The Real Brian Show is a full house this week with Captain Influence, SevenBlueSeven and JonnyPistol at the helm with The Real Brian. We're talking gaming, Black Mirror, chokolat, non-spoilery Avengers stuff, and... did we mention gaming? It's the game of life!
In true Real Brian Show fashion, the conversation this week hovers around various games in life that are both highly connected and don't really have anything to do with each other. There are the fun game-games, like Alien: Isolation, Overwatch, Battletech, Divinity... But then there are the real-games.
We play a different sort of game every day. The foods we eat, the drinks we drink. The people we talk to, the people we don't talk to. Our lives are a complex network of interactions that shuffle us along the platform of life, where we level up or proverbially lose lives and find ourselves back at square one.
This isn't The Truman Show. People don't watch our lives like they can watch a Twitch channel. But sometimes the way we live is put on display for all to see, and when that time inevitably comes... what are people going to see?
We'll all slip up from time to time. Perhaps it comes in a heated moment during traffic, or at just the wrong moment after a long day. Learning to control our reactions to situations under pressure is an important tool in anyone's belt, and that doesn't mean suppressing emotions, but possibly learning how to separate emotion from circumstance. The guys talk about getting into the mind of someone you're butting heads with and it started me down this path of the different places I become irritated by people. The most obvious is while in the car. Why does someone choose to go 10 mph under the limit? Why did that car have to swing wide left in order to turn right (causing ME to nearly drift into oncoming traffic)? But then there are other places... like at the grocery store when someone with with 100 items chooses the "self checkout" line.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Where do these irritated reactions come from? After all, I can't control other people. I can't control whether someone loves me, needs me, remembers my name, knows what I'm dealing with, or even grasps what implications their own actions have on everyone around them. We all only have so much time in the day, so maybe part of the problem is that we don't give ourselves enough padding, enough space, to accomplish the things we need to in a single day. As a result, we're behind in our own schedules. That makes us anxious, short, selfish, and narrow-minded.
Maybe in order to do more, we have to do less.