Category: Off-Topic

Self Sabotage is a sweet romance

October 20th, 2021

One of my favorite modern bands is Twenty-One Pilots. And when I say one of my favorite, I mean one of a very long list, because I like a lot of music and will get excited about a new artist or genre every other day. Twenty-One Pilots is definitely a band that pierces through that somewhat, and that’s for a simple reason. Their lyrics, at least in the songs that really stand out to me, are brilliant and thought-evoking. Let me tell you about what I’ve been up to lately, and why their music felt so apt to the situation.
I spent the past week or two working on a submission to a writing contest. It was a spur of the moment kind of thing, and it’s my first time doing something like this, but not my first time considering it. The challenge was to write a story inspired by a short video. Easy enough, I have tons of old material to borrow from. Although I started off excited and wrote quite a bit, as the deadline came closer, I noticed the quality go down. I felt like I shouldn’t really go all out on something that isn’t that important to me. But is it not important to me? Or is it more important than I’d like to admit. One of the reasons I started this blog in the first place was to put my work out there and get some feedback. I’ve gotten very little so far, but it has motivated me to write more, and read more from other writers. There are some talented bloggers on this platform, and reading different styles has definitely made me realize there is much to learn.
Going back to the writing challenge I partook in, the final product I turned in was fine. I thought it was a decent little story, but I know it’s not going to blow anyone out of the water. If any remotely talented writers also participated in this challenge, I’ll never hear back that I won something. Now, that’s not bad in and of itself, but it’s the way I went about things that leaves a bad aftertaste.

Like a little splinter buried in your skin,

someone else can carve it out but

when you’ve got the pin.

It hurts a little less and

you can even push it further in.

There’s much truth to this, and it links back to why I called this post “Self Sabotage is a sweet romance,” which is also a line from the song Choker by Twenty-One Pilots. It’s scary leaving others to judge your worth. If I sabotage myself by not giving my all I can always use That wasn’t my best work, it’s no wonder it didn’t win as an excuse. If you don’t give it your all it hurts less when you fail. Or so the theory goes. But I want to go all out. I want to give it my best and then fail spectacularly. But I don’t have the guts to do so. And I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m not the only one.

Having said that, and I do want to end this post on a lighter note, I did submit something to a competition for the first time in my life. It’s not going to wow anybody, nor is it likely to win anything, but it’s a step further than giving up during the process. And I think for those of us who are prone to self sabotage that is the healthiest way to look back on things. Not so much by looking at the failed attempts as failures, but looking at them like attempts made. It’s a small step, but it’s a step forward nonetheless.
One Year of Blogging.

October 2nd, 2021

Good evening everyone, I hope you’re all doing well. It’s been a little while since I last posted something, hasn’t it? I’ve been a bit busy, and the writer’s fatigue I talked about in one of my latest posts hasn’t quite gone away. I was doing decent for a while, but I realized that working on a schedule was seriously hurting the quality of my posts. I was just writing them to keep to a schedule that in all honesty only I really cared about. So I’m going to stop doing that mostly. I say mostly, because I am bringing back the book club, which has been on unannounced hiatus so far, and something like that should be done on a schedule, in my honest opinion.

On that note, it has been a year since I started blogging, which is kind of crazy. It feels like I’ve just started. When I started the blog I was quite busy with teaching, and then for a while I was just sitting at home doing nothing like a good part of the world. Now that a new semester has started I’m working a lot more while finishing up some of the courses I didn’t quite pass last year. Switching back to a busier schedule has definitely taken a toll on me, hence the lack of posts recently. But after a year I did want to post something, and I think now is as good a time as any to start back up again. So starting Monday you can expect somewhat regular updates again. I have a few posts I want to make, but I’m going to set the bar low for myself so I don’t constantly feel bad about it. So on that note, see you all Monday!
Writer’s Fatigue

