I’ve been thinking lately about how much of my life has been spent min-maxing.
I think a lot of us who grew up anxious, high-achieving, hypervigilant, or chronically “a little too much” end up learning this idea early. You learn to optimize. You learn that when conditions are good, you should probably use them while they last. You capitalize on stacked buffs.
A beautiful spring day?
World buff.
Coffee, stimulants, and mood stabilizers kicking in?
Focus and throughput buffs.
A sudden shift into extra energy?
Heroism/Bloodlust.
And because I’m actually fairly competent and capable when the buffs are stacked, this strategy has often worked surprisingly well.
This weekend on Mother’s Day I woke up exhausted after several days of vague physiological weirdness–fatigue, GI nonsense, dry eyes, one of those “is this autoimmune or am I just aging?” episodes that I still can’t quite categorize. But then suddenly, after coffee, sunlight, and some movement, I was able to
- Haul mulch from the giant chip pile out front and widen mulch beds around trees in the floodplain out back.
- Repot a bunch of herbs into decorative planters and reeorganize the mess that is currently the garden.
- Water a bunch of trees.
- Clean the patio.
- Notice the deer were eating the coneflowers again and address it by separating a huge clump of catmint and strategically replanting it as a deterrent.
- Repot my dying money tree into succulent mix because apparently I now am the kind of person who improvises emergency horticultural interventions.
Then I dyed my hair purple, did an everything shower, gave myself a mini-pedicure, and got ready to see the kids and play WoW, my preferred Mother’s Day activity.
And while I was doing all this, I kept thinking about the whole minmaxing idea and whether it was working for me. I realized I’ve been treating good days as mandatory optimization windows. If I have energy/buffs (which I can measure now thanks to my Visible(TM) heart rate variability monitor! Buy Visible now through my affiliate link! j/k), I should use all of it. If the weather is nice, I should garden or hike. If I have a paper to review, I should bike downstairs with the laptop holder so I can write the review while doing a 12-mile ride in the Netherlands on Rouvy (Buy Rouvy now! j/k again).
Basically, if the buffs are stacked, I should maximize output before they expire (truly frost mage coded).
In the olden days of Vanilla or BC, running out of mana was the problem. Now it’s not so simple–now we have to juggle cooldown management, positioning, avoiding standing in the fire, and maintaining output without pulling aggro or wiping the group.
And that actually feels like a better metaphor for aging, chronic stress, mental illness, and whatever weird mildly autoimmune/autonomic/reactive situation my body/mind seems to inhabit.
My main problem isn’t lack of capability. It’s that my UI doesn’t display debuffs very well. I can still function like a 30 year old (OK, maybe 40) while all kinds of hidden effects are stacking quietly in the background: sleep debt, irritated lumbar nerves, dry-eye irritation, dehydration, whatever autonomic burnout thing my body occasionally does, and the kind of allostatic load that public health people love talking about but are terrible at recognizing in themselves.
And because I’m still technically functioning, I keep greeding action–sacrificing long-term game stability/ability because the short-term damage you’re doing feels good. Standing in the fire to finish the cast. Pulling one more pack because the group can probably handle it. (Note: the family group is named Bigpullman, which should tell you something.) Staying aggressive instead of considering survivability because Heroism is up and 10 buffs are stacked.
And sometimes you get away with it! Sometimes the meters look amazing. But sometimes healer mana is already low, positioning starts breaking down, no one is managing their cooldowns right, and the group wipes because everybody kept pretending “still technically alive” meant “still playing smart.”
As a person with bipolar disorder, I’ve spent a lot of my life confusing “I can do all the things” with “I’m managing my life in a sustainable way.” And the older I get, the less true that is.
Now I need to be thinking in terms of restoration mechanics–they’re not interruptions to gameplay; they’re an integral part.
An experienced player would say “of course”! In raids, nobody thinks waiting for cooldowns, using buffs or healing potions, keeping defensives up, or just taking a moment to recover are signs of weakness. They’re absolutely necessary.
A bad player thinks only about their DPS.
A good player understands that sustainability mechanics are part of the parse.
The point of the game isn’t to top the meters for thirty seconds before faceplanting in the fire and wiping the raid (usually me). It isn’t tunnel-visioning the boss while standing directly under falling rocks because “the healer’s got me” (not going to mention any names for this one). It isn’t blowing every cooldown in phase one and then acting shocked when phase three becomes a disaster.
And I think this is where I’ve gotten stuck. Because I’ve spent years upon years trying to minmax my life without really learning how to play my class* sustainably and deeply understanding my own basic mechanics.
I want to figure out what restores me and what debuffs me. I want to preserve survival margin. I want to stop before collapse instead of after collapse. I want to recognize the difference between “I currently have stacked buffs” and “this is actually sustainable throughput (energy) for me.”
Because eventually the buffs expire.
And maybe the highest-level version of the game isn’t maximizing output every time conditions are great. Maybe it’s learning how to play in a way that still works after the buffs are gone.
*(60-year old scientist, nature lover, and person with bipolar disorder/other chronic health problems