Tilting Toward Happiness

I was on

Instagram yesterday and that can be a good thing or a bad thing depending upon how long you watch a particular video and your algorithm changes and all that.

But At this particular moment, my algorithm was doing good and I had some good videos that I was looking at.

And this one reel that came across my timeline on there was this woman who was laying in bed talking and she's telling about how she had a gamer friend that she used to play a lot of World of Warcraft with, which is a video game.

And one night they were playing and he gave her some feedback about her gaming just kind of a passing comment that she said not only helped her gaming in that moment in the game they were playing but that she said that comment has been living rent free in her head ever since and that she said it kind of low-key changed her whole life she said this thing that was supposed to be a passing comment about video gaming she said it just they were talking about it and at the moment she was really super tilted about this video game.

And what that means is being tilted in gaming is when you're playing along, you're doing whatever game is, it could be poker.

It actually is heavily used in poker online, but it's also used in any other kind of gaming.

And If you're in a video game and you get killed or you lose a round or whatever it is, you start getting a little bit angry.

And you might get obsessed with revenge on the player that beat you or the person who won that round or whatever it is.

And you become focused on beating that person.

Not winning the game, but beating that person.

And that's a bit of an oversimplification of it.

I'm sure by the end of tonight, you'll know more about it than you'll ever need to.

But hopefully that makes enough sense that you understand what I'm talking about.

And basically what it is, it's being more obsessed with winning, but less and less capable of actually doing that.

And it becomes this downward spiral.

And so this woman said she was sort of beating herself up talking to this guy that she knew who was a really pro-level gamer.

And he said to her, you're a really exceptional player.

And he said, you're just tilted.

And tilt is just being overly attached to an outcome.

And she said she was shook.

She said that really hit her.

And he said, you're either too focused on wanting to either win or to time something just right to be able to do that, to get that achievement or to make that timing happen or whatever.

It's like...

I immediately, completely non-gaming related, I immediately thought of like, if you ever get a really full cup of coffee and you have to walk from the kitchen to your chair or whatever, and you're walking and the more you try not to shake and spill that coffee, the more that coffee is going crazy.