In Praise of Pause

For 35 years I formed my identity around striving - applying maximum effort, systematically, with high focus to achieve what I wanted.

In primary and junior high school, this meant dribbling my soccer ball around in my backyard for hours (and hours!) on end. In high school, I worshipped at the foot of good grades, taking as many college-level courses as could cram in my schedule. And when I cut my teeth in a finance career, I was regularly logging 60-80 hour weeks at the office, checking my email until late into the night.

The striving served me well! I had the lucky concoction of a stable family life, no headwinds from my skin color or gender or physical body, and a competitive spirit that wanted to be good at things. If I had the desire, there was a direct line between applying my time and achieving what I wanted.

There is no “and then it all fell apart” to this life arc. What did happen, however, is that as the stakes kept rising, and the years of pulling wore on me, there were moments I felt lopsided as a person. But I could mostly ignore them. The pressure of the present never let up…and if I’m honest I liked it.

My tipping point came, believe it or not, while playing a sci-fi computer game called Outer Wilds.

spoiler alert for the game - don’t read on if you’re thinking of playing

In Outer Wilds, a nomadic alien species named the Nomai travel the stars in pursuit of some ‘higher cosmic power.’ They called this thing The Eye of the Universe, and they thought it was trying to communicate with them. The Eye would twinkle cryptically in some far-off star system, and they’d race over on their space ship to pin it down. But The Eye would wink out before they arrived, only to reappear at the far edge of the universe. And off they’d chase again.

In the middle of all that space-faring, one tribe of Nomai becomes stranded in the player’s solar system. Their ships are marooned, so they must spend generations rebuilding their technology stack, just to regain the ability to travel between stars.

They have to stand still for a few hundred years (!)

Standing still, they’re confronted with a question: is The Eye of the Universe, the higher power, really there at all?

This moment in Outer Wilds marooned me into a pause of my own. It made me step back and reassess what I was striving after, and whether it was a goal I still wanted to pursue.¹

It’s not that I hated my life or my finance career, and even now I don’t harbor bitterness about how I spent the first third of my life. But I felt ready to reorient.

I needed to stop moving, to look up at the stars and become enchanted by them again. Like the Nomai. To lay down the striving, and pause.²

Fast-forward a few years, and I’ve reoriented my striving toward making video games. But not games about shooting things, or adrenaline, or mind-numbing escapism. Just like not all films need to be Marvel’s The Avengers, not all games need to be like that!

I make games that create that moment of pause and re-evaluation, like Outer Wilds did for me.

Serenity Sketch is my first game (or “app” if you’re put off the word game). It’s a guided Practice of pausing. In it, you take ten minutes to paint with water on a digital stone. And then let go as your creation gently evaporates. (I wrote more about why I made it.)