September 13th, 2021

I think everyone who writes, or does anything creative runs into this a couple of times. And if you don’t, well, that’s great and I’m definitely not jealous of that.
I have a few posts lined up that I want to write, so it’s not like I have a writer’s block where I don’t know what to write. I’ve had that before as well, but it’s a different feeling in my experience. Fatigue is when you know what to write, but just don’t have the mental energy to do so. For example, I was supposed to write my next book club entry for last Friday, but I didn’t get it done, so I decided to move it to today. I spent all weekend not writing it, and now we’re here, and it’s still not done. So the goalpost gets moved up a bit more.
I’m also still nowhere near done with the next chapter of my story. I just can’t find the willpower to sit down and write.

I personally think having a good structure and challenging yourself is the way to go about it. The past few months have been very slow for me, and I haven’t really had much to do. When all you do all day is sit around and play video games, it becomes very difficult to focus up when you do have to do something. Luckily, I got a lot better contract at my job for a lot more hours, so starting this upcoming week I’ll be busier. Not too busy to have no free time, but busy enough to feel like I’m actually doing something with my life. I also need to do a couple uni courses this year, but we don’t talk about that, because that just makes me depressed.

I don’t really have a point to make today, I’m just curious if other people recognize this feeling of wanting to write, or create something, but just not having the energy to do so. Let me know if you agree, or if you don’t have that at all. I hope to be back on Wednesday for another review of the new Tensura episode, and Friday for the next book club post. Thanks for your patience everyone!
Online shopping and saving the planet

August 30th, 2021

I wasn’t sure if I was even going to post something today, so instead of a well thought out post like last Friday’s (which I was very happy with), you get a small rant instead. I’m leaving for the UK in two days, so the rest of this week I don’t know if I’ll be able to post. I’ll try my best though.

The reason I’m going to the UK is because my best friend is getting married! Very exciting stuff if not for my relentless anxiety. Covid regulations, flying to Ireland to then take a bus to Northern-Ireland and everything surrounding this is not helping my mental state. For starters, I didn’t even have nice enough clothes suitable for a wedding. Luckily we have online clothing stores that can deliver you clothes that are on the cheaper end, so you can manage to just pass by. So that’s what I did. And when I went to check-out I noticed a little box. I’d seen that box before I didn’t pay much attention to it. It asked me if I wanted to pay an extra 25 cents to compensate for the CO2 this shipment causes.

Okay, as opposed to what? If I don’t pay 25 cents do you send more CO2 waste into the atmosphere? How about you don’t put the clothes in four different layers of packaging. Or better yet, how about you ship everything in once box, as opposed to three different boxes? It’s a pet peeve of mine that big corporations will always try to pin the issue of Global Warming on the consumer. As if I asked for all my products to have multiple layers of packaging. I don’t mind doing my part to help the environment. I’ve recently started cutting down on meat. I like meat, so I’m not planning to go vegan anytime soon, but I figured I could cut out some meat as a middle a ground. I reuse plastic bags until there’s holes in them. I have refillable water bottles instead of plastic ones. Now I don’t know if all of those have an actual effect or not, but I bet it’s better than me paying 25 cents to some shipping company.

Maybe this is me being cynical, but I think that if a company is really wanting to do better, they should do so themselves as opposed to guilt tripping their consumers into being the ones putting in the real effort. They’re the ones with all the money, are they not?

And that’s really all I have to say about this. It’s a short rant, I’m well aware, but I wanted to upload at least something today. I hope to write the Tensura episode review before I leave, and if not then I’ll put out a tweet. As for Friday, don’t expect a post, I don’t even know what I would write. Thanks for reading and see you all here next week.
The importance of attainable goals

August 23rd, 2021

I wanted to write a short post today. Part of what I was originally going to talk about was already mentioned in last week’s post, which you can find here if you missed it. As the title suggests, I think it’s very important to have attainable goals. I have a long history of setting goals that I can’t attain and then giving up on the progress completely.

