i remember it as a kid and a teenager, that overwhelming sense of getting left behind, either mentally or physically that rush that came over me that i didn’t have the right things in place and that i was going to if i didn’t adapt be left behind in the race of survival. it was a really stupid thing that kicked this off last night, well a few things, one was a game, the other a brief storm and it was an interesting reaction that lit a fire under my backside.

pay to play

it’s no secret that both myself and @dayleeo love our multiplayer game, after the creative working day is done there is nothing more we would rather do but to team up on the same side and take out a bunch of noobs (ok, so maybe some of them are good but allow us our five minutes of flailing ok, it feels good ok?) — yesterday i noticed that fortnite had released BR mode (battle royale) to their game. i huge move for them and maybe a realisation that in fact that was the most popular title of the moment, they needed to adapt and fast, so they rolled this out, power move in my eyes.

having watched someone playing it i decided that it was maybe the next game that we should look at maybe getting, paladins was getting worse (i admit, it’s great for free) and maybe we should get some of the battle royale action after all the squads feature would be released eventually and make the joined up team game even more interesting — the thought of me and dayle making a little plot with traps and such like and then defending it, killer idea, perfect for a stream, perfect for a blog, even a podcast.

at no point in the process did i consider the specs of my machine. at no point, paladins worked and played fast, i had a tank game that played at 60fps, not a problem, it’s ageing sure but no worries. how wrong i was, it was during the stuttering loading screens and then the stark realisation that my machine was old, that i had again, been left behind by the progress and the seemingly never ending march of technlogy my machine was starting to feel the pain. i was starting to feel the pain of the inability to play and the shock of wondering when i would ever earn enough to, erm, keep up.

the cost of taking part

maybe it was also watching the apple keynote, with superlative statements of decision and precision and price tags getting dropped all over the place that was stuck in my mind but it’s the nature of the technology beast, there is always a cost to take part, not just take part but take part competitively, no point playing this if the hardware can’t keep up with my intention, we’ve kinda stumbled into the digital equivalent of the hunger games. in fact, i’d go as far as to say that we have already started the journey of the selection process.

this days to be a professional gamer, streamer, brand advocate or audience developer you have to have the right kit. you have to have the ability to capture content, distribute it, organise it, make it stand out from the other giga quads of information that fill up hard drives on the internet everyday, we are in a race for attention at all times regardless if you like that or not. the marketers know it, the hardware vendors know it and now that you’ve taken the time to read this, you know it too.

and it’s not just technology and gaming. ask any homeless person what they feel like they have been left behind from and you’ll probably find it’s society, friends and family and the systems that help them survive, money has changed, access to systems that provide services have changed, going or gone are the days of the paper cheque even thou we have a wealth of subsided mobile phones we still need to have an address and statements of bank accounts to get access or verified accounts with certain web services.

the cost of access changes rapidly and it’s increasingly difficult to keep up — and that’s if you understand what you need to change too, those that don’t fall between the cracks, the cracks where data doesn’t get to them and the system doesn’t know about them — that’s where costs start mounting for society, out of sight, out of mind, frustrated and angry, wanting to punish the very systems that put them there.

at the sacrifice of

and the price of keeping up is always at a sacrifice it seems to me, at least my own approach to keeping up with a changing on demand world where i the worker with hours per day to take part, turn up, try and earn some funds to allow me to eat, work, game have a cost over time. what sacrifices are you living under to keep up? less time with family, the kids, not noticing yourself in the mirror anymore and realising that a decade has gone by and your feel stuck on a treadmill. we carry our hopes and dreams on our backs into each day but still from time to time feel that slow drum sound of groundhog day in the distance.

some are sacrificing their ethics in the pursuit of wealth, taking shortcuts, selling out to the highest bidder to maintain relevance, blindly heading in a forward motion leaving a debris of old ideas, plastic mountains of CRT mountains and the fall out of failed experiments. we all do it, the system is designed for waste not designed for optimisation. we pay in for the experiments we take in damage to the very earth we walk on. even the irony that silicon chips are made of sand is not wasted on me.

put pursuit we must because the alternative is stagnation, apathy, squaller and remoteness, a feeling of a degraded life in some way one desperate for upgrades, power ups, bonuses, treats. the line between activation and consumption have always been really difficult for me. i remember being a kid and finding my dad in a good mood and throwing me a fiver across the room on a saturday as he was flush from wages at work, the first thing rolling over me is that i needed to find my coat and shoes and find out when the next bus was into town to get the latest game for my computer.

no reflection, no impulses of questions, one direction, town. sit on the bus, mull over how i was going to spent the money, would it be a £1.99 title or more, would i have a mcdonald’s, if i spent more could i walk back from town to home, would that take time of me enjoying the prize that was waiting for me at the local town, the spinning tower of new short term digital dreams of happiness - it’s systemic, built into the core of me as a child and teen to consume, to seek out the new form of entertainment not realising that it might just actually be creating more another form of apathy from not being a fully rounded member of society.

powering up right

it takes certain events in your life to make you question the way you’ve always been. for me it was the birth of my daughter, the realisation that i didn’t have to worry about the size of my manhood anymore because let’s be honest, a baby is a pretty big thing to come our of a woman, you can’t compete with that for size, instant fix. thanks for that nature.

second, going to a town called phil campbell, alabama a month after a tornado where 27 people had lost their lives in a population of a 1000. someone knew somebody who died or who lost a family member or cousin, you could feel the pain, see the stripped away to bark of the trees of a weather system unrepeated at marching through for the next ten miles laying down destruction — that trip, that videoblogger cover that mindset soon changed when i realise this was real life. it changed me forever, it made me consider my time here on earth and what i was going to try to do with it.

i’ve been trying to find balance ever since. it’s hard, we know it’s hard. hard to balance what you need from what you want, what you want for others, how you can empower them to level up which in turn seems to help you put the wolves from the door. i know first hand it can be hard to live out the way you want to live when it seems your swimming against the tide and into the eye of the storm on a daily basis. we can only go on that internal gps and the beliefs that we carry with us to guide us through.

doing the best with what you have

and so to round out this little expression of coffee buzz from coffee cup number two today i leave you with this. you have exactly what you need and always have for who you are today. we both have the opportunity to change that for tomorrow. these are the only two days worth considering in my book, today and what you might look like tomorrow. i could hope and dream that the future contains x, y and z but to be honest with you, whatever our wish it we must remember that while we are still working on us the world is working on themselves too.

i know that with clear sense of purpose and a mindful approach to the way i wield and craft my time i can make incredible incremental changes to narrative of being left behind. i can learn new things today that can help me empower myself and adapt for a tomorrow. i can feel content that i’ve turned up and taken part, that i used what i had and created a spark that can fuel a fire of creativity of an idea. it’s those ideas that fill me up with more happiness that sitting around acquiring material things. they are just things. i can’t take them with me when i pop my mortal coin on planet earth.

in closing

as i lay there last night with the wind lapping at my door and making that spooky sound i realised that for a moment right there i was free. free from the shackles of consumerism if wanted it. i could be lifted up into the air and dumped on my side by nature - it cares not for my needs. it just is. nature and the trees and fields of green around me are here, they will be here, in some form for as long as the planet spins. we will not, we will be long gone and your human emotions of being left behind will have long gone, nothing will be left behind, just echoes and memories of a world that ran out of time.

SO TAKE BACK TODAY.