Burnout, Anxiety, FOMO, and Trying to Deal with Life

Recently, I’ve been dealing with a huge malaise around… honestly, everything. I haven’t contributed much to the site, my hobbies are sitting on the shelf, and the various piles of shame of unfinished and unplayed things continues to grow. I work, spend time with family, mess around on my computer for a bit, go to sleep… rinse, repeat.

It’d be easy to just say that that I’m in a rut, but I know that’s not true. It’s far past time that I need to be honest with myself and start to look at why I feel like I’m trapped in mud, and can move just enough to realize it’s going to be hard to get out so I don’t bother. There is a lot of mental health issues, anxiety, and problems that have been pushed to the back for a long time that may have managed to get me finally, and my choices are pretty much at give up or try to do something.

Prior to 2020 and 2021, it was a lot easier for a lot of us to keep ignoring or running from problems like this. But the pandemic sort of grabbed us all and locked us in our houses with all the demons we’d been trying so hard to ignore. Our choices have been reduced to give up or maybe deal with them (or I suppose try harder to ignore, but that’s not really a sustainable choice).

Ultimately, though, we all have to face them. When you deal with anxiety and depression, the world right now isn’t exactly the best sort of place. Throw on to that being a parent, with two kids who are too young to get the COVID vaccine in a country full of assholes who are refusing to get vaccinated and putting them at risk. If you are a person who is is able to get vaccinated and still refusing, I sincerely hope you cease to exist before you can hurt anyone else. All of society and humanity will be better with you gone and forgotten. Please, feel free to never read this site again and go away forever.

Shockingly, that does have something to do with this article, though. I’m talking about anxiety, and people like that are who have been dragging out the nightmare we’ve all been drug through for the past starting-to-push-two-years now. It’s hard to find enjoyment when we we’ve seen just how awful so many of the people in our world are, how awful so many of the companies behind the products we like can be, and how predatory so many of the things we enjoy are at their base.

Also, I maybe be dealing with some anger issues.

I’ve been churning this article over for months at this point, in a whole lot of variations. It was talking about how I have too many hobbies (I absolutely do), how companies are ripping apart their own properties and brands with FOMO (they certainly are), how I’m in a gaming slump (I am)… and really, it all is just swirling around the same general problem. Maybe I’m oversharing, but I think that I’m not the only one that’s dealing with a lot of these things and maybe it would be worth writing about. Or maybe I just want to rant for a bit in a bit of catharsis, because that’s always fun.

Let me be very clear with something – there should be no shame about acknowledging and taking care of our mental health. Our society has long just pretended that problems like anxiety and depression are failures on the part of the person, or weaknesses, and that’s led to untold damage. I mean, I fully believe and encourage that, but I’m also just now starting to deal with these problems that I have clearly ignored for decades at this point. It’s hard, so incredibly hard, to move past exactly how messed up we’ve all been by our cultures and society in general (and for some, our families and backgrounds).

So I’m going to break down and walk through the various hobbies and things that I’ve long held close, said I’ve cared about, or put as part of my identity… and have recently started to question or examine. Mostly because, strangely, they are often the cause of some of my anxiety (though certainly not all), as well as my release for it.

Video Games

A couple of months back, I made a post in a Facebook Group I belong to wondering, honestly, if I just don’t care about Video Games anymore. My overall time available to play games has been shrinking over the years… a consequence of getting older, having kids, a career, marriage, and just other things to do.

It used to be that I’d get excited for a game, play it for a few days before life would distract me and never finish it. But in the past year or so, that changed. I wasn’t buying and playing for a bit… I was either buying and never playing, or just never even buying. I’d be hard pressed to talk about the last time I was just over-the-moon excited for a game. There are times that I’d be thrilled at an announcement or trailer and it die off (looking at you, Avengers)… but this was different. Stuff that I know should be right up my alley wasn’t doing anything for me at all.

Case in point, the Mass Effect Legendary Edition. I’ve talked, many times, about the series. That game is full-stop my favorite series, and the games are all high on my list of favorites of all time. Mass Effect 2 is quite possibly my favorite, and at least in the top 3 somewhere (Zelda: A Link to the Past and Final Fantasy VI would be the other two, if you were curious). I’ve played it a couple of times a year since it came out, often bringing in the others for good measure… but 2 is just a perfect slice of a game.