I’ll give an example. I am a stress eater. I am also someone who gets stressed very quickly. I know, not the greatest of combinations, but that’s just the cards I’ve been dealt. One of my go to addictions has always been soda, in particular Pepsi Max. In combination with a lot of crisps, candy and cookies I would also drink 1, 2, 3 and eventually almost 4 liters of Pepsi a day. For those of you who don’t use the metric system, that’s too much. Way too much. So at some point I decided it was enough. I was going to go cold turkey. This went great, for about a day. Anyone who’s had any addiction will recognize this. It’s not as simple as “just stop drinking, smoking, gambling, whatever your addiction may be.” You need to find a method that works for you. And for me, goals are best when they’re slowly increased.

Nowadays, I drink around 0.5 to 1 liter of soda a day. That’s still not perfect, but that’s down a lot from where I started. Small disclaimer, it’s recently been going up since my mental health has been very bad, but that’s besides the point, I’m confident to get that back under control. I did this by setting limits, and then slowly lowering those limits. I started by saying “no more than 3 liters a day.” That’s still a lot, but it was a small, very attainable step down from where I was. Then less bottles per week and before I knew it, I’d cut my soda intake by more than 70% in the span of half a year. On the side I did the same with sweets and other snacks, and after about a year of slowly lowering I got to a place where I’m comfortable with how much junk food and drinks I take in.

I did something similar for writing. As some of you might remember, I wrote about writing 100.000 words total back in 2020. I then set my goal for 2021 at 300.000 words. This seemed like a high goal, but it wasn’t. Well, it’s more complicated than that, but it wasn’t as high as I thought it was. In the first five months of the year I wrote 153.000 words. Continuing at that pace I would possibly reach way more than 300.000. But knowing this, I got complacent. I started writing less and less, and this is reflected in the words I’ve been writing each month. Now I do have to admit that the state of my mental health has been a big influence, but that’s not all. I’ve gotten lazy.

The moral of the story is that goals are important, but you need to be able to shift the goalposts. If you’re struggling to reach a goal, and it’s too hard, you need to allow yourself the breathing room to set the goalpost a little lower, and then move from there. It’s better to succeed at easier goals than fail at harder goals. The former feels good, the latter does not. I also think it’s important to then learn to adjust your goals up. If you’re overshooting your goals by a lot that’s great, but don’t get complacent. If there’s progress to be made, then aim for that progress. If it gets too hard you can always scale back down. This works for any goals you have in life. Just make sure you know where you’re headed, and you are doing this at a comfortable and efficient pace.
The tricky thing about motivation

August 17th, 2021

I make no secret of my poor mental health. Earlier this year I was dealing with some tough health issues which seemingly appeared as a direct result of the amount of stress I was under. I am doing generally better now. Not because I solved all of my problems, but moreso because a lot of the problems ended up not being resolved the way I wanted, but since that’s now set in stone I don’t have to worry about trying anymore.

To give a recap on how my past year has gone; not great. Setting aside my health issues, my family’s health issues (My father has sleep apnea and still isn’t sleeping well, my brother had a cornea transplant and is still recovering from that) and everything wrong with the world right now, my main goal for a long time now has been to get my bachelor’s degree at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. I am starting my third year classes in September, for the third time in a row. That wasn’t the plan. This is going to be my fifth year here, and although I was well aware I would be slower than the average person, I really wanted to be starting year 4 around this time. And of course, Covid threw a wrench in everyone’s plans, and I can confidently say that I worked hard in the past year, but it wasn’t enough. I failed just enough important courses to be held back for another year. There’s no shame in that, and I want other people going through similar situations to know that there’s no shame in that, especially not after this awful year. But I’m being held back to basically do one class per semester and then sit on my ass for the rest of the year.

