Wishing you hope and 3 more things this 2021

Elroy Rendor
6 min readJan 6, 2021

Happy New Year everyone! As I pondered on the year that has been and as I looked at what may come this year, I wish everyone the power of hope to start our year.

2020 may not feel like it has been behind us, and thus some of us welcomed the start of a new decade by retreating to our virtual worlds. In my case, it was Genshin Impact’s Teyvat. Teyvat sucked less than The World in the game called Life not only because of the superpowers and the immersive adventure but because it is a world-like many RPGs-that run on the currency of hope.

As the coronavirus pandemic ravaged (and continues to ravage) the world, people-from the ordinary person to the experts-lost the power of vision, a vision not of eyesight but one of foresight. Virtual worlds like Teyvat do not suffer from such, not because of the absence of a pandemic, but because virtual RPG worlds are, by design, running on hope.

When battling the slimes and the hilichurls, the Traveler of Teyvat is presented with a numerical representation of his/her capacity. Each hit goes with a number that is likewise accompanied by a diminishing bar on top of the enemy. The Traveler can then look at his/her equipment, skills, and weaponry and understand what to do next or how to empower him/herself. When traversing Teyvat, one knows how to get to their goals, how much time or effort such goals might most probably take. One can read guides to conquer insurmountable dungeons. In such virtual worlds, our hope is not just rewarded-the invisible hand of game design feeds us new goals as it rewards our hopes until we inevitably create the habit that is both virtuous and vicious. But this is not the case in the real world.

The Art of Manliness episode 657, the podcast that has been most influential for me in the last quarter of 2020, interviewed Dr. Ross Ellenhorn to discuss the power of hope and how this help-and hinder-people to change. Dr. Ellenhorn discussed how people feel the existential weight of hope. When one desires to lose weight, for example, the burden of bringing this change to fruition is entirely on that person. To those who cannot make such changes, some tend to lose hope that they are such a person capable of such change. He therefore invites us to reconsider people we consider “depressed”-perhaps they just lost hope or are doing their best to protect that hope by not making such a change at all. I know someone who has not quit smoking despite the firm instructions of the doctor after hospitalization. Has this person lost hope of being a person capable of change? Has this person resigned to a mantra that “this is who I already am”?

The start of the new year has always been a season of hope. When we draft our resolutions and goals, we hope-often for the nth time. And while I wish you plenty of hope this start of the year, I also wish you three (3) more things to protect such hope:

1. Creating a vision and a plan

The start of the year is the best time to reflect on the year that has been and to create a vision of what to be done for this year based on that reflection. But often we do not accompany such a vision with a plan to make such change. Virtual RPG worlds, by design, offer lessons to resolve this.

Games often have a dashboard. A player is informed of his/her different ability points, skills, and how good these are. They can see a progress bar. Information on the materials required to progress is likewise given. This allows players to not only have a good understanding of where their characters are but also how to improve. When one fails a dungeon, one does not just lose hope-with the given information the player can understand how to prepare to tackle such dungeon once more.

To replicate this in real life, what we need this new year is not just a vision of where to go but to make available the information we need to reach such vision. Want to learn or develop a foreign language? First, understand how such a goal fits into your life, then assess your level and knowledge first and understand how many hours per day and/or per week is necessary to achieve your desired expertise? Build bullet journals, habit trackers, or Notion dashboards-whichever works for you-to keep track of your progress and hopefully along the way build the habit of the desired change. But beyond manually counting the times “I showed up,” how does one make realistic assessments of progress? Here comes my second wish for you-appreciating feedback.

2. Seeking and assessing feedback

Virtual RPG worlds abound with feedback. From the number that represents your damage to the health bar on top of the enemy, such elements give a player feedback. The numbers and graphical changes become feedback not because these are details returned to you but because these details have a benchmark. From the tutorial stage you played yourself or from the videos of other people playing, the graphical information returned to you is comparable.

To level up a person’s cooking game, a person does not just cook a lot more dishes. S/he welcomes the feedback from the other people who tasted their dishes. Our friends, family members, and mentors-when strategically sought and if they do mean well-can provide us the feedback we need to calibrate how well we are doing with our vision and plans. They may just provide you with their ace in the sleeve!

But not all feedback is equal. Some video game players have “showcase videos” to show how they pull off large damage numbers or clear dungeons the fastest. This is indeed a type of feedback showing you that you are not pushing out as much as feasible. But one has to scrutinize how such a showcase was made possible. Was it due to a certain team composition, a weapon, a bug exploit, etc.? The same goes for the feedback we receive. Was that feedback due to that person’s life experiences (or lack thereof), their biases, or simply their mood that day? Upon the distillation of their feedback, may we get the wisdom we need to make the right assessment of how well we are performing in life. This may, in turn, just give us the courage and self-empathy to continue hoping that “we’ll get there.”

3. Cultivating self-empathy

In the AoM podcast I shared above, Dr. Ellenhorn also talked about the self-empathy we need to cultivate when we cannot yet enact the changes we hope for. Perhaps, an event in the family hinders you from making such a change? When changing careers, perhaps you are still unsure about the financial repercussions to you and your dependents?

What ties the vision and plans we create and the feedback we seek and assess is the invitation to be less hard on one’s self, to understand the aspects under our control and those that are not. By doing so, we can protect our hope or restore the courage necessary to hope once more. Unless they are designed to be punishing, video games are empathic to the player by design. From the quest rewards to NPC tips, video games cultivate a belief in yourself that you can make progress where you need it.

In an earlier blog, I talked about how luck is such a large determinant of our outcomes in life. May an understanding of how such luck shaped your life allow you to appreciate how far you’ve come, how many struggles you were able to conquer, and how much you’ve risen amidst the hand that was dealt to you. A former colleague once told me that “we work for our choices.” May looking at the choices we’ve made in life allow us to cultivate the crucial courage to accompany our hope.

Happy New Year!

Originally published at http://elroyrendor.com on January 6, 2021.

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Elroy Rendor
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Public policy analyst, smart cities visionary, heritage advocate, change maker.