If you’ve never played a tabletop RPG (like dungeons and dragons) I highly recommend dabbling in it, for educational purposes. Almost everything you need to know about the nuts and bolts behind navigating life’s many challenges can be deduced with analogical reasoning from tabletop RPGs.
In just the character creation section alone we learn how people self balance their stats after some base rolls on luck and ancestral genetic heritage- and how any number of gifts one wants to have can be, so long as each is paired with its own curse.
Through methodical turn-based progression and combat we learn cause and effect. We learn to respect the autonomy and agency of all creatures, and respect the fact that everyone gets a chance to have a turn before anyone gets a second one.
You learn to use things you wish you could save, rather than die protecting them. To think in terms of probabilities, viewing survival as a form of luck maximizing gambling- in which every forward action is calculated on a risk v reward basis to advance the ball of our lives, and to do so under a long-term goal umbrella of personal management.
I don’t have my old high school chums to play Dungeons And Dragons with anymore (or rather, Swords And Six Siders, the normal 6 sided dice variant we could get our heads around), so when I get some time to relax, I play Nethack on alt.org.
My most frequent deaths are deaths of despair, which doesn’t bode well for me personally. I could see something like that happening. I’ll make a poor decision in the game and lose a goal, or an object, or a dream I had- and even though I could turn it around and probably do just fine, I end up making one awful fate-tempting decision after the next until finally it caches up with me and I suffer some very preventable YASD or another.
I must regale you with the tale of one such death of despair that occurred just now so I can complete the mourning process by externalizing.
After it happened I came stumbling out of the boulder tower with my last surviving pet kitty and wandered around in a daze picking fights with everything and spending zero time on self care until eventually I was so weak that a hostile raven put me out of my misery by pecking out my weeping eyes.
Prior to that I had been a devoted Priest of Hermes that had wandered quite deeply into the dungeon with Sprinkles my kitten. Fortune had really favored me in a number of ways, putting me in the somewhat unique position of having 2 very fine warrior cats and a very rare magic whistle that allowed me to summon them next to me at will, effectively giving me warrior cat armor.
The whistle came from a hardware store. Sprinkles picked it up and snuck it past the shopkeeper, which I let slide- cats will be cats, after all. We can’t hold them to any human moral standards when it comes to private property. I also didn’t hold it against him when I used that magic whistle to teleport him out of the shop next to me every time I saw him pick something else up, until the shop was completely empty and my pockets were weighing me down. Cats will be cats, after all. Nothing like a neutral Priest of Hermes.
The second cat came from The Oracle. Or rather, the floor that The Oracle resides on. I was walking through the statue gallery when it jumped out at me and started clawing. Sprinkles stepped in to defend me, but I hate to hurt a cat. At this point I was completely out of food and near the point of starvation- so I had not a single food item on me to try taming it. I had just recently eaten my last clove of garlic, not that the cat would eat that- but it would at least appreciate the gesture enough to leave me alone. I realized that one of the items I got from the hardware store was some type of magical horn. There’s three I know of- a horn that blasts fire, a horn that blasts ice, and a horn that food falls out of when you activate it. Any of these three solve my problem, so I activated the horn and received two candy bars in my hand from my freshly identified Horn Of Plenty. Surprisingly, the cat ate one of them and instantly became my pet- responsive to the magic whistle, just like Sprinkles- and about the same size and strength.
Any time some creep would wander over towards me with nefarious intent, I’d blow my magic whistle and BAM! torn to shreds by teleporting cats, which were surprisingly lethal and effective. I came upon the Sokobon tower- which is a series of boulder pushing puzzles, up a tower, with a special prize at the top. A side quest, of sorts. I left the cats outside, so they wouldn’t get in the way of the boulders, and went into the first chamber. That puzzle has a row of pits that boulders must be pushed into, to allow crossing over the pits to the ladder that leads to the next level. As I was pushing my boulders, a snake appeared under one and set upon me. I retreated back to the previous floor from whence I came, gathered my kitty armor, and brought them (foolishly) into the tower with me to dispatch the snake.
Afterwards, I decided to let the cats hang out in the chamber while I pushed rocks into the pits to bridge them. I figured I could just use the magic whistle to move them if they got in the way (which was the reason I left them below initially). I pushed a large boulder to the first hole, to the point that it blocked my sight of what was in front of it. Concerned that one of my cats might be behind it just then, I blew my whistle to move out out of the way. Then I shoved the boulder forward.
What I didn’t realize was that neither of my cats were in the way of that boulder, but when I blew my whistle I summoned Sprinkles directly into the pit that I was about to dump a boulder, just out of sight.
The boulder went squish, right into the hole. And I was greeted with the dreaded:
“You hear the rumbling of distant thunder…”
Which is code for “You just angered your God, and until you find an alter to sacrifice enough corpses to mollify and appease him, your luck will be -10, and no God will come to your aid when you pray to them.”
Not a death sentence, but a big kick in the balls. Especially after losing the kitty that had been with me from the beginning. Especially after losing my lethal dual attack kitty armor.
I stumbled out to my YASD, and that was that.
Moral of the story: Don’t let anxiety over unseen things trick you into manifesting exactly what you were trying to avoid, inadvertently, by thinking you were manifesting the opposite- when leaving anxiety unacted upon was the correct path, in hindsight.
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