Yes, it’s a remake, so that takes a bit of the shine off… but still getting it on new platforms and combined together, that’s a big something. The games are showing their age, and even at the full $60 price of games, they’re well worth it in my book. Yet… I didn’t get it when it came out. I waited a couple of weeks, and thought I had time to play. I got it, installed it… and then didn’t do anything with it. I didn’t end up playing it until last week, and got as far as becoming a Spectre and haven’t picked it up since that weekend.

I don’t know that I can even blame it on the fact that EA is a trash company that exemplifies the worst parts of capitalism. Honestly, pretty much all major companies (and certainly all major game companies) at this point, and when it comes to my outrage meter these days, I only have so much rage to spread around. I still hate how gross and exploitative the companies that control video games are, their business models, and how they purposefully make games unfun to sell things to fix problems they created. But if I’m ranking things that really set me off, companies that condone and enable the actual rape of their workers get more of my anger these days. Bioware magic was a lie we were sold that was just crunch to line the pockets of millionaires and billionaires at the expense of people who love what they do.

Everything I love is tied up in companies like that, and I have to make some level of peace with the fact that none of them are all that great. I won’t ever stop railing against them, and the crappy stuff they do… but that’s the world we live in. I mean, this is a site dedicated to Star Wars in large part, and Disney certainly makes it hard to be a fan frequently. So does LEGO, and LucasArts, and everyone else. If you can look at a property or fandom you love and can’t see a place where it let you down, I both pity and envy you. Because you’re deluding yourself and I sometimes honestly wish i could do that as well.

When I sat down and thought about how I feel, and how it doesn’t seem like the normal gaming ruts I’ve hit in the past, I had a realization. I’m honestly just a fan of too many things, and have vastly too many hobbies for the time I have available. Video Games, LEGO (even in a limited amount that I do), writing, D&D, Warhammer, Board Games, Magic the Gathering, and other tabletop war games are all competing for the same dollars and the same increasingly shrinking slice of time. I’ve overextended myself in the things I do for fun… and it’s in turn made all of them not fun.

I’ve honestly stopped even looking at my “backlog” of games to play… I used to dream of the time when I’d have a whole bunch of time to get on there and play as I got older and could do more. Spoiler for all of the younger people reading this article that haven’t checked out because there are a lot of words and it’s basically “old man yells at cloud” in article form - life does not work this way.

I’m married, I’ve got kids, a full time professional job, responsibilities, and just things to do. TV always lied to us, with shows about friends all hanging out together and looking bored in their 30s. Even one of those things is a lot… have a professional job? You likely have to work on skills and keep up with things in your off hours. Have a significant other? They like it when you invest some of your time with them, and that only gets harder later on (and, again, spoiler warning… it never gets more easy or natural; if anything, it gets harder over the course of your relationship). Single? You probably have friendships, and healthy friendships need to be cared for too. There are things to do around your house or apartment, meals to prep and care for, just going back and forth to work, running errands, etc.

It all adds up… a thousand little tiny things you don’t think about. It never decreases, and for me, that’s culminated in me going through m day, getting home, and eventually just sitting down and playing through the exact same game or two that I always have, because it’s easy, comforting, and familiar. Or sometimes, I just do nothing. I keep having to tell myself that, honestly, both of those things are okay. I’m under no obligation to play anything I don’t want to. That’s my time, my enjoyment, and how I choose to spend it is my business. I don’t need to play new things, or even really the old things. Sure, I wish I would have spent a whole lot less money on the old things, but that ship has sailed.

For the record, I looked it up… the last “new” game that I outright purchased, was Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Any other “purchases” since that time have just been my free game claims with Xbox Live or PS Plus (which I really need to cancel). All of my various game libraries have hundreds of games in them, and they only seem to be growing… but the reality is that my time playing through those libraries is long gone. And I’m not sure it’s ever going to come back.

Tabletop

My love of video games is older than my love of playing games around the tabletop… but I’d say my love of pen and paper games, or tabletop wargames, runs a whole lot deeper. That made for a very nerdy younger me… player of Magic the Gathering, Dungeon & Dragons, and Warhammer. Growing up in the midwest that did not make a whole lot of friends. Being a choir, band, etc., didn’t exactly help either – but my parents wouldn’t let me ever go out for sports because they didn’t want to pay for insurance. Things like that may give a clue to where some of my anger and anxiety issues come from…

Board games, weirdly, were never a big thing for me. They weren’t in the cultural zeitgeist at all back when I was a kid, not even at the fringes at my local game stores. Those didn’t really hit en masse until the early 2000s, when I was leaving college and entering the real world, so it sort of passed me by. I just never had a group that played them in my circle of friends, so as much as I wanted to when i saw them, I never had a chance to.

