Duct Tape and a Prayer

I have a suspicion that work is what’s making me not want to play WOW. See, I work two jobs, for a total of 40 hours a week. Both are significant stressors, the first because I don’t enjoy it anymore and I don’t have a guarantee of getting paid (and because, since I set my own schedule, my boss reads that as “you can drop everything at any given time to help me at a moment’s notice”), and the second because it’s dull and repetitive, yet requires enough brainpower and attention that I can’t really think while I do it. Neither has any opportunity for advancement, and neither pays me enough.

You’d think that with all of that, I’d welcome the escape, right? Oddly enough, I don’t. It’s not because I see WOW as work too – in fact, it’s exactly the opposite: WOW doesn’t feel productive enough. See, I have a very strong desire to get out of my current situation. I know I have the skills to be doing a job I actively enjoy, and doing it for enough money to support me and my family. (In point of fact, I’ve been informed in the last month that I’m literally making 1/6 what I could/should be making in my field.) The work that I do, however, exhausts me mentally and emotionally, so I have a hard time bootstrapping myself into being motivated for the work that I want to do. Instead, I think about the work I want to do, chastise myself for not doing it, and additionally get on my own case about doing anything that’s not “productive”.

If I could just get going on the new-job projects, I’d feel more legitimately productive; if I felt more legitimately productive, I wouldn’t have to recoil in horror from anything that wasn’t productive; and if I could get to that point, I could play WOW again.

And that’s why work is killing my desire to play World of Warcraft.

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