Control: How to Fight the Laziness Monster…

I, Dalton Lewis, am in a terrible battle with the laziness monster. I fight valiantly every day to get something done and die horribly to the temptation to hang around doing nothing productive. I sit around, day after day, unable to leave the home because of a super psycho death virus. I should get a lot done, right? I should sit here, desperately typing away at Google Docs, making novel after novel, getting work done, doing something amazing, becoming a famous novelist. Strange — it isn’t happening. It makes sense — I should work hard and get something done. Right? There’s no reason to sit around watching old procedural shows on the internet. There’s no reason to watch old movies again and again. I certainly shouldn’t play the Dragon Age game series that I have played 1000 hours on. Right? Yet I do.

I watch NCIS: Los Angeles. It tries to show a family, a group of people who deeply care for each other. They have problems. One of them gets fired and needs to be rehired and go through training. Another one wants to get married to a beautiful woman. He shows up to surprise her with a ring and finds that she isn’t doing the charity work she claims to be doing and isn’t at the location she claims to be staying at. One has a daughter trying to make it into the Naval Academy in her father’s footsteps — but doesn’t want Dad to give her a free pass there. A violent offender who threatens to kill an agent is released from prison — erroneously. These storylines are presented in a series of episodes in which the characters fight bad guys and stop them from making fake bills or smuggle drugs or plan terror attacks or steal government secrets. The team must stop them.

I compare it to my normal life. I sit around, at home. I have books to read. I have writing to do. I have exercise to do. I have very little going on in my normal life other than watching and reading stories and playing games that tell stories. I have family dinner. It’s the highlight of my day — my mom cooking a delicious meal for me and my dad and her. Tonight we ate spaghetti with chicken parmesan. We ate as a family. After that I went to my room and played more video games.

What else should I do? I don’t have a job. I don’t do enough. I don’t know why. I have trouble with the motivation part. I know, I know — work harder. It’s a simple solution. It’s hard to sit around and work when screens have so much shiny entertainment that’s designed to distract and entertain us. That makes it so much harder to do one’s own work to distract one’s own audience. It’s even more difficult when one tries to write a work of speculative fiction about ideas and not good guys fighting bad guys.

I play video games instead of writing. I play Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age II, and Dragon Age: Inquisition. The first one is a sprawling epic about stopping a darkspawn invasion and saving the planet. The characters are unforgettable, the story is long and elaborate and wonderful, and the mechanics are fine. There’s a feud between the elves and the werewolves in which both sides blame the other for real (or perceived) offenses. There are mages that want to rebel against the templar knights that police them — but things go horribly awry and demons are summoned. The dwarves need a paragon’s support to determine the result of an election of a new king — but the paragon has a deep, dark secret, and you have a choice to make: trust her or do the right thing? A lord is injured, and his son makes a deal with a demon to save his beloved father’s life. The demon then raises a zombie army to take over the castle and village — until you stop them.

These elements work well because they create an interesting universe in which to have adventures. You, the player, get to be friends with Alistair, a noble and righteous knight who’s funny and self-effacing and hates being in charge. You get to exchange barbs with Morrigan, a brilliant and devious spellcaster just entering the world outside her mother’s hut for the first time. You get to meet Leliana, a bard archer who is part religious figure and part spy. You get to fight countless bad guys with these characters, and that’s a joy to do.

In real life friends are great but have lives. They don’t go on ridiculous adventures fighting bad guys with you. They can’t even hang out with me very often right now because they might die from the super psycho death virus that is happening right now. They are much less reliable than the fake friends provided from the television and video games — and they spend less time with you. I really think that it’s an easy call — hanging around playing video games and watching tv shows is a better use of my time than writing novels and hanging out with my real friends. Thoughts?

Thanks, and take care, friends.