People that hate me had no reason to start hating me, but by the end of the journey, I gave them plenty of reasons to despise me. It’s a sad truth about how my brain works. We are either on the same side, or you are a mortal enemy.
Although, after playing a million hours of Red Dead Redemption, I started viewing all other living beings as NPC. (A non-player character [NPC] is a video game character that is controlled by the game’s artificial intelligence (AI) rather than by a gamer. Non-player characters serve a number of purposes in video games, including: As plot device: NPCs can be used to advance the storyline.)
When I first started playing the game, if I heard a negative comment as I passed by, I took offense to it. I would jump off my horse and put an end to the NPC. Then all of a sudden there was a posse after me, and then because of my ADHD, I would forget what mission or goal I had set out to do. And, I would get annoyed at myself and then annoyed at the game.
But, I started seeing the NPC as scenery. They were distractions. If I stuck to the mission at hand, like collecting the right weed to get the damn trophy for weed collecting, I could actually collect enough weeds without a posse shooting at my head.
NPC & Real Life Hate
And then I began adopting that mentality in social media. My goal was to try to make people laugh, make silly memes, and learn about new subjects that crossed my path. Arguing wasn’t an option any longer.
I wasn’t good at arguing. I treated each altercation like a Mike Tyson fight. If it lasted more than 2 rounds, I got bored. I went for the kill shot on the first go around. It was ugly.
I never considered the option of just staying out of the ring. Once I did, all the comments were just pre-programmed code meant to distract me from the mission. And dammit, I wanted those weeds.
