Much of humanity would fail without constant maintenance. Roads quickly become riddled with holes, sidewalks are worn to the reinforcement (if there even is any), and endeavors are cast into obscurity by the advance of humanity's aspirations.

I am intimately familiar with criticism and delusional assumption of negativity, two requisite components of a miserable life of failure and self-loathing. The inability to succeed is fed by the lack of desire to participate due to the recognition of the ultimate destined failure of seemingly everything.

This mindset is a bit irrational, and I'm not going to concern myself with how or why I came into possession of it. What I will address, though, is how it is irrational, and how I consciously counter it.

For instance, I am currently encoding and compressing my physical mind into some language stored in an electronic format. Nothing is exploding, nothing is disappearing. So far as I know in any given moment, things are going as I expect them to. That's nice. This is a representation of a very important aspect of this reality: things do work, even they don't always work how we conceive of them; even if they evolve to be unrecognizable.

Playing Quake can be an annoying process. Not understanding how or why I fail sends my mind into a downward spiral of far-fetched assumption. Was that person cheating? Was I playing poorly? Is the game horrible? Should I be playing easier opponents? What was I doing wrong? What were they doing right?

These are all unanswerable questions. The simple truth is that the game exists in its current state, and the same rules apply to all players alike. It is, in a sense, its own self-contained reality. The answers to these questions are not immediately apparent to me, and that is something I am not happy with. I like to know things. Knowing things means you can make better decisions.

It's simple to quit a game of QL, or anything really, with the assumption that it isn't worth investing any more effort into. What's the point of this game? What's the point of being successful in it, or of even desiring to play competently? Why should I even bother, when I am so unsure of whether or not the people I am playing are even legitimate? What's the point of paving roads when they begin to crumble? They will only continue to crumble into the future, and nobody really appreciates them anyway.

In truth, all that matters is whether or not the game has some value to me that outweighs its detrimental aspects. It's the same for anything. Is it worth investing the time to play or work? Already I find myself realizing that QL has given me access to a deep insight into some very deep flaws in my character. The ability to dream up negative aspects of something in order to detach yourself from it is a valuable tool when it is used in moderation and applied reasonably, but when allowed to dictate and taint thought processes can severely limit my potential and possibilities.

Were I to decide to quit using ESR, as I have very verbally announced more than a few times in the past, what exactly would I be gaining or losing? Were I to decide that working on the site is unrewarding and uninspiring, what would I gain or lose? What would the site gain or lose? It would be another disintegrating road, forgotten by the people who use it, who would simply add to the traffic of some other streets, should there be some others around who desire to maintain their own.

When does it pay to let your dreams decay? How could this world exist without the quiet pillars of development toiling away without appreciation, taken as granted to them by the vocally dismissive and loudly insulting masses of mostly unproductive, ignorant, mindless, indulgent, and ungrateful consumers?

Why should anybody wish to offer something free to a crowd that doesn't appreciate it? I suppose because for every arbitrary number of people thoughtlessly grinding the road to dust, there is one stepping carefully, with respect for the monumental amount of effort required both to invent and maintain the conveniences we have all come to know and loathe.