Respawn settings
If you don’t like the world you’ve created, you can change it. (Image by allinonemovie)
Back in the olden days, when you used up all of your lives in an arcade game, that was it. Literally, GAME OVER.
You had to drop another quarter in the slot to play again. And you would always start at the beginning. It might take you hours to get back to where you were in order to practice the higher levels of gameplay.
Early home gaming consoles had the same design. But as computer and video games evolved (and merged along the way), they allowed players to save their progress. They could also respawn at points other than the beginning, allowing gameplay to be less repetitive and more complex. Instead of games that needed to be completed within one sitting, the journey could unfold over a period of days or weeks.
Life is like that, too. Obviously, when we die, it’s game over as far as our experience in the physical world, but we’ve got a lot of chances to experiment and iterate and get things wrong prior to that point. And every time, we get to save our progress and respawn from where we left off. We never have to go back to the beginning.
Interestingly, this is not always a comforting notion. Many of us like to see things in absolutes, extremes, and binaries. Good/bad, black/white, success/failure.
The story is often, “I’m bad, but someday, I’ll be good. I’m a failure, but someday, I’ll be a success. I’ve got it wrong now, but someday, I’ll get it right.”
We don’t want to start until we believe we’ve got what it takes to play the game all the way through. We’re hanging onto that one quarter.
Unfortunately, we’ve already messed up our pristine record of doing nothing by doing something. We’re already participating. We’re already playing the game. We’re already trying stuff. We’re already doing the work, albeit halfheartedly or slowly. We’re already living, sharing, growing, experiencing.
This is a little scary for some of us, like a nightmare in which we didn’t realize the exam clock had already started while we were sitting there daydreaming. This wasn’t the real version of life we were going to live. This wasn’t the art we were really going to make.
However, there are better metaphors. How about a punch card to your favorite coffee shop that already has three punches on it? Or a few credits toward your bachelor’s degree based on your work history or high school AP courses?
Or the ability to respawn at your previous checkpoint in a video game?
You aren’t starting from scratch. Whatever you want to achieve, you’ve already gained useful skills toward it. You’ve learned and grown.
It’s a little disappointing. We might want our true path to look dramatically different, like the childhood fantasy of finding out that these boring people you’ve been stuck with aren’t really your family and this isn’t the world you belong to.
We have to suffer through the same life we started with. We can’t rage quit and expect to start fresh.
On the other hand, we’ve already gained some useful skills and assets for the next part of the journey. Maybe we’ve overlooked them all this time, seeking something better or more interesting. But if we fully inventory what we’ve already got, we might be surprised by its value and usefulness.
I’ve seen this pattern over and over again in clients and colleagues, students and friends. Whether someone is decades into their career or closer to the beginning, they want to dismiss or discount the work they’ve done so far, sometimes in truth-bending ways. One of the most creative people I know spent years seeking recognition for her work, ignoring and shutting down an incredible YouTube channel with over a million views along the way. One of the most generous people I know said that he wanted to start being consistently generous.
These distortions are, in their way, more acceptable than the pain of acknowledging that we’re already imperfectly doing the thing we wanted to do. But when we do recognize the effort we’ve already contributed and the experience we’ve already gained, we are more grounded in reality. We’re hanging out on the same plane of existence as the milestone we hope to someday reach. When we allow ourselves to stay in that world — the same world everyone else is in — we might find that our end goal it is a lot closer than we think.
The possibility that we might actually get what we want brings up its own set of fears. What happens when we win the game? In the arcade days, you couldn’t really win — the enemies just came faster and faster until you got bored or died. But in more complex games — and in real life — you can enjoy a sense of completion. And then you can pick a different game. There’s always another one.
