How I lost my purpose and values, and started procrastinating

When I started working on this blog in June 2007, I was excited and motivated. Used to spend a lot of time working on it – content, marketing, networking, the usual stuff. That drive lasted for approximately seven months (until the end of December 2007), because seven months after starting it, I was tempted to try a MMORPG – you know, like some people are tempted to try coke, out of curiosity. I couldn’t believe people would get hooked on a game and actually play it for years, so I went on and tried one for myself to see what the deal was, ignoring all the warnings signs about addiction.

Soon after doing that, I was hooked too (maybe I thought I was special and would not / by the way, don’t try drugs).

Addictive

Gaming time started with 4-5 hours a day, and went up to 10+ after a couple of months.

Of course, you can’t play for 10+ hours a day and still have time to work on something like a blog – not when it’s fresh and you’re trying to get it off the ground. So at that point I had to give something up (another time consumer). Blogging being hard work, long hours, and rewards being somewhere in the future hiding behind a lot of work, I chose to give it up in order to keep playing that game. MMORPGS are designed to offer quick rewards in the beginning so it was a great thing (yea right).

For a while, playing it felt sort of good. After seven months of blogging with no big breakthrough, some quick rewards and an artificial feel-good feeling were a nice thing. So I played on.

During the following two to three months, there have been a couple of times when the feeling that I was wasting my time made its presence felt. I acted on the feeling and tried to quit the game. But I wasn’t really meaning it, so that resulted in being out of the game for 5 days at the most. So I kept playing.

Not productive

After spending so much time in the game, my character got to a pretty high level, among the highest on my server. Then I got in a good guild. Made more friends in the virtual world. Gained more items. And then, the feeling that I shouldn’t be doing it, that I should quit and do something productive, returned. But this time it was going to be even more difficult to quit than it has ever been before, because I was standing to lose a lot of things I worked for. Losing all the time invested, all the money invested, all the game friends, the game items, the reward-cycle, the artificial feel-good, the instant gratification… I wasn’t really meaning it this time either, so I kept playing (I think this was during the summer, June-July or something).

With the summer coming to and end and some important content updates for the game announced for release during the autumn, I had to keep playing and get to check them out. So no attempts to quit during that time. And of course, in the autumn, when the updates came, there were no quitting attempts either, “why quit before getting bored of the new stuff” I said to myself.

Finally broke the addiction

But after the updates no longer felt new, the feeling that I needed to quit sneaked back into the frame. During December, the feeling was constant. And in January 2009, I decided to try and quit once again. So I tried, and this time I succeeded (go me!). It was a combination of factors that made it possible, but that’s not the point of the article so I won’t mention them.

After successfully getting out of the game, I started working on the blog again. The problem, though, was not only that my old readers had left me, but I lost something else too. I started experiencing lack of focus, surfing the net purposelessly, procrastination, lost creativity… and for the past two months I’ve been trying to fix those bad habits by using brute force, with no success though.

Pifanee: lost my purpose

And then, after really thinking about it, I realized something. All those effects were signals of a bigger issue, and the issue was that I had lost my purpose and values while I was gaming. They just sneaked out the window while I wasn’t paying attention.

After quitting the game, my blogging was purposeless. And of course, when you’re doing something without a purpose, your actions are unguided and you usually end up asking yourself, “why am I doing this?”, or “why can’t I just focus on this task?”

That is how I lost my purpose, values and focus; or, to be more precise, that is how I let them slide by me. I am hoping this will serve you as a guide, in case you lost your purpose too and are wondering why you can’t seem to get yourself back together again; or as a warning of what might happen if you do something similar.

If you just can’t stop wasting time, find your purpose.

I will talk about the importance of purpose and how to set one in one of the next posts.

Did you have a similar experience and would like to share it? Please do so in the comments.

PS: I can’t regret that gaming period. Having not done it would have meant not knowing what I know now, and I believe most people lose their purpose at least once in their life. And I wouldn’t have met the people I did. Great people. : )
PPS: That game was Rappelz. It’s a crappy game really, very buggy, and the developers are smoking Hello-Kitty catnip – they don’t listen to the English speaking community, at all.