I’ve mostly got stories of fun memories and some heaping piles of regret from those days. Of course, like so many others, I owned a lot of things that it turns out are really hard or expensive to replace now if I want them. Magic the Gathering, for example, has gotten stupid expensive. I never had any of the Power Nine, but I had a lot of other cards that are on the reserve list now, including, at one point, 3 full sets of revised Dual Lands (that’s 4 of each Dual Land, and there are ten total… so I had 120 of them). For those not who don’t follow the finance side, those cards would be worth about $15k or so today, minimum. I think I sold them for about $30 each, to pay for books one semester.

Logically, I know that it was likely the right call, even though it hurts. I don’t use my college degree for anything, it was very expensive, but it was crucial for putting me on the path where I am now. It got me in the door, ultimately, for the career where I am now fairly successful and skilled. And it put me in a place where I met the only person I “went” to college with (we never had a class together, and actually met at work) that I still talk to – my wife. So, you know, a win.

Bigger regrets, though, are ones I have no real control over. Like my nearly complete collection of D&D Planescape boxed sets and books. They were stolen out of a storage locker (along with my dice, some golf clubs, and a few other things) in college. Those are exceptionally hard to get, and very expensive to buy, so not something I’m ever likely to have again.

That’s just old stuff, though. In today’s world, old stuff is easy to work with, because it’s not like it’s going anywhere. Sometimes you see an eBay deal and that’s something you jump on… the worse thing you get is a bit of buyer’s remorse. Far more sinister is the constant bombardment of new products and things in the tabletop space. All of the mainline game makers are putting out products all the time… Dungeons & Dragons has three books coming out between now and the end of the year. I think I have one being delivered today (as I’m writing this, anyway), and I don’t even remember which one it is.

I have to come to terms with some of this being FOMO rearing it’s ugly head; we all love to talk about fighting FOMO and not being subject to the predatory marketing and pushing fandoms. We also all know that’s complete bullshit; none of us… none of us, are immune to these pressures. That’s why they work so well. It doesn’t matter how smart we are, how evolved we think our brains are, or anything like that. We’re still humans our our brains fail and trick us all the time. That’s why I feel the urge right now to go and buy some packs of Magic the Gathering and open them, even though I don’t need the contents for anything really… because my stupid monkey brain is wired to see that reward surge of opening fun and forgets the fact that most packs are full of things that have no value for me (to use, to sell, or to trade).

All of the companies have been ramping up their releases, competing for our hobby dollars, demanding more and more, going bigger and bigger, hitting the FOMO harder and harder. I was enjoying getting back into physical Magic the Gathering, but it’s honestly just too much with their constant barrage of physical products. Collector’s Packs, Set Boosters, variations of cards, box toppers, Commander Decks, limited sets, Mystery Boosters and The List, Secret Lairs. At the same time, they wrap them in artificial scarcity, screw with local stores and allocations, and use that to just ramp up the FOMO that much more. This leads to frustration, and volatility, with players and the market in trying to get singles and cards.

This all ties into the mental health issues that I’ve been trying to come to terms with because I’ve come to realize that there’s clearly a link between how I deal with stress and anxiety and me spending vastly too much on these hobbies and things. I pick up more hobbies than I have any chance of ever doing or completing, building up hobby debt (both as monetary debt and things to get done), and that builds the anxiety, which I need to take care of so I go buy more things to try and take care of it. It’s a cycle that I’ve been perpetuating most of my adult life, I think, and it’s getting to the point where it feels like it’s ripping me apart.

It’s even worse with some companies, that have seemingly been able to weaponize their incompetence and exploit all of the various problems that have cropped up in the pandemic. Shipping slowdowns, product shortages, scarcity… they’ve been able to just turn on that. Games Workshop is just such a company, makers of Warhammer 40k, Age of Sigmar, and angry fans everywhere.