That sounds bad enough, and it is, because it kills my motivation to get anything done. How can you get into the flow of working when you don’t have much work to do? You get lazy. At least I do. If all I need to do is a little bit, I’ll put it off indefinitely until it’s too late. And to make matters worse, year 4 at my course is apparently really freaking hard. It’s 3 days of internship (teaching), 2 days of class, and in my less than ideal situation you can add another day of work to that to stay afloat. That puts me at 6 out of 7 days done, not even looking at any homework that needs doing. I make no secret out of my autism, and the fact that I am simply not capable of holding on to a fulltime job. I will get panic attacks and slink back into depression if I go over my limits. That’s just the way it is. I’m working on getting better at things, and I’ve come a very long way, but I know I’m not quite there yet.

What this means is that for a year I’ll be sitting on my ass playing games, then the next year I will be stressed out of my mind and probably still fail and have to add another year. This has killed any and all motivation. Not only motivation for classes starting soon, but also my motivation to write. I initially wanted to do a post yesterday about setting goals and how to properly determine a good goal for yourself, but I felt like talking about this was more adequate right now, I’ll probably still do the other post next week.

And motivation is, as the title says, a tricky thing. You can be really motivated to succeed, but not at all motivated to take the steps to get there. Does that make you lazy? Does that mean you’re not actually interested to succeed? I don’t believe so. It’s hard to stay motivated for a long time, and it’s even hard to show this motivation outwardly. Especially when you’re not always directly succeeding. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m not in a great place right now, but I know it’ll be better again. And I want those of you who struggle with motivation to know that you’ll back to a better place too. That’s just the way things work. There’s ups and downs, and it’s easier to see the downs when you’re doing well, than see the ups when you’re doing poorly. So keep that in mind next time you’re down.

I missed the book club on Friday, I’m hoping to have it ready for this Friday, but I’m not making any promises right now.
Unpaid Intern

July 26th, 2021

The coffee is free, just like me.

I harbor quite a bit of resentment towards our country’s stance on both education and internships. I’m not very good at school. In particular, university requires a lot of organizing without much guidance. This has caused me to take a long time to get through my education. We get student loans here, which we have to pay back at a rate based on our income. To make a long story short, they expire after x amount of years (15 for me) so if you don’t make much money they are basically a gift. After you run out of student loans, your options become a lot more limited. I’m obviously not going to detail my entire financial situation here. That’s a personal thing, and to be honest too depressing to really dig into. But the bottom line is that my student loans are several tens of thousands, and I probably can’t work full time due to my autism. The solution for this problem exists, but we’re not using it. Internships.

Teaching English is actually the second degree I’m working on getting. I first majored in Business Economics. I ended up fostering a strong dislike for the economics field and quickly realized that although I enjoy the theory, I do not enjoy the actual work. So I switched to teaching, and have never looked back since. To get that degree, I had to do an internship. One semester of full-time, and two semesters of 4 days a week. I ended up working (on average) 5 to 6 hours a day instead of 8, because that’s really all I could handle. I was happy they offered me that opportunity. What I’m less happy about, is the fact that the entire thing was unpaid. Now my boss was a nice guy, and although we had very little in common, he was often understanding about my situation and my anxiety attacks, which were much more frequent back then compared to now. But he never paid me. Not a penny.

I’ve recently been thinking about this a lot, especially since some of my family seems to disagree with me on this, but I find the fact that unpaid internships are legal a failure of our society. Doing some rough math, I worked as a financial administrative assistant for approximately 1200 hours. This is a low estimate, but for the sake of this it’ll suffice. Even at minimum wage, that’s roughly €13.000 that I missed out on. I did all of that work for free. And a lot of it was grunt work. Filling in sheets, printing things, doing some translation (which I quite enjoyed), working in the store, packing parcels, going through invoices. It’s not like I was a waste of space there, I was just free manpower. Now that company has since gone under, and I wouldn’t be surprised if leaving a majority of your finances to unpaid interns was a part of that.

