I recently re-downloaded all my Sims 4 packs on my computer (which is a MacBook Pro, and it can barely handle running the game even with all the gameplay settings on ‘low’) and remembered exactly why and how 13-year-old-me could spend 9 hours of her day just playing Sims.
I’ve got a little under two months to finish my masters dissertation, and it’s actually coming along quite well. I’ve got an introduction, a substantial chapter 1, and at least a solid plan for chapters 2 and 3. But besides writing this essentially long a$$ paper, there is absolutely nothing I’m required to do with my day.
During summers in Belfast, the sun does not set until about 9:30 pm, sometimes later. Just last night at 10:15 pm, the sky was still glowy with a soft burnt orange color. I underestimated how much this would mess with my sense of time, especially my readiness for sleep. All of my friends have said this too, and my Irish friends have said to lean into it.
As I mentioned in my last blog, I’ve been haphazardly reading Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey and How to Do Nothing by Jenny O’Dell. I have been thinking a lot about time, attention, and living a good life. Hersey talks a lot about divesting from traditional measures of progress and success (namely those directly connected to grind culture and capitalism, which is, in America, basically our whole value set) and instead focusing on rest and leisure as a right, something we never have to earn or be "worthy” of, and as a healing practice.
And How to Do Nothing is not actually a guide on doing nothing. It’s about resisting the attention economy and instead refocusing and reinvesting in activities that you don’t do for getting things done or for money or for any other reason besides that they bring you joy and fulfillment. At least, that’s one part of it.
I’ve been trying to take this seriously and not hold myself to external expectations about what a day should look like and what measures of progress in my work should look like. There is no “should.” If I don’t get moving out of bed until noon, that’s okay. If I only write 100 words on my thesis, that’s okay. If I only do the basic self-maintenance things and fill the rest of my time with mindless activities that I can barely remember, that’s fine. It’s all just part of a day and of living.
So enter: The Sims 4. And a bunch of new game packs because they were all 50% off on Origin.1
I love Sims for the same reasons I’ve always liked writing stories. Sims is just like creating three-dimensional stories. I love creating different families with storylines and tensions and likes and dislikes. I love building their houses and individual rooms, trying to match all the decorations to their sim personalities. And then I love the gameplay. I play with autonomy levels on high, so I may be God, but my Sims don’t do half the things I direct them to do. This makes it especially fun to see how their lives shape out, and the Sims 4 has had a bunch of updates that create more opportunities for unexpected scenarios and storylines.
But there I was, at 2 am on a Tuesday, realizing that I had spent six hours straight playing Sims. I had leveled up through a career, had grandkids, and had been abducted by an alien, but I hadn’t felt the time go by. The time blindness shocked me, and I went to bed wondering how I could spend so much time doing almost nothing. And marveling at how emptily satisfied I felt.
Later that week, my friend Louise invited a handful of our friends to come spend a few days at her parent’s house while they were away on vacation. These days were meant to be a respite from jobs, dissertations, and any other Belfast-induced-stressors.
Her family’s house, built by her great-grandparents and passed down through the family, is tucked away in Ballymena and sandwiched between long stretching fields. Louise sparkled as she showed us her garden beds where she was growing strawberries and leafy greens, the orchard where she and her late grandmother planted trees, and the shed her parents converted into a workspace for her basketweaving materials.
Our few days in Ballymena were just what Louise said they would be. In between communal meals, where Louise threw together what bits and bobs we had from the garden and the pantry to make salads and charcuterie spreads with homemade bread and vegetable curry, we went on walks along greenways in town, took afternoon naps in the sunroom, and *some* of us got work done.
I didn’t touch my dissertation. Instead, I laid on picnic blankets in the front yard and read How to Do Nothing and poems by Hera Lindsay Bird and felt like an iPhone at the end of a long day.
I liked seeing how Louise spent her days. In the morning, she’d spend some time in the garden (collecting fresh plump strawberries and fighting the slugs); in the afternoon, she’d make bread, get some work done, practice her violin, read in French, and maybe take a nap. And in the evening, she’d gather us all for dinner, and we’d talk and laugh and be shocked when it was 11 pm instead of 9.
It was a dumb revelation for me to see someone just living their life, doing things that brought them joy, and getting done what they needed to. When I told her about this, while I was playing Sims one afternoon, making them read books and swim in the pool and build relationships with other sims in the park, she said, “You know, you can do this with things you like to do too.” and I hadn’t put two and two together, but I had to laugh at how much time I had spent making my sims do things that really I’d been wanting to do.
I haven’t played Sims since getting back from that excursion, but I think of that moment often. The empty-satisfaction I felt after playing Sims for hours could be a full-bellied satisfaction if I just actually lived how I was crafting crunchy granola lives for my sims.
I had been so stuck on feeling like I needed to live into a specific kind of schedule where I was doing specific tasks and activities and making a specific kind of progress. Reading a leisure book or learning how to swim, or just laying in the sun in the park with friends was not a part of how I was thinking about progress. But it was those activities that made me feel the most ready to sit down with my dissertation, and when I finally did get back to work, I didn’t feel overwhelmed or burnt out. I was able to zoom out for a moment and appreciate the process of progress: of chipping away little by little. And it was those activities that made me feel like a person living a good life.
It is silly how difficult something so simple can be; getting out of our own way and giving ourselves permission to dedicate time and energy to the things that make us feel alive. But also how silly it is to be so concerned with “living a good life” that we paralyze ourselves from doing just that.
I have been guilty of being in a constant state of rush, of grind, of doing, doing, doing.2 It is extremely difficult to unlearn that and the shame that comes with not participating in that culture. Belfast has been good medicine for this. Things here move at a significantly slower pace than in the States, and there are no medals, plaques, or titles to win for being the busiest. But I’m reminded that even in a faster-paced environment with external rewards, there is no meaningful work (in any sense of the word) without rest, leisure, and distance from capitalistic ideas of progress and success.
Rest and leisure, is by nature, then, productive.
I’m lucky to be in a moment in my life where I really only have one priority (and that is to finish this dissertation by the end of the summer), and everything in between that commitment is mine to choose. I recognize that it will not always be like this, so I am leaning into the Irish summer time: late rising, leisurely daytime, and long evenings.
I have hope that when I get to my new reality in the States in two months, I’ll have carried these lessons and some form of this lifestyle with me, and that I’ll find some middle-ground between the tensions of academia hustle culture and my own ideas about what success and progress should look like for a scholar who also wants to be an artist and an athlete and a person with a soul and a purpose in this world.3
An ode is coming for the long walks, the harder-than-a-marathon 15-minute swims that I’m finally just starting to learn how to breathe correctly through, the park-sits, and park-lays with friends in the middle of flowered fields that are populating my days, but for now this is just life! This is what it’s supposed to be! There is no rush to do, do, do. So, I’m not. :)
I am honestly not embarrassed to say that I spent close to $200 on Sims games. They’re great. They’re still on sale, too, so if you’re feeling like you need an escape, the base game is free, and there are so many expansions to choose from.
And it brought lots of external validation that felt good until it didn’t.
This could also be me, bright-eyed and unbroken yet by the PhD, but I really do have hope and faith that I’ll be able to find my own sense of place in academia that doesn’t require selling my mental health for success or sense of belonging. We’ll see.
Asha, you are so incredible! I'm so happy to know you. I've been thinking about many of the same things on the farm. Thank you for sharing these reflections
This is so lovely! I'm so glad you've got lovely Irish days in the sun.