About two months ago I started playing Cookie Clicker again. It’s a game I first played around 2013 when it was really popular, and I’ve revisited it a few times over the years. I don’t really remember how far I’ve gotten before, except that I know I’ve never gotten to 100% completion. Another game I played years before Cookie Clicker was Powder Game which isn’t an idle game but it is similarly directionless. It has you fiddling around with a physics engine and its various materials which interact in entertaining ways. I’m quite nostalgic about it.
Playing through Cookie Clicker to this relatively late stage got me thinking about patience.
For several years my thinking about what motivates the large arcs in a person’s life has tended to revolve around strength. People are motivated by all kinds of things, but most of them can be reduced in one way or another to a certain flavor of strength. When a man can stand and look reality eye-to-eye he can do anything.
But this idea that strength is the highest virtue pits people against reality. People become fighters viciously acting against entropy in a virile act of rebellion against death. This is a compelling image which recalls the work of Nietzsche and the existentialists, but my thinking has drifted away from these lines and toward patience as a more well-adapted form of this ideology. When you hold up patience as a primary virtue then you can see people not as agents of life against death but rather as outcroppings of life which stand against the weathering of death. We live whether we want to or not; we aren’t fighters. We are waiters. Most of us don’t have any choice but to keep living.
This can be a difficult way of thinking to live with. Albert Camus tackles the problem of living without meaning or expectations in The Myth of Sisyphus, a book which is close to my heart. I have struggled on and off with depression for over ten years, and although it is tempting to attribute this problem to my difficult worldview, I would suggest that it is attributable in the opposite direction; this way of thinking about the world where life is a statistical anomaly which thrusts us unwilling into the troubled stream of forms is easy to find when you are in a depressed state.
While I was finishing up college and thinking about patience and strength quite a lot I came across the ultralight hiking community and that lead me to learn about the Pacific Crest Trail, which I spent five months hiking last year. It covers 2,653 miles from the U.S.-Mexican border to the Canadian border. I’ll write more about that trip in the future, but I want to talk about it here because it was an experience which brought me a feeling of great reality to the idea that patience and strength are similar.
One of the audiobooks I kept listening to was Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. I had never heard of Siddhartha before the trail. The story of how it found me is unlikely.
Since early on in the Sierra Nevada mountains I’d been talking about switching to a smaller pack for Oregon, one which I’d found through the work of John Zahorian. He makes YouTube videos but also co-founded Pa’lante Packs before starting his own one-man operation making packs as MeadowPhysics. The pack I want to use for Oregon was the Grasshopper (although everyone called it the Johnsport), mostly because I want to show off how little gear I needed to carry. The images on the site have now changed (and the design of the pack seems to have changed a bit as well), but when I was looking at the pack one of the images featured the pack containing a copy of Siddhartha.
My hiking buddy Snake Charmer got pretty excited when he saw that picture and told me it was a great book. I listened to the audiobook dozens of times over the next three months. I can probably recite a good percentage of the book from memory, but one line in particular struck a chord. As I walked every day I kept thinking about it, and it comes to me easily now: Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better. I wrote it into a copy of Wild by Cheryl Strayed which was being used as a sort of hiker graffiti board at Shelter Cove resort. Snake Charmer took the opportunity to write an insulting message about a group of hikers we didn’t like.
So that’s how I found Siddhartha and learned that one line which has stayed with me. Writing is good, thinking is better. Cleverness is good, patience is better. Life is an act of patience. When a man wants something he doesn’t get it by thrashing around looking for the right way; he puts unhelpful thoughts out of his mind and lets himself drift toward his goal.
“When you throw a rock into the water, it will speed on the fastest course to the bottom of the water. This is how it is when Siddhartha has a goal, a resolution. Siddhartha does nothing, he waits, he thinks, he fasts, but he passes through the things of the world like a rock through water, without doing anything, without stirring; he is drawn, he lets himself fall. His goal attracts him, because he doesn’t let anything enter his soul which might oppose the goal.” – Hermann Hesse
I don’t mean to use this in a motivational or self-help way. Actually, it’s a principle which works against a person’s happiness as often as it works for it. It’s like Morrissey said, “what makes most people feel happy leads us headlong into harm.” You see, patience is one things but attention is another. You can be as patient as you want but your impulses will lead the way.
Seen this way, religion might be a way of resolving this patience into something like a reward; you’re patient in waiting out this difficult life and at the end you get something substantial back in return which gives each hour of waiting for death a direction. For some people throughout history this has obviously been a vital source of comfort. For me, that has never been appealing because it is too obviously an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. To accept a life after death is to turn your eyes away from reality. This is not new thinking, except that for me this thought takes on the color of patience; a man waits for death and he can either expect or not expect, but he is patient either way.
I also have ADHD, which makes it difficult for me to create habits. Habits are a core part of most peoples’ lives and they offer a blessed relief from the patience required to go through the motions every day. In my view habits aren’t proof of patience, but rather a selective blindness which allow the blind to spend energy without feeling it too deeply. It’s a very valuable ability and its absence is obvious. For me, having ADHD means frequently facing my weakness through my inability to form habits. How do you live when your paramount virtue is strength and you can see how weak you are on a daily basis?
As I’ve gotten older those issues have gotten less significant, which I’m thankful for. It’s easier for me to see the mind as a golden river.
So there’s Cookie Clicker, strength, patience, and me. In a sense, the game is separate from me because it continues without my interaction. In another sense the lack of complex gameplay and the long times involved synthesize my life and the gameplay into a new life which continues much as before but with a new way of waiting and playing which unobtrusively affects the way I think about things. What more can you want from art?
Cookie Clicker is a game which is special because it doesn’t require constant attention; it’s a meta-game which requires interaction in the form of pure patience. Most games supply you with expectations and satisfaction during active gameplay, but Cookie Clicker omits the normal details. When I remember playing Void Stranger (a lovely puzzle game with relatively active gameplay) and playing Cookie Clicker, the memories aren’t dissimilar. The gameplay is very different, but that’s not what I remember. What I remember is going to work and randomly thinking of each game and what I was going to do next. I remember the way that they affect my day-to-day life more than I remember the gameplay.
That’s what I see in Cookie Clicker and many other mundane activities which seem to have no end result; they seem to have no result but in the course of doing them you become a different person. I started running after finishing the trail and the same logic applies. I’m a young healthy person, so running doesn’t have particularly big health benefits, but I do it anyway. It’s a lot of suffering for no particularly good benefit, but I do it because along the way I become a different person.
So what’s up with Cookie Clicker? Is there really such great value in running or working at the end of a lifetime? At the moment, I don’t think those things are objectively better than Cookie Clicker.
“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson