Work to live or live to work?

I know today's entry is kind of a late one, but I was busy all day doing stuff, and no, it wasn't work-related stuff, I was simply hanging out with a few acquaintances I hadn't seen or heard from in a while, as well as with my parents. In fact, the only reason why I'm home right now is to take a shower and change into something more fitting for the nightly atmosphere that I'll be diving into with the aforementioned friends in about an hour. If it wasn't for that I probably wouldn't have been able to write a blog today and my thus far perfect record of writing at least an entry a day would've been ruined, so yeah... random, much? I don't really know how I got here, as this isn't really what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about comes from something that happened just a few minutes ago. I was driving home, just a few moments away from my doorstep, when I got a call from one of my oldest friends. I haven't seen him in a while due to our hectic schedules, so he wanted to know if I could spare some time to hang out with him sometime this week. My response, of course, was to tell him that we should hang out now, seeing as I was bound to meet all the guys tonight. I had expected him to say yes, buy as it turns out, today, Saturday, he was working, and he's still working; his shift won't be over 'till around midnight, at which time he will take an hour-long drive to get to his home, to sleep for around five to six hours, get up, shower, dress and head back out to work half a shift tomorrow morning.

When he told me that, I asked him right away if he was short of money (I know it's a bit rude, but that's the way me and my friends are with each other), but again, while expecting confirmation I was sorely disappointed. It's not an extra shift, it's just the way his work... well, works.

Obviously he gets a couple days off during the week and whatnot, but still, this got me thinking. I wouldn't take a job, no matter how good the pay may be, that precluded me from having some time to hang out with my friends and family every once in a while. Because the point of having a job, at least from my perspective, at this point in life, shouldn't be regarded as nothing more than a means to an end, a way to get by. If you want to have a career, that's fine, but you have to allow yourself some time to just live. For most people that's college, but my friend chose not to go to college, instead getting straight into working, and I feel like he's missing out on some things.

The age that we're in right now -- our early 20's -- is supposed to be a time of self-discovery. And I know it sounds a bit corny, but I really do believe that. This is the time when we learn who he are and what we want to become, and I feel that by constraining yourself with tight work schedules and routine, you risk stifling that process, and while you might not think much of it right now, ten or fifteen years down the line there's a very good chance you'll wake up one morning and realize that the life that you have is not the one you wanted, and then, it might be a bit too late to do something about it, and you're going to have to live with that.

I don't want to do that. I don't want to have that kind of regret. So instead of living to work like my friend seems to be doing, I rather see what life is like, and work is just a small part of the equation. There'll be time to chain myself to a career three or four years from now, but at the moment, I just want to work to live.

Old School Gaming

So, I've been spending a lot of time lately playing WCIII. I know, it's not exactly "old school" considering it only has like, what, nine years? But, you know what? Game years are like dog years, so in truth it's actually kind of old now. Still, even though I've had this game pretty much since it came out (I can't believe the CD's still working. :|), and I've played it more times that I'm capable of counting, let alone remembering, I still find it incredibly entertaining. My friends, of course (those that do the game thing anyway), like to give me a hard time over it, claiming that WoW, the MMO successor of WCIII , is much better and more enjoyable.

Now, I have played WoW. I even went as far as buying the game, and the first expansion a couple of years back, and, even though I did find it amusing for a while, like with many things in my life, the novelty eventually wore off, I got bored, and couldn't be bothered to keep paying the monthly fees. Whereas WCIII's still there, keeping me going whenever I have nothing better to do.

The truth is that ever since I first played WoW, even when I did it the first time and it was "OMG SO AWESOME!", I did find it a bit repetitive. Basically it's your character running around, killing things, and picking things up, with the occasional, albeit rare, killing of the character itself. The dynamic may vary throughout the game, and the context in which it unfolds is bound to change, but the pattern always stays the same, and unless you're really small-minded it's not hard to notice. In WCIII at least you get to build stuff, and command your own army instead of playing with just the one character, and the game itself was much richer in terms of lore than it's successor (and that's one thing that Blizzard hasn't handled very well -- killing Illidan? WTF?!). But my friends, of course, still think that I'm just old-fashioned and weird. Oh well...

And WCIII is not the only old game that I love. I've played every single Final Fantasy game that has come out, from the original NES one to the latest FFXII for the PS2 and it's spin-offs for the NDS and the PSP. Not all of them were good (FFTA anyone?), not all of them were bad, but there is one that stuck with me, and that I still play from time to time, and regard as the best of all Final Fantasy games so far. And no, it's not FFVII, I don't have a mancrush on Sephiroth or Cloud. It's VI.

I love, love, LOVE FFVI. It's one of the most incredible games I've played in my life. It has an incredible plot with lots of lore in it, each and every one of its characters is well-rounded and endearing, and its villain, Kefka, is most likely one of the most awesome video game villains of all time. But the most incredible thing about it is that, no, this does not come with shiny 3D graphics or awesome cinematic sequences, or mind-blowing character maneuverability. It's just a SNES game. And it's because it's a SNES game that it's so great, because there's no smoke and mirrors, no flashiness, no nothing that will distract you from the game itself. And if you think that's not good enough in today's world, well, let me tell you, today's world is not what it used to be.

So yeah, my friends call me old-fashioned because I play old games, but that's okay, because these old games that I play will probably still be with me by the time MMOs have become a thing of the past.