You've heard it before, I'm sure. "Don't live in fear." Don't make your decisions based on fear. Don't work how you work, live how you live, vote how you vote, based on fear. You should just do whatever they're trying to roll you into doing, because if you don't, it must be because of fear, and fear is bad, and to be avoided. No good person admits they experience fear.
That's dishonest, and it eliminates the most important layer of meaning from the Fear equation. When someone says that about Fear, what they are really condemning is something anyone would condemn, and something that anyone would want to avoid, and that is Fear's bastard child, Cowardice. And we'll explore that more in a moment.
But Fear has a legitimate child as well, and it is your ally. A costly ally, but one that can be depended on through the worst challenges life has to throw at you. And that is Responsibility. Because when you harness the power of Responsibility, you gain Control. And control of your life leads to stability, and contentment, and ultimately happiness.
To understand this, it's crucial to understand what fear means and does. Because fear, as your ally, is a powerful tool.
In the child's mind, fear is the life preserver, the watchful eye and readiness to flee potential danger. It's a simple kill switch and it usually works, and thus most children survive into adulthood none the worse for wear.
In the adult's mind, fear is more than that. It builds the guideposts, and it raises the warning signs. Fear builds layers of context until a mature human being can make decisions six mistakes upstream and avoid going bust or worse.
(1) You don't have that third beer because you need to be up early because your boss has warned you about late starts and you need that money to pay the bills or you end up hitting the breadline and the bricks.
(2) You don't have that third beer because it's the 29th of the month and you know the cops are going to be fishing for DUI arrests and you have a 24-mile commute each way and losing your license is essentially guaranteed unemployment, and you need that money to pay the bills or you end up hitting the breadline and the bricks.
(3) You don't have that third beer because that pretty thing you've been chatting up all night might not remember giving consent, and oh damn now you don't remember for sure either, and then your spouse isn't particularly amused at having to post your bail, and next thing you know all your stuff is out on the front lawn, and she cleans out your joint account, and you have no money and nowhere to stay, and you miss work again because of the arraignment, and now you have to fight a sexual assault charge, and your boss fires you, and you end up hitting the breadline and the bricks.
(4) You don't have that third beer because you don't want to pass out at 75 miles an hour on the I-10 overpass and end your tenure on this earth in a crush of metal and glass.
Nobody thinks through that in full conscious lucidity, but the adult brain
processes it all through means of the
fear of being left to the breadline and the bricks, or worse, by whatever twisting event sequence you get there, and in that ponderous moment...
you lay off that third beer. And the
butterfly never flaps its wings, and Shanghai is spared the typhoon.
I'm sure we can all think of low points in our lives, or even unpleasant situations that weren't part of low points but were just acutely awful by themselves, and the inner urge to avoid revisiting those situations is fear working as a tool for you. I fear going bust, because I've been there. I have run completely out of money and been sleeping in someone else's garage, without a mailing address of my own, albeit briefly (I am fortunate) and I was able to take responsibility, gain control, and grind my way back up to solvency because I feared being at zero and being
de facto helpless. I will not allow myself to go bust again, it motivates me every day even though I am now a gigantic distance away from the point where such an outcome would be at risk again. I am responsible for my own life, and thus I am not relinquishing control.
Cowardice is where the weak person quails in the face of fear and abdicates control. Where instead of acting and moving forward, or even attempting it, the coward expects someone else to come along and save them. And when it becomes an indecent spectacle because they grow to rationalize that they are entitled to be saved, embracing their impotence.
There are times when cowardice is forgivable. Sufficiently traumatic experiences can overwhelm the conscious mind with a degree of fear that eludes grasp. But that's not the everyday cowardice that ruins most lives. The everyday cowardice is at a much lower and more basic level, and can be found in the routine evasion of necessary things. In essence, in the failure to take responsibility, and thus to take control of one's life. It's all written off to bad luck. And that's the most corrosive way a person can lie to themselves. Because everyone knows bad luck isn't your fault, right?
It's OK to get help. It's not OK to demand it as if by right. But it's OK to accept and admit what you fear, and then be responsible for overcoming it, thus taking control.
An encapsulation of the above concept can be found in the pilot episode of "Firefly," in Malcolm Reynolds's decisive moment right when all seems lost for the heroes:
"You depend on luck, you end up on the drift. No fuel, no prospects, beggin' for Alliance make-work. And towed out to the scrap belt. That ain't us. Not ever. There's obstacles in our path, and we're gonna deal with them. One by one."
And now, I'll leave you with a look at how we do this in the hobby game industry.
Q: Don't you fear widespread economic disaster?
A: After the way the last few months have gone, I fear this less than I fear localized disasters. At least when everything was kaput due to COVID, everybody was in the same boat. Well, a lot of us were. Seems like the mass market
wasn't suffering much at all. But we were able to take shelter in the near-universalness of the bad situation. Nobody would condemn us for being closed for the shutdown, or for adopting limited opening hours afterward. Relatively few players are hassling us about the game room continuing to be closed, since most rational adults understand what is going on. Customers, by and large, supported us generously and continue to do so. It has been a struggle in many ways just to make sure we're still running the engine, but the answer to this has been to spend every day working either to generate revenue or on the maintenance of the infrastructure to generate revenue. I've said before right here on this weblog, every day is an opportunity to advance the business some small amount.
Q: Don't you fear Amazon?
A: There is plenty to fear in Amazon's ability to deploy seemingly limitless resources to ruin the independent retailer facet of any particular product, line, category, or even business if Bezos and his minions so desire. Rather than the coward's answer of cursing at the sky or hoping someone will take Amazon out of the equation somehow, the responsible retailer builds answers. First, dealing in merchandise that does better with in-person shopping than via the Amazon marketplace, such as used video games. Second, dealing in niche markets that have top-of-mind focus that Amazon isn't nimble enough to match, such as Magic singles. Third, appropriately, with Third Place Theory, hosting events and gameplay. Fourth, instead of beating them, by joining them, and selling through Amazon's platform. There are other approaches that can work as well, but those are four clear viable ones.
Q: Don't you fear digital delivery obsoleting physical video game media?
A: I've reached this issue before here on the Backstage Pass, but really, we don't. No single service is a true Netflix-for-Video-Games, although Xbox Game Pass is absolutely great and everyone should take advantage of it. But with video games, it's not nearly as easy to create a seamless streaming catalog and interface that matches what physical media can do. Not just in terms of fidelity, since that part will surely catch up as bandwidth and processing strength improve. But in terms of licensing as well: Barely a fraction of the games out there are available via Xbox Game Pass, Playstation Now, or Nintendo Online. Not
that many more are available to buy from Xbox Live, Playstation Store, and Nintendo Network (now just Switch,
thanks to the hax0rs). And, de-listing happens all the time. If you absolutely, positively, want to play a specific game, owning the physical media containing it is still the gold standard. And that's just counting current games, not the immense depth of the retro back-catalog. Even movie streaming is suffering from some of these same problems now. Netflix today isn't the Netflix of a few years ago. Each of the other services has carved off its licenses and exclusives. To watch anything on demand, you'd have to subscribe to enough streams to make old-fashioned cable TV seem a bargain by comparison... or you could just own the disc and never face the question. There's surely a trend line here, and I think we'll see an adjustment around five or ten years ahead. Retro will still exist, but as old hardware ages and new audio and video technology continues to change, the used video game market will finally end up not cost-effective for the center-of-the-bell-curve mainstream gamer. That means for the time being, our responsible play is to make hay while the sun shines.
Q: Don't you fear Magic dying?
A: