I recently read Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. Great book, very interesting – the first half is a memoir of his time in the Nazi concentration camps, the second half a description of his form of psychotherapy, called logotherapy.
One of the concepts that stuck out for me was where he described one of his common approaches to helping patients properly assess their priorities. He told them to imagine they were actually 80 years old, but had inexplicably woken up today in the past as their present age. What are they going to do differently “this time around?” Or, as an alternative approach that got at the same idea: imagine they’re lying on their deathbed, looking back on their life. What do they think about how they spent the day they’re about to spend? Do they regret their choices, or think they made the right ones?
It’s not a particularly mind-blowing idea – I know I’ve heard the same concept in different ways and places before – but something about the way he presented it resonated with me. I’ve been thinking more about how I spend my days, and especially my free time. I don’t think about “will I regret this specific day?” or anything, but I kind of think about how I’ll look back on that activity category.
For example, I’ve never regretted time spent playing games with stories, but I do sometimes spend an evening playing something endlessly repeatable – Slay the Spire, maybe, or Bloons Tower Defense – and at the end of the day feel like I didn’t really accomplish anything, like I just distracted the monkey part of my brain that likes flashing lights and bright colors. It’s not that I think games without stories are bad, and it’s not that I always regret them; I just sometimes use them to waste time rather than to entertain myself, and I usually regret wasting time.
It’s complicated by the fact that some of those same games have been genuinely helpful to me, in unpredictable ways. The Dragonslayers, one of my favorite screenplays (which I’m currently adapting into a novel) came out of playing Stellaris; Dwarf Fortress has provided a shocking number of… I don’t know what to call them. Personal metaphors? It’s given me the framework and the examples to understand lots of abstract structural concepts, like how and why it’s so hard to rebuild a system while leaving it functional.
Basically, as a writer, it’s hard for anything I do to be a complete waste of time – which is why I think Frankl’s way of “looking back” is so helpful. For some reason, looking at things in that framework gives me the perspective I need to judge if I’m doing something that’s likely to be helpful to me, or if it’s just killing time.