I Am No Longer a Man-Child
Originally published at Grasping for the Wind. Please leave any comments there.
In a private discussion with some of my fellow fantasy reviewers, we were talking about how a tastes change over time. For instance, as a young man, I enjoyed Star Wars a great deal. I collected newspaper clippings and announcements, bought the customizable card game, the toys, the novels, the Legos, and the movies in many variations. And yet all that remains to me is the Legos and the movies in one version. Everything else was sold off to other fans. I lost interest as I grew older. My tastes changed, and I found fulfillment in other hobbies and other worlds.
The changing tastes and interests of people was really brought home to me last night. My wife and I went out to dinner for her birthday, and we stopped in at Michael’s Hobby Store afterward to let her use her gift card she had received from my parents. There is a Gamestop nearby, so while the wife was spending time shopping at the craft store I thought I would pop in there to see what they had in the way of cheap video games. (I have a gift card with a few bucks from trade-ins I thought I might spend.) I hadn’t bought one in at least a year.
I spent an hour in there. Yet I found nothing I wished to purchase. It was strange, because in my young adulthood, when I was playing Nintendo from the first US version on up, and the Playstation, Gameboy, and Sega Genesis; I would have bought any number of games.
Yet not one in the thousands of titles in the store was of interest to me. I only own a Playstation 2 and computer for playing video games anymore. But only one title looked even remotely interesting to me, and that was Neverwinter Nights 2, only because I don’t own it yet and love Forgotten Realms. But it was too expensive for me at the moment. And it wasn’t cause the games weren’t good either. The looked awesome actually, I just kept thinking about the hours I would spend playing it. I thought about how my wife feels neglected when I spend too much time playing video games (this has happened once before, when Neverwinter Nights was selling downloadable expansions about a year ago), and I just couldn’t generate enough interest in sacrificing her happiness for my own, no matter how fun the games looked.
I chose not to buy any games because my gift card only had a couple of bucks and most of the titles cost $10 and up, I saw nothing that interested me, and I thought about the fact that I never play video games anymore. Once, I would have spent 100 hours playing Final Fantasy, but now I think that time could be spent in other ways. Not necessarily more productive, but more fulfilling at least. These three factors combined caused me to leave the store empty-handed, something I never would have done in my teen years, even in my early twenties.
I remarked to my wife later, “Does this mean that I am no longer a man-child? Have I become a man?” Since in my society, video games are generally a young man’s pursuit.
My tastes had changed, and those tastes and personal likes had moved due to responsibility, lack of time, and the finding of more fulfilling pursuits. I used to try and keep up with the Joneses in the video game world. Now I find the pursuit of reading a more fulfilling and profitable enterprise. Its strange how th change came so subtly, I didn’t really even notice it.
Tastes change, personal likes and dislikes grow and develop. What we enjoy doing twenty years from now may be vastly different from what we enjoy now. Yet that does not mean that what we enjoy now is wasted. It is a step in the growth of me, of who I am as a person.
Last night’s event left me feeling I have truly left boyhood and adolescence behind me. I was always a sober child, but now I look forward to the great adventure that is manhood. (Even if it took 27 years to get there.