As a teacher, I’ve done three internships so far. The first one was unpaid, and was one day a week for a semester. I can definitely understand that, although I don’t agree with it. I learned a lot, and realistically only taught about 3 classes, so I didn’t really work for free. I’m thankful for that internship, but I still think it should have been paid. My second internship was paid, although below minimum wage. It was also only one day a week, so I didn’t miss out on much there. My third internship was two days a week, for one semester. I learned the most at this internship, and although I got some gifts and coupons, as well as a little money each month, I really feel like I deserved pay. By the end of the internship I was fully responsible for a classroom for two days a week, even if that wasn’t planned, nor technically allowed as an intern. Oops. But I used all my payment on the train ride back and forth and it left very little energy for me to work outside of those days.

The moral of this story, I guess, is that if unpaid internships didn’t exist, my student loans would be a lot lower, and I probably would have had some extra spending money on the side. Life would be much better, and it solves the problem of the government eventually being unable to collect my student loans anyway. Do I have a solution? Not really, I’m not a politician, and it’s not like I have a background in economics. I do think the government should pay for stuff like this. It’s why we pay taxes, right? The Netherlands is known for being a tax haven, so where the hell is my money Rutte? (Our Prime minister). I think it’s disgraceful that young people are made to work for free while simultaneously building up debt they’ll spend half their life paying off. But that’s me and my opinion, maybe you disagree. If you do disagree (or agree) please let me know in the comments down below. Thank you for reading!
Looking back on Covid

June 28th, 2021

I know what you’re thinking, the coronavirus is still there, and we’re not quite there yet, and you’re totally right. But after almost 18 months of worry, pessimism and anxiety, I think it’s good to start looking forward again with optimism. As of posting this, I’ve had both shots, and in a week from now they should be completely doing their job. I know that many people around me are doing the same, and for a lot of us the end is in sight. I even have a party to attend with friends this weekend. I haven’t done that in almost 2 years. (I wasn’t a particularly social person before covid either, if I’m honest). What have we learned in the past 18 months? What should we remember from this dreadful period of time, and what am I personally taking away from this. Let’s take a moment to reflect on the global pandemic.

I still remember February 2020, when the first rumors of a strange virus entering our country started going around. I was playing an MMO at the time and remember talking about it and getting very mixed responses. Some people were already taking precautions, others were ignoring it completely. In hindsight we know which of the two options was smarter, but at the time, both seemed equally valid. Personally, I took a week off. Stress gets to me easily and I already wasn’t feeling super well. I figured I’d take the rest of that week off and rest up. The day later they closed schools and I wouldn’t see my uni building for… well… I still haven’t seen it again. If this was the early beginnings of the new normal, then the toilet roll hoarding was the start of the madness. I have to say I was guilty of being part of that too. We were about to run out anyway, but we did get a new pack a week or two earlier than we normally would have. In hindsight even that feels silly, but it would have been gone completely if we hadn’t because of the people grabbing piles of it. This was where it was still funny. It quickly stopped being funny.

Shops started closing down, I can point out several in our town that went under during the pandemic, and streets started emptying. Work continued and I had my internship to keep me busy, but a lot of other activities came to a halt. I had plans that got cancelled, and school started becoming a long distance thing.
I know I’m far from the only one who experienced this, but online class stressed me out so much. I couldn’t handle it and basically quit. I focused on teaching instead. I’ve talked about this before, but I taught special education for half a year, and did so two days of the week. This was not only very fun in general, but it was a great break from the madness going on in the rest of the world. These kids needed in person education more than anyone, and since the class sizes were tiny we managed to stay open and I could continue teaching. In doing so I completely neglected my own uni classes and by the time I got to the second semester of this year I was so far behind it was basically a lost cause.
But I also started this blog during the pandemic. I remember early on there was a lot of talk about people picking up new hobbies or projects during the pandemic. Making something out of this period of time that has us locked at home. And then there was also talk of people making sure that everyone knew just getting through this moment in time was enough on its own.