Fun story for those who don’t follow them, and how it works… in the spring, they had a huge build-up to a new product – Warhammer Quest: Cursed City. It’s a board-game style set with a whole lot of cool new miniatures in it. It can be played single player, the figures can be used in Age of Sigmar, and most won’t be released elsewhere for awhile (if at all). The last WQ-spinoff game, Blackstone Fortress, was very popular and had a lot of cool minis in it. It’s still available, though not exactly easy to get, and came out back in 2018. The new game looked to be it’s replacement, a shift back into Fantasy (Blackstone was a 40k game), and was going to be available long-term… mostly because that’s what Games Workshop implied heavily, and even said a couple of times in their tweets.

There were posts, pages, marketing blasts, kits sent to YouTube creators, multiple months of build-up on Warhammer Community and White Dwarf, GW’s in-house magazine. And then the game went up for pre-order when the FOMO fires were at their hottest… and sold out in about 15 minutes. Then never came back in stock. Turns out, what was implied to be an evergreen product was a limited release product that GW then went completely radio-silent on. To this day, they’ve made exactly zero tweets, announcements, or press releases on the game. They scrubbed it from their website, and only have the rule supplements up and available. it will get no further support or information. If you happened to have gotten one (full disclosure, I did, I had it ordered through my FLGS), you were the lucky ones.

It’s mind-boggling how they’ve managed to weaponize their own incompetence and inability to handle product. 2020/2021 and the ongoing pandemic caused by the idiocy of our fellow humans, and the disruptions around the globe from shipping and workers realizing their horribly underpaid for the work they do… and GW isn’t alone in being messed up by it. What’s unfortunate is that they, like so many others, continue to press the same FOMO buttons, and press the same things, that just make you want a product so bad. They know full well they aren’t going to be deliver, and that they’re going to piss off a lot of people in doing it. But they keep doing it, again and again.

Months down the road… that Cursed City box I bought is still sitting in a closet, still in its shrink wrap. Even though it was hard to get, it angered a lot of people, and it’s never taken off in popularity. The models that come in the box aren’t powerful in the main game, Age of Sigmar, so they’ve never commanded a price premium. The game itself hovers in value right around its MSRP, $200, and most people who have a box and are looking to get rid of it… just can’t. I don’t know what I’m going to do with mine.

Maybe I’ll open it, build, and paint the miniatures one day… but I kind of doubt it. They look really amazing, I won’t lie. But I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of other minis waiting to be painted that I care about more. One thing I know for certain… I’m never going to play the game. That’s what a lot of this journey has been about, really… I’m not going to play any of the games. I’ve got tons of board games and the like I’m never going to play.

I think they look great, or have cool things, and I really wish I could play them, but in my 40s, it’s not like the time and group of friends will magically spring into being for that to happen. My friends all have kids and lives, and getting us all together is hard in the best of times. Throwing a new game into the mix is effectively impossible. None of us really care enough about boardgames to play it, and I don’t care enough about them to play it alone. That’s hours of my life I’d rather put into other things, or wasting it playing video games, reading, or writing articles like this.

So maybe it’s time to just… stop trying to chase that dream. That’s the hardest lesson I’m trying to learn in this journey. The one that I know, and understand, but cannot often accept. That I’ve got so many hobbies, but will never have the time for them. So maybe it’s time to give that dream up. More importantly, though… there’s nothing wrong with that, ultimately. Not all of our dreams come true… hell, almost none of our dreams come true. And that’s okay.

Remember being asked as a kid, “what do you want to be when you grow up,” or being asked in school or college, “what do you want to do after you graduate”? I rarely had a great answer. When I was a lot younger, I wanted to be an astronaut, but that was never an achievable goal. When I started college, I wanted to make video games, but then I started to take the computer science courses my school offered, and hated them (they were not suited for games anyway)… so I decided to go other directions. Given how terrible the game industry is, I dodged a bullet.

Really, though, I never had much of a plan past “I want to be able to provide for myself and my family” and “I want the security I never had growing up.” Yeah, I had a lot of other things I’d like to do, or things I enjoyed… but no real long term passions or goals. I still don’t. I’ve never thought that was a bad thing, and not sure I think it’s a bad thing, but I am starting to realize that maybe a lot of that lack of planning is why things are piling up that I’d like to try.

So… it’s time for me to say goodbye to board games and the like, overall. I’ll keep my Zombicide games, because there are a whole ton of minis that I want to paint in them, I can use them in D&D and tabletop (that’s why I got them in the first place, actually)… but I’m likely going to get rid of a lot of them. Gloomhaven may be the best game made in the past couple of decades, but I’m never going to get to play it. And it sitting there, taking up space, not being used, is a hobby debt that just adds to my anxiety. I’m tired of seeing the latest thing, which looks awesome, deciding to chase it, and then wondering why I did it when stuff like the Resident Evil 3 board game shows up on my doorstep. I don’t even like the Resident Evil video game series… why did I think I’d like the board game?

