The Difficulty of Prioritizing

No, this isn't an except from my latest business lecture nor do I intend it to be as dry as one. It's late at night and I am pretty freaking tired so my brain wonders off into the strangest of places. I just want to share a particular section of my experience picking up new games at the store yesterday. Not sure if this is a common problem for most people because I doubt that many of us have a long Purchase List to refer to when getting a new game: I found it very difficult to select the game to buy even though I pretty much have my games categorized by their level of importance on my Purchase List.

Is there a dark side to the my induction technique or is it just my insomnia talking?

That list may seem to be very objective but in actuality, everything became subjective when I am right in the store or when I am browsing a list of available games for purchase on the Internet. Different thoughts flood into my mind and what was supposed to be a pretty straightforward process - getting games that are on the Severity 1 list first - became all jumbled up and frustratingly confusing. Some of the sudden thoughts that always come to mind as I struggle to select games within my spending capability are as follows:

1) "Didn't I have a similar game like this already? Why do I need another so quickly?"
2) "Hey, I think I have seen my online friends play this game the other night."
3) "If I buy these games versus those, I can get more games - which supposedly lead to more satisfaction: yeah right - for the same amount of money!"
4) "What? This game is on sale?"

5) "They want that kind of money for this game? Shouldn't this game be on sale?"

Whenever I attach a Severity value to a game when I place the title into the Purchase List, the only factor that goes into the decision-making was my first impression of the game. So earlier at the store, I had 6 games in the basket and I was only willing to spend around $100. The three games that I decided to hold off until another day were Napoleon: Total War as well as Tropico 3 for the Personal Computer and Resonance of Fate for the X-Box 360. Sometimes, I would spend a lot of time just standing there at the video game isle trying to make that final determination.

Analyzing this with my mind half-asleep, I think I am able to break down the problem into something ridiculously simple: I am just a control freak. I know that I will not be able to play so many new games at one time but somewhere in my sub-conscious, there is a part of me that keeps reminding me that I only live once and I need to take advantage of whatever time I have left in this life with only the best things that I could excavate from it. I think the remedy is for me to keep reminding myself of this basic understanding: I can't have everything I want in my life. There are good things and bad things that happen in our short lives. It's not okay to justify those bad things because if it's bad, well, it's bad. But that doesn't take away all the good things that I already have. I should just get any games from my Purchase List without doing too much over thinking because if it's on the Purchase List, then it must mean that I really wanted the darn thing. It may mean that I miss out on the game I didn't pick up that day, which is still a lost but why dwell on sadness when I deserve to be happy? So what if I don't generate enough wealth to get all the games all the time - I would never justify that I should settle with having a tight financial restriction: Instead, I would always strive to change that even if goal is unreachable. It hurts a lot to miss out on things that we feel entitled to and that pain is quadrupled in retrospect. Making the best out of the situation - that will be one of the things that I am going to work hard on achieving for myself from this point forward.