So now that we’re at the end I think it’s good to acknowledge the things that went poorly and the things that went well. And now we move on. Whether that’s with uni like me, or with your job, or anything else you had going on in your life that suffered because of the pandemic. We made it through, and now it’s time to pick our lives back up again. Let me know if there’s anything about your experience with the pandemic that you’re looking back on. Maybe something unexpectedly positive happened.
Bo Burnham’s “Inside” is a must watch

June 7th, 2021

Could I interest you in everything, all of the time?

A little bit of everything, all of the time?

Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime,

Anything and everything all of the time.

Today we’ll be doing something different from normal. Yesterday I had the pleasure of sitting down and watching Bo Burnham’s latest special: Inside.
I’ve been a big fan of Bo’s brand of comedy for a long time. His song art is dead is one of my favorite pieces of commentary of all time, on top of being very funny. I’m particularly fond of the way he performed it on the show The green room in a room full of talented comedians. I implore you to check it out for yourselves. But the topic at hand for today is his new special. Before sitting down to watch the special I had seen the song Welcome to the internet which Bo has posted to youtube. Let’s jump into what I thought then.

If you come into this special expecting a lot of laughs then you’ll likely be disappointed. I expected it to be funnier than it was, but I suspected it would be more introspective than funny, and I was definitely right in that aspect. We spend about 90 minutes watching Bo go through lockdown during the pandemic. He’s spending this time on making his new special, the one we’re watching. His hair also grows throughout the special. I didn’t mention this yet, but he made this entire special on his own. It looks like it’s produced by a full crew but instead it’s just him in a room with some cameras and lights. It’s a strange parallel to some of his early work in which he was just a kid sitting in his room making youtube videos.

So what do I think of the special itself and the topics it covers?
Bo talks a lot about different issues currently happening in society. The internet being the amazing yet terrifying beast that it is has its own song (this one you can find on youtube). He plays the role of the internet personified and definitely does so from a villainous outlook. He also talks about wealth inequality and makes fun of Jeffrey Bezos. The main theme of the entire thing though is him slowly losing his mind in the pandemic, just like I assume most of us did. I definitely lost my mind over time and right now I’m dealing with heavy stress related issues. You can see similar things happening to Bo. He admits when he’s near the end of the special that he’s scared to be done with it, because it’ll mean he has to go back and live his normal life. He doesn’t want that, this special is his coping mechanism. How do you cope when your coping mechanism isn’t there anymore?

If you want to know more about the special I recommend watching it yourself. It’s definitely worth your time, and although I think it’s not his best special, it’s still really good and often painfully relatable. With the pandemic coming to a close (I’m getting my second shot soon, the end is in sight) I’m worried about going back to normal life. I think I’m more excited than worried, but it’ll be a challenge to go back. How do you all feel about this? And having watched this special, does that change your outlook in any way? Thanks for reading.
5 Games that helped me through the pandemic.