Really, the stuff that I have been sticking to in all of this has been Warhammer and D&D (or Pen & Paper) – things that have a social and friend group component that I found I was longing for. That put me around a table to have fun and talk to people. So those are what I’m going to keep doing. I like painting, I like writing my campaign world… and they can be a healthy thing when I’m not building up mountains of plastic to build and paint.

LEGO, Star Wars, and Nerdy Stuff

It’s no secret that I haven’t exactly been into LEGO in recent years. I’ve written about it before on here – in truth, none of us on the site are deeply into it anymore. For me, honestly, it’s become sort of a cold detachment. My kids like LEGO, but neither of them really love them. They’re not running up and down the aisles begging for different sets. My daughter loves getting them, but she’s never asked for a specific one that she wants. My son just loves whatever his sister is playing with.

I’ve bought four sets for myself in the past 12 months: the Saturn V rocket, the ISS, the Space Shuttle Discovery, and the Nintendo Entertainment System. I’ve only opened and built two of them, Discovery and the ISS. Ostensibly, I was going to write reviews for them here… I still might, but just never get around to it. Both just sit on the shelf, on display. I like the space sets, and my daughter loves space stuff, so they make for a good thing to have and talk about. I’ve never opened the Saturn V, because I don’t know where I’d put it.

The NES is a weirder set… it looks great, and it looks fun, but I just don’t feel like opening and building it. It doesn’t matter how many people tell me how much fun it is, how often I look at it… I just don’t feel like it. I honestly feel nothing. That’s what I get when I look at most LEGO anymore. There’s a tiny little flicker of building of “oh, that’s fun” and then it’s gone. It goes on a shelf or goes to my kids when it’s done. I can review them, but I feel no passion at all for it.

The heading of this said Star Wars and Sci-Fi though… what does LEGO have to do with that? Well, I’m going to let you in on another shameful secret of mine: I’ve never finished watching Loki. I’ve watched the first two episodes, and enjoyed them, but never bothered to watch the rest. I feel exactly the same way with that show as I do with LEGO. I can’t even explain what it is… to enjoy something in the moment but not really care or not care about it past that. Something that I genuinely love but then move on from. There isn’t any anticipation or excitement for what’s coming up.

I’ve stopped watching any teasers or trailers for upcoming movies or TV shows, because they just didn’t excite me at all (and, honestly, I also felt like going in unprepared more). That’s part of why I haven’t posted any of them here when they come up… because I’ve stopped keeping track of anything like that. I’m not going to a movie theater anytime soon, but even when I’m at home I’m not really watching stuff.

I can’t even describe why most of the time… that general feeling of malaise that 2020/2021 has just rubbed all over us is part of it. I haven’t watched What If?, or Black Widow, or any other Marvel movies. I’ve been watching Lower Decks, but I haven’t watched the new Star Wars cartoon and never got around to watching Bad Batch.

In some ways, it all feels like it comes around back to FOMO again, because everything comes back to FOMO. Nearly everything in our life is marketed that we have to watch it now or we’ll miss out, experience it now or it’s missing, or see it now or it’s gone. The internet and spoilers being everywhere make it almost impossible to watch anything and be surprised unless you watch it the moment it drops – we had a major twist of Brooklyn-Nine-Nine spoiled in the FBTB Discord because someone thoughtlessly just threw out a plot point within an hour of the last episode dropping.

I guess it all just gets tiresome, this idea that if you don’t consume something immediately, you miss it forever. When the truth is, it almost never works like that. In fact, we’re almost always worse off when we treat everything like that.

What Does It All mean?

It’s hard to come to this realization. In the back of my mind, there’s something that clings to these things, these goals, these aspirations. The logical part of my brain knows it’s right to move on… that it’s not giving up, it’s being realistic. There’s a simple calculus at work here in all of this… I’ve got a finite amount of time to give to the hobbies that I enjoy and love, and by overextending like this I’m not able to enjoy any of them. Yet there’s that little hope, that I could. That flicker of enjoyment in having a thing, even though I know it’s fleeting, and more often than not, it’s just regret at having spent money on something I know I’m not going to use anytime soon.

