I grew up blessed. Three square meals a day, most of them home-cooked. A trampoline in the backyard. Parents who loved me and loved each other (they’ve been married 35 years.) A strong sense of faith. I doubt whether anyone born in ‘90s America can say they were anything but privileged, at least by historic standards.
But these things are all relative. If I compare myself to my peers, I can find room for complaint. My clothes were always hand-me-downs. I shared a bedroom with two brothers - such that moving to college gave me more space than I’d ever had. And I was never very good at making friends. I experienced abyssal loneliness.
I can see now that those difficulties accomplished two things: They caused me to treasure the joys of life, and they stuck in my brain the same way that you remember vacations when something went wrong much better than when everything went right. In a word, they gave me Contrast and Memory.
I’ve always felt small things more deeply than large things. I’m ashamed to say that I’m mostly unaffected by a death in the family, but a sunset leaves me speechless. I’ve wondered before if this means I’m callous, unloving, or inhuman.
I don’t think it’s any of those. I find great meaning in the intricacies of life, in dappled sunlight and ink on paper and birdsong and the sour-sweet flavor of lemonade.
But this also means I twist myself into knots over insubstantial issues. One day in college, I remember a great mental burden settling over me as I tried to decide how I should partition my time. Was I putting enough effort into homework? Was I reading enough books every year? Was I playing too many video games?
These questions aren’t exactly life-or-death, but they felt all-consuming at the time. I remember walking between classes in a daze, unable to function normally until I’d come to a conclusion that felt reasonable and livable. I even prayed that God would show me the answer.
An instant later, two words popped into my head: Disciplines and Liberties. I’d been given a framework for compartmentalizing life which allowed me to value hard things and easy things for their own sakes, rather than despising one and idolizing the other. And just like that, my conundrum was resolved.
Some things in life are Disciplines. They require effort, usually for little payoff. They drain our time, energy, and resources. They can feel defeating or insurmountable. But they have to be done. Here’s a partial list of my Disciplines:
Working out
Writing
Learning French
Prayer
Other things are Liberties. They give life, not take it. They convey a sense of weightlessness. They are their own reward. Again, my list:
Reading
Movies
Video games
Playing piano
Programming
(Let’s just skip over the fact that I have more Liberties than Disciplines.)
The two categories give us a clue as to how they should be approached. Disciplines have to be borne, and there’s no way around that. To check your Disciplines off the list will require an expenditure of energy. Liberties, on the other hand, usually finish themselves. They’re the activities we slip into without even trying. But they come with a challenge: They need to be controlled lest they take over our lives.
Nothing would get done without Disciplines. But nothing would be worth doing without Liberties.
What this categorization did was help me to realize that it’s okay to begrudge some things; they’re probably Disciplines. And it’s okay to feel swept away by some things; they’re probably Liberties. The important part to remember is that they need each other for balance.
Core to this internal struggle was another big question bouncing around in my head: Did I want to pursue video games or books as my life’s work? I could see a future for either one, but I knew that I wanted to give it my full devotion rather than wandering off after a few years as I had every other hobby.
I had decades of experience reading literature - the only kind of writing education that really counts. But, on the other hand, I had been equipped with all the skills necessary to make my own games: programming, writing, music composition, and graphic design. If I looked at this quandry from a mechanical perspective, video games actually seemed to make better use of my talents. Or, at the very least, video games would let me go wide, using more part of my brain than writing which would require going deep and focusing on a few insular skillsets.
There was also the philosophical aspect to consider. I’ve always been prone to moralize about everything in life. But really, does it matter whether I do Thing A (video games) or Thing B (writing)? Who’s judging me on this choice? Probably no one. And yet, I can’t argue with the fact that games and writing have different effects upon the world. Which do I want to contribute to? This, to me, is not beside the point. It’s central to making such a decision.
If someone were to ask me about the meaning of stories - why we consume them, why we need them - my answer would be this: Stories help us explore consequences. They show characters choosing to act one way or another, and then show us the results. The most authentic stories report honestly about what follows. It’s easy to write what my friend G.M. Baker calls Fantastical Fiction, meaning tales that flatter us with impossible fantasies we wish could be true. There’s a place for such works, but they aren’t telling the whole story.
If consequences exist, then choices matter. If I decided to throw my heart and soul into video games, it would be closing the door to authorship.
This, for me, was a hard decision. More than the search for Disciplines and Liberties, I spent weeks in a state of unhappy tension. I conducted research, listened to podcasts, read blog posts. I surveyed my friends, asking questions like “Are you happy with the amount of time you spend playing video games?” Or “What has been the positive and negative impact of reading in your life?”
I was constructing a hierarchy of values. It was deeply personal and thoroughly subjective, not something I want to foist on anyone else. But I needed to be convinced by my answer.
And what I realized was that the act of creating, itself, can be a Discipline or a Liberty. Creating board games and video games is something I do instinctively, something I fall back on when I’m bored. I love generating a set of mechanics and coming up with interesting decisions for the player to make. I love elegant design, like the game Go which has few rules but a massive possibility space. I love trying to word a rulebook so it’s clear without being verbose.
Writing, on the other hand, is something I force myself to do. Every hour I spend writing varies between barely-sufferable and insufferable. I think it feels different because it’s a purer form of creation than other hobbies. In programming, I have copy and paste. With piano, I can rehearse the same measure for hours, letting my fingers do the work while my mind wanders. Painters can imitate the masters; athletes run drills; cooks use a recipe.
Writers must come up with 80,000 words, each of them unique. You can’t copy so much as a single sentence in the same book.
I suspect that’s is the reason why a famous writer (it’s been attributed to many different people) said this:
I hate writing. But I love having written.
And so, finally, the difficulty of the actions themselves became a part of my choice. Do I pick the natural, easy thing that flows from me without thought? Or do I slave away at the thing which I find to be more ultimately valuable?
Full disclosure: I’ve been struggling with motivation lately. Perhaps that’s the reason I decided to set down this post for all of you. Maybe someone out there needed to hear the question worded another way.
We all know that hardship builds character. It brings Contrast and Memory. We’ve heard that difficult things are the things worth doing.
Did you, like me, grow up blessed? Have you struggled to decide how to spend your time? What will be the legacy of your life?
The High Road or the Low? Disciplines or Liberties?
Let me ask it one final way. What do you want to be: A lump of clay or a bar of Ramston steel?