Infinite Potentiality
28 May, 2026
Trying something new this time around! Yes, I stole the title from the Machine Girl song...
Summer Break
After a year of answering dozens of essay prompts and hundreds of math equations, there remains one question I have yet to solve: what will I make of my time this summer? Although I am on the cusp of legal adulthood, every summer I am transported back to a time in my life where participating in nothing at all was socially acceptable. Dissuaded from venturing outside by sweltering, hundred-degree weather, I spent many of my childhood summers as a vampire: hidden in my room, blinds closed, and functioning on a semi-nocturnal sleep schedule. I entertained myself with arts and crafts, baking, video games, and (when I got older) the occasional outing with friends. While I cherish these periods of my life to some extent, in retrospect I cannot help but feel regretful that I did not pour my time into something more productive, particularly during my high school years. Every summer, I create vague notions of plans, broad brush strokes placed upon an empty canvas in an attempt to create something more meaningful and more valuable. But more often than not, by the time September rolls around, I am left with nothing except for an underpainting, a draft that I began but never finished despite my desires to not repeat the summers of Nothing from years past. In theory, the possibilities are endless, but in practice, I am constrained by indecision confronted with a micro-dose of infinity. One summer feels both like far too little time and an unnecessary abundance of it. I theorize that these feelings are only exacerbated by an unhealthy amount of guilt that I’ve come to associate with a lack of productivity, ingrained into my weary conscience by American hustle culture and the sort of school environment that promotes a toxic relationship with my GPA and résumé. Each facet of my personality, my creativity, and my philosophy, are irrelevant when flattened into a single, marketable statistic. Because of course, who am I if not an arbitrary number and a list of achievements?
It is neither a novel idea, nor one that is particularly profound. But it is one of my own creation, not subject to the influence of a machine, and I think there’s merit in that itself.
The Outdoors
I’ve been biding my time by going on walks through my local park. There’s a handful of routes I haven’t gotten to explore yet, so they’re nice to bring some novelty into my life. It’s also allowed me to encounter some wildlife that I don’t normally see, as well as find some hidden spots off the beaten path. One of my friends recently introduced me to geocaching, and that’s also been a big motivator for me to go outside and explore places I wouldn’t normally venture to. Especially with a lot of the urban caches I’ve found, the phenomenon of finding something that others normally walk past is intrinsically very cool to me in a way I can’t quite explain. To some extent, it makes me believe that there really are no bounds when facing the unknown and unexplored, so long as you know where to look.
Photo element from ribo.zone :)
Minecraft and Socialism
I’ve been playing lots of Minecraft with my friends lately, and I think it has taught me more about socialism than any history class has. Historically, many of the servers I’ve played on have followed the same trajectory. Everyone gathers their own materials, builds their own base, and works on their own individual projects with minimal interactions with other players. After some time, the server either dissolves to anarchy, or everyone gets bored and stops playing altogether. But I think playing Minecraft with a mindset that prioritizes collectivism seems to mitigate some of these issues, at least in the approximate year or so that we’ve all been playing. We started the world with a shared base, and our “big project” is a village that we’re working on building together. Especially in multiplayer, I feel like trying to speedrun Minecraft can ruin the experience because it erases the joy of what a sandbox game can be. Speedrunning the game is predictable, it’s the same sequential list of advancements regardless of where you spawn. On the other hand, the completionist’s route is more fulfilling as a result of exploration and experimentation. Whether it’s building, discovering features and structures from new updates, or inventing a social structure for your server, Minecraft is a game of endless possibility, both in terms of world generation and in player behavior. So, why not integrate some economic theory into our world? Sharing materials and working on a collective goal has prevented server warfare and people from logging off because they aren’t motivated to work on a project only they themselves are interested in. Additionally, I also feel like I’ve grown closer with the people I play with in real life. A friend once mentioned to me that creating physical objects together helps people bond, and while I have yet to fact-check this, my experience playing Minecraft the "socialist way” have proven it to be true. Despite just finishing one of the most challenging years of my academic career, we all still logged on consistently, and I speculate that it is because we knew that we would get to develop our world and spend quality time with each other while doing so. Granted, this playstyle is not a “one size fits all” method. I think it would lose its functionality on a very large server or one where players don’t know each other very well (for comparison, ours has 3-4 consistent players at any given time and we were all friends for over a year before starting the server). Regardless of however you decide to play, I really love this game!
A Side Note
I REALLY HATE THE NEW GOOGLE PRODUCT LOGOS (except Docs…she’s kind of cute) THEY’RE SO UGLY.
That's all for now! I hope y'all enjoyed this post :)