I suppose that’s what this very long and wordy article is all about, writing and trying to articulate what it’s like when you turn all the focus inside and realize maybe you don’t like a lot of the things you’ve been telling yourself you like for so long. I used to think it was just that I was getting older, or I was busy, but maybe it was something deeper and I was just using these as a defense mechanism. Maybe it’s all of those things. I don’t know.

For me, things usually work something like this. I see something, think it looks really cool and want it. There’s a part of the hype machine whipping it up that you have to buy this right now it’s so cool, but also this other artificial part that if I don’t buy it right now, it’s only going to get so much more expensive to try and get later when you have a use for it and have time to do something with it. The worst part is that the second part isn’t always imagine… there is an actual cost to “waiting” that’s caused by the artificial scarcity that pretty much every nerdy property relies on to do their business. Toys, tabletop games, collectibles, even some video games… if you wait, it could very well end up being prohibitively expensive to get. Or it may be really cheap because no one ended up wanting it. It’s just a gamble.

Typically, this leaves me getting something, it going on a shelf, and me ultimately regretting it… especially when my card statement or something comes and now I need to pay for it or the balance has crept up higher yet again. Maybe I’ll try to get rid of it, and probably never recoup what I spent. Maybe I’ll just hang on to it, and I’ll take up more storage space that I don’t have. Maybe I’ll actually put it together, or start to put it together… maybe I’ll just toss it. If it’s a video game it’ll get installed and it will sit there, with very little time played, taking space. If it’s a Warhammer model, maybe I’ll glue it together and prime it, then keep wishing I had time to paint it. Magic cards will get put in a sleeve and stuck in a binder. D&D books will get put on a shelf for me to read later. Books go next to it when I have some quiet time to sit down and read them. It just keeps going, and going, and going, and going.

Suffice it to say, I have more things waiting for me to do than I have days or weeks or years left of my life to actually do them. I’m never going to put together all my LEGO sets ever again, and my kids won’t do that either. I’m never going to have a use for all the different Warhammer figures or models. I play Magic the Gathering in a local store once a week at the very best. My D&D group has trouble meeting more than once a month… and we haven’t been able to get a game in since the beginning of May. Logically, I can look at what I really can do and I cannot in any way reconcile it with what I want to do.

That’s really the problem, it feels… and I’m often left desperately wishing that I could rewire my brain to just be content with everything I’ve got already. Honestly, I wish I could go further and just get rid of so many of the possessions and stuff and things I have. That’s been the dream, lingering in the back of my head for so long… the fantasy of “what would it be like if I just got rid of this all and walked away.” I can’t do it, I’ve never been able to do it, but the more I get, the more I want to do that. I want to sell off my LEGO collection, and a bunch of the miniatures I have and won’t ever paint, the books I’ll never read, the game I won’t play… but that’s just as much work and time that I either don’t have or don’t want to spend.

Maybe all of this is a way for me to try and figure out is to just lay it out and take stock of everything that I call a hobby right now. I’m not exactly getting any younger, and certainly not getting any more time as my life goes along and my kids get older, so it may be time to just acknowledge that some of these things are going to go away and need to stay away, no matter how cool I think they are and look, or how much I want to do them.

To a certain point, that’s happened with some things in my life. I’m not actively seeking out a PlayStation 5 at this point. Do I want one? Yes. Do I need one? Absolutely not. Outside of the fact that there’s basically nothing to play on the thing, I don’t even play my PS4 and the games on it. There’s nothing coming out that I’m excited about, and I don’t know that I’ll be making the time anytime soon for the things coming out. Part is that I’ve become so soured with how game companies keep treating their customers and all the predatory things they do with games… even (maybe especially) in the games I like. The trend of season passes, daily challenges, time-limited unlockables, and login rewards are just ways to turn things that are supposed to be relaxing and fun into stress-building work and time commitments. FOMO doesn’t just suck with physical releases, it sucks when they tie it to stuff like that as well.

I honestly wish I had an answer here, or could say that this is something I had a plan for taking care of for myself so I had wisdom to share. I don’t, and my life is a running example that I don’t have the willpower or impulse control to do it. I mean, the whole idea that willpower is the answer to get over any addictive, compulsive, or drive behavior is nonsense anyway… it’s like trying to train “just hold it” potty training.

Maybe what we all need is a bit of therapy to get over it…