Ian talks about the coronavirus and how it presents an unprecedented challenge for our mindset. Tips for getting through this alright include patient progress, relaxing music, and social interaction.
TRANSCRIPT:
What’s up, Internet? My name’s IanBbloom. Welcome to Nerd Finance. I’m your resident financial life planner and huge nerd. In today’s episode, we are going to be wrapping up our three-part Animal Crossing series by talking a little bit about something that I think is especially important during this time of social distancing and the Coronavirus, and that is simply mindset. Animal Crossing does something for a gamer’s mindset that almost no other game does, which is that it puts you in a state of patient progress and total ease. I want to talk about a couple of things that you can do in your life that you can pull out of Animal Crossing that will give you the ability to maybe get through this time a little bit easier.
Now, I want to start this off by saying that I’m not a psychologist, but I do practice a lot of mindfulness as part of life planning. The first thing that I think you can do to maybe make your life a little bit less stressful is put yourself in a mindset of patient, measured progress. Animal Crossing is all about this. There’s almost no sense of urgency in the game. The loans that you take on from Tom Nook to upgrade your house have no interest rate. The trees re-spawn and refill on a three-day cycle, and so you don’t necessarily have to harvest every day. There are only a certain number of certain actions that you can perform during the day. Everything is about patience and a little bit of iterative improvement in Animal Crossing.
Something else that I think is important is finding a sense of calm that can be gotten through music, mindfulness, or meditation. Animal Crossing’s soundtrack is all low, happy tones. It’s all calming and soothing, and whether you get your soothing feelings from music, like a lot of people do, or whether just sitting and meditating or relaxing via any other means is your particular cup of tea, I think it’s important to have a ritual that puts you in the mindset of relaxation every once in a while. Animal Crossing does this very well through its music and slow, I won’t call them mind-numbing, but patient tasks that it asks you to perform, like harvesting from your trees or chopping down wood, things that take very little physical effort in relation to your physical body, but are attentive in the game and allow you to focus on something different outside yourself.
The last thing that I think is important is Animal Crossing promotes social interaction. Social interaction is extra important during a time where you’re stuck in your home, and that doesn’t mean that I’m telling you to go outside and go to the local pub or brewery and spend time there. They won’t even let you in. But what I am telling you to do is find ways to interact with your friends in a new manner. You see, Animal Crossing asks you to go to other players’ islands to get the different types of fruit that you need. It asks you to go there to sell your turnips at higher prices. It asks you to go there simply to interact with other players and see what their Island is all about, because one of the biggest parts of Animal Crossing is the creativity and customization that you have. So, I think that that is a good lesson that you could take away from it. This is a trying time, and other people will help you get through it.
So, anyway, wrapping up the three things that I think are really important is to adopt a mindset of slow, patient progress. Don’t beat yourself up over things that you thought you might get done that day, but maybe didn’t have the energy for it. Just try to do them the next day. The next thing is that I think you need to find a ritual that puts yourself in a place of calming and soothing mindsets, whether that’s music, meditation, yoga, exercise. Whatever does it for you, I think that’s important. Then the third thing is make sure that you find yourself some social interaction every now and again. Animal Crossing does that on purpose, because it knows that games are more fun with other people, but turns out everything in life is more fun with the involvement of other people at the level that you desire. Keep in mind, I understand that introverts exist. If you don’t want to see tons of other people, just find one friend or family member that you can check in with every day. Anyway, I hope that this video was helpful to you, and that’s the end of our series on Animal Crossing. Thank you so much for watching, and have a wonderful day.