May 24th, 2021
We’ve all been stuck indoors for a long time now. Personally I’ve taken the covid-regulations very seriously. Maybe too serious from time to time. I just do well with order and rules, and less so with chaos. If there are clear rules, I’m going to follow them. Especially if they also make sense to me. Wearing masks, not leaving the house more than necessary and keeping your distance are all very reasonable things to do when other people might have a deadly disease. This has led to me being at home a lot more than normal. I haven’t even seen my university, or a group of my friends since early 2020. I still remember the week before schools closed down in the Netherlands. I was feeling a bit worried and decided to take the week off, just to be safe. I had some classmates tell me it was stupid to not go to school because of this strange disease, and maybe they were right. I just didn’t feel like going into a crowded train that led to a crowded Amsterdam metro and straight into a very crowded campus. In hindsight it probably wouldn’t have made a huge difference, since cases were still very low at that point, but I don’t regret it. So with an unreasonable amount of time on my hands and no real outdoors activities to fill the time, I had to fill up the space with video games. Let’s have a look at 5 video games that managed to get me through this pandemic.
1. Animal Crossing
I never played the previous Animal Crossing installments. I didn’t even really know what the game entailed until I bought it. I just knew that all of my friends were going to buy and play the game, and I had a Nintendo Switch already, so I figured why not? What followed was an adorable gameplay loop that definitely didn’t reek of capitalism at all. I had a lot of fun building up my island and getting different villagers. I kind of stopped playing after a while though, and I’ve been thinking of picking it up again. I should decorate my island some more, and maybe even get some of my friends to play again. If you like an adorable game with one of the most relaxing soundtracks there is then I recommend you give this one a go.
1. Among Us
Now I didn’t really enjoy playing Among Us that much. It’s a very stressful game and although I’ve played a bit with friends and this was definitely fun, I always felt like I had to take a shower afterwards because of how much I sweat when I’m stressed.
Among Us was definitely a craze for a while. It was kind of fun to see my students at my teaching internship play the same games as I did. Makes you seem like the cool teacher while you’re actually just a nerd that plays video games way too much. Luckily most of my students weren’t crazy hyperactive about Among Us, so it mostly made for some good pictionary prompts. And as an English teacher I like to motivate my students to do more in English, and some of them played in random lobbies with people who didn’t speak Dutch, so good on them for that!
1. Minecraft
Minecraft has to be one of my favorite games of all time. I’ve put more hours into this game than I can count. I remember playing the Tekkit mod back in the day before most big mod packs were even a thing. Earlier this year some friends of mine set up a vanilla server, so I played quite a bit of minecraft. I am bad at finishing build projects in this game though, so I ended up building about half a wizard tower. I used to love playing this game, but I feel like nowadays it comes and goes in waves. Luckily there was another game that has been keeping me sane throughout all of this:
1. Apex Legends
I’ve played Apex Legends on and off ever since it was first launched. I started a little bit later than the launch, mainly because a bunch of my friends were playing it. I love the fast gameplay of a battle royale like this. I always like to compare it to Overwatch, which I used to play a lot. With a game like Overwatch you often quickly realize it’s going to be a bad game. Either the enemy team is really good, or some people on your team are bad or toxic. Or in certain cases just straight up throwing. The problem here was often that you’d still be stuck in the same game for another 5 to 15 minutes. Apex doesn’t have that problem. If you encounter a squad that’s better than you they just kill you and you jump immediately into the next game. The game also has a lot of downtime while you’re looting so you can chat with your friends and talk nonsense for an evening, only to now and then focus on the game.
1. Stardew Valley
I don’t think a perfect game exists, for for me personally Stardew Valley comes pretty damn close. For those of you unfamiliar with Stardew Valley, it’s a farming simulator. You sit in your office and you one day are sick of it all, so you go to the farm that you inherited from your grandpa. From here you travel to a lovely village in which you get to talk to all the fun villagers. You get to befriend them, farm crops and even explore the local mine. Or in my case, fish a lot. Fishing is great in Stardew Valley. The best thing about this game for me is how relaxing it is. You can’t really lose in Stardew Valley. You can die in the mines, but it’ll just bring you to bed and you lose the progress for that day. Not the end of the world. If you ignore the mine, or have a good enough grasp on managing your health, then it’s a super relaxing game with a fantastic soundtrack. I’m normally not a huge fan of this graphics style, but for a game like Stardew Valley it just works. I’ve played this game on both PC and switch, and enjoyed it every single time.

Honorable Mentions

I want to put a few honorable mentions here really quickly. Most of them are on the Nintendo Switch. First I want to mention Forager. It’s a very fun game where you slowly expand your islands by getting resources
and includes some fun puzzles.
Second game I want to mention is Path of Exile. I played this for a hot second back when it first launched, and then didn’t touch it until recently. With the announcement of a Path of Exile 2 it seemed like a good moment to get back into it, and it’s been quite fun, although very complicated.
The last honorable mention is Black Desert Online. I love and hate this game at the same time. I recently quit it for a second time, but it was a very fun game while it lasted. It just turned into too much of a grind near the end.

I hope you found something you enjoyed among this!