Why I do the things that make zero sense

You look at my life from the outside and it probably looks like a chaotic, steaming pile of mismatched garbage.

Like a glorious, festering soup of hyper fixations.

You see me sitting in a dark room, bathed in the sickly glow of a cathode ray tube television, sweating bullets while I stack pixelated blocks in competitive 8 bit tournaments from thirty years ago.

You watch me, a natural born southpaw, brutally punish my clumsy right hand for four gruelling hours a day, drilling sleight of hand card mechanics until my knuckles lock up and my fingers feel like chewed up pretzel sticks.

You think it’s madness. You think my brain is just a broken gumball machine spilling its guts onto the sticky floor of reality.

But you’re wrong.

There is a methodology to this madness, and it is razor sharp.

(And yes, it involves a lot of weird, granular suffering, but that’s where the magic happens, isn’t it?)

We live in a world that wants you soft. It wants you scrolling, consuming, becoming a smooth, frictionless blob of beige nothingness and you see it day in and day out if you ever go out into the world. People are just “eh”

The algorithm wants to chew your food for you. So I refuse to eat the sludge. I do the things that are hard, the things that are absurd, the things that require my actual, physical meat vessel to learn and fail and bleed and adapt.

Forcing my non dominant hand to palm a deck of Bicycles until it obeys my will? Which is me rewiring my own nervous system.

That is me planting a flag in my own biological limitations and telling my own body to go screw itself, I’m in charge now.

Everything looks like chaos and some people might see it as obsession, but all I’m doing is trying to train/trick my brain into doing the hard things, instead of becoming a mindless drone that does the same thing day in and day out.

Maybe next month I’ll teach myself a dead language, who knows?

So the next time you see me obsessing over some strange, obscure slice of life that makes zero sense, just know I’m not crazy.

Now go find your own beautiful, pointless agony cause it might save you from going insane.

Stephen Walker.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom