The Animal Crossing / Stardew Valley model for NY goals

Is anyone else a lot weirder about setting New Year's intentions these days?

If you want to have a bleak time, go and look youtube in late 2019, and all the videos about people enthusiastically setting their goals for 2020. (I was learning Spanish in preparation for a trip to Spain.)

In many ways, it shouldn't make a difference. A lot of people's goals were things like "meditate for 10 minutes a day" or they had a theme word for the year like 'Acceptance' which the pandemic + lockdowns certainly gave plenty of opportunities to practice.

And in any case, an intention isn't a vow, and ought to change with circumstances, that's always been the case.

But, but, but... it's still left me weird about it.

Context: Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley are both 'cosy games' where you help develop a charming village or farming community, but there's no real end-point.

There's a productivity method that involves finding a metaphor to romanticise the day-to-day habits you want to improve. Like you could encourage yourself to go for walks by imagining you're in a Jane Austen novel – 25% of any Jane Austen book consists of characters going on dramatic walks.

The most commonly recommended one is to treat your life like a quest-style game, where you're an adventurer, and you do things like increase your Vitality stat by exercising, or your Intelligence stat by reading books.

So I was thinking about this, looking for a metaphor. And I think Stardew Valley (etc) is it. You and your life are the whole village, not any individual within it. And there are a hundred different improvements you can make to the community: picking up litter off the beach, planting flowers, building a library, donating fossils to the museum, enlarging the coffee shop, decorating the houses, hiring street musicians, etc. But there's no pressure to do them in any particular order, or to do all of them, and there's no Final Boss Fight that it's all in service of, the way there is in a quest-style game.

I find this very peaceful but also positive. It is still about growth and development, which is important to me, but there's no judgement as to which kind is better.

I went to a bronze sculpture workshop last month, and I'm never going to become a bronze sculptor, but now I see the bronze statues around my city differently; I have a much better sense of how difficult different forms would have been to cast, and how they might have gone about it.

Metaphorically, going to that workshop was like building a Level 1 bronze foundry in my village. You don't have to literally take up a whole new hobby to add or upgrade a building. Any experience you have can add a layer of meaning to your life.

So I can have a general intention for the future – to add layers of meaning to my life and upgrades to my village – but I can pick and choose big and small things to improve as I go.

This piece was originally published in The Whippet #184 – subscribe to get the next one in your inbox!