Time and Money

As I spend a little more time building my characters each day, I grow a little more weary of the process. It seems like such a large investment of my time to a process that will not have any materialistic return or noticeable gains. I guess I am having a little trouble having a hobby that's neither morally superior nor a complete waste of time. Before Warcraft my idea of a computer game was a few rounds of Sudoku or Mahjong Solitaire. My idea of a hobby was mastering a Beethoven Sonata or a Bach fugue, reading a poem or a Stoppard play or delving into architecture, anthropology, linguistics or some other intellectual discipline. However, there is only so much intellectualism a person can engage in on any given day and my idea of relaxation was reading thrillers or watching action flicks or medical dramas ad nauseam.

I still play the piano. I still read, both thrillers, scientific texts and english literature. I still watch plenty of TV and engage in the occasional game of solitaire or soduko. Yet now I also log in to my Wow server to check the AH stats, do the dailies or level up a toon. It remains a daunting thought: how much time and effort has gone into a computer game. Very little of what I do is a natural progression of seemingly meaningless repetitive tasks that eventually amount to some larger achievement. There is no visible progression in reading or watching TV. There is somewhat in playing the piano, but these days playing the piano equates to using a fully T6 geared main to run Gnomeregan or maybe it's using a level 15 for Karazhan. Either way, progressing as a piano player requires better finger joints than I have. As for work, how many jobs are more than taking care of daily tasks that needs to be done every day? Working life is mostly like visiting the Isle of Quel'Danas for the ten or eleven repeatables that pay well at the end of the day.

Maybe the answer to the uncomfortable realization of just how much time and money goes into the game is as simply as not to worry about it. In the great scheme of things, it's not really that much time or money and there's always plenty of other things to worry about. And there's plenty of other things that could be added up just as easily - how much time is spent sleeping, cooking, cleaning, commuting, watching TV, learning how to breathe again during an asthma attack and whiling away the hours that seem like an eternity during a migraine and the confines of a dark room and quiet bed?

Most of life is routine and a vital part of that routine is relaxation. And since I don't play for the end result but play because I enjoy all of it - the leveling, the grinding, the Auction House buy-and-sell frenzy, to name a few - it doesn't truly matter what it adds up to in the end. If the means are where the meaning and fun is more so than the end, then I guess I can look forward to another stint of playing this week without the guilt or concern that I'm wasting time.