Lonely Road

I’ve been struggling with something lately. I had a really good end of 2008, the site was going well, I was energized, and we launched both the forums and a new design for the site. I won’t bore you with the details but the bottom line is that I’m too trusting and also have fairly high expectations of friends and colleagues. Finding like-minded people is very difficult when you are surrounded by people with very little passion and drive. You can tell me that I’m not looking hard enough or that the problem is in my attitude. Save it, I’ve heard it all before. I am a rather introspective person and I like to take time to think about the situations in my life and how I can possibly change them. In this case, it boils down to my priorities not aligning with other people, even though we may share similar interests.

Without going into specifics, I’ll humor you with an analogy. Imagine for a second you’re an avid Battlefield 2/Call of Duty 4/World of Warcraft or any other team based game player and up until now, you’ve been fairly happy playing solo or joining pick up teams/squads. But you’ve recently found out that a few of your friends from work actually play as well and are interested in forming up a team to better achieve common goals. The first few outings were pretty successful and you were led to believe that everyone was having fun but as time goes on, excuses starts to come up such as: “I can’t play tonight because I’ve got to put air in my tires.” Or “I haven’t patched my system yet so I can’t play”. These are all fair excuses but when they continue to come up, you start to wonder if it’s because they are lazy or that they really don’t care to play with you.

This is compounded with the reality that they have no issue patching other games or putting off running errands for other events, which is only logical to assume that the activity isn’t worth it in their eyes to do both. But I’m a good team player and I’ll hold on to gear that I think they would benefit from or save the more lucrative quests for when they do make it online so we can both reap the rewards. You could call me a schmuck for doing something like that but that’s the way I am. I look out for my friends and I make time to share with them.

The other advice I receive would be to simply kick them out of your team or stop holding loot for them. But the difficulty with that is they do participate infrequently enough that you feel just the slightest twinge of remorse for cutting them out. So I figure, how about I got the extra mile and make this as simple as possible. I’ll download the patch for you and send it to you so all you would have to do is double click the EXE file. You would think that solves the issue but in fact, these team mates of mine are so lazy that they wouldn’t even bother to double click or would respond with “Oh, I’ll get to that soon.”

At this point, the only conclusion I can come up with is that if can’t rely on these “friends” of mine to actually follow through on something that we have a common interest in, then how can I trust them to have my back when there’s nothing in it for them? It really shouldn’t be this difficult to find someone who will actually give a damn about you.

In effect, this makes you disheartened because you saw the potential of your team succeeding in sharing a similar drive and motivation. But because of people’s uncaring attitude or their focus on what’s happening in their own lives, they fail to see missed opportunities. I’m constantly reminded of how narrow other’s points of view are. Many people I meet in real life are incapable of seeing past their own situations. Am I guilty of this very thing? Most certainly. My life takes priority but when it comes down to it, there are things I’m willing to sacrifice for a friend because I call them a friend. That unfortunately is rarely reciprocated. I hope one day I’ll find someone who has a similar dedication and drive for what they are passionate about and that I’m not too jaded to see it.