat nothing but fruit roll ups and gummy worms and wonder why they are depressed. In all this, the best way to get out of that rut is to just do something with your life. Even just a boring every day job can work, barring that you have to ignore that mindset that takes every mildly interesting idea in your head, and shuts it down before you even try. For me it isn’t exactly a fear of failure, but a lot of the cool things I have in mind simply never happened, because it seemed too hard, that it doesn’t accomplish anything, that it’s not worth it, if I can’t see myself doing it then it won’t happen straight up. It is a massive problem for me, but the couple times I ignored it, I made a 5 foot mahogany sword in a month, I redesigned the symbol for a niche character from a low res picture of concept art from the ground up, I tried and mildly succeeded at doing a cool thing, and that is enough.

I know I did just bash on being a mindless consumer just a second ago, but I do have to walk back on that for just a moment. Often finding a thing to do to not be a depressed heap becomes quite easy when you have media to supplement it. In moderation the consumption of shows, games, art, and music can in itself be part of the thing that keeps you sane. Recently I feel there has been a barrage of criticism against modern media, that everything is so washed out that there is nothing to enjoy. This line of thinking is fortunately garbage and bad and wrong. It may seem cliche, but the amount of stuff that is quality that the human race puts out far exceeds the free time and life expectancy of any given person, you just have to be open to looking for it. 

I remember having an idea of a “classic game”, the ones I watched people play or talk about at the time on youtube or in discussion. One day I chose 20 of those or so I remembered being talked about during a steam winter sale and started going through them. And what can I say, Stardew Valley, banger, Hollow Knight, banger, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, banger, OneShot, banger, HalfLife, softlocked and good while not that so yea. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, great games with passion are always just around the corner, don’t let yourself become a fan of something who will only enjoy that one thing, you will become a grumpy old man: start growing gray hairs and yelling at children in no time. 

I also have the idea of the perfect album. In the same vein of good games, in my mind there is some music that exists on a plain of such quality and craft that it breaks down all barriers of genre to give a showing anyone can at least appreciate. In my time I have discovered a handful of these, many are things I personally enjoy, others I find are in a genre outside of my liking but are still of that same timeless quality. Vulgar Display of Power, Mezmerize, Nonagon Infinity, Songs for the Deaf, Time, they never drag, and are things I will play in full from back to front without complaint.

Even when you uncover the perfect albums, find your classic games, do a cool thing, you still have to deal with yourself. I believe I may have been an unpleasant human up until junior year, and I think I have the family tradition of unmedicated ADHD to blame for that. As my mother is a provider, she attempts to diagnose and help people deal with their conditions, and much of that has to do with the meds she prescribes. I also hear the horror stories of those prescribed badly. Meds don’t change you as a person, it’s more like tinting your outlook. I take Vyvanse, and before that I simply didn’t comprehend how it felt to be normal. For me, an incredibly apathetic antisocial inability to focus was normal, and the meds were like a storm clearing up on a terribly dreary day. In the same vein meds can just as easily add more buffers, and enhance pre-existing conditions. I am lucky to have someone in my life who actively wants to give me medical independence by helping me understand what my conditions are, and what medications do to impact that. Being your own advocate is key, to quote someone smarter than me: “if someone is telling you how to think, they are not your friend”. 

Well, that’s about it, I’ll see you all in a decade or two when the universe decides to pull a funky coincidence and we think “oh wow small world innit”, I’ll see if I can keep doing cool stuff in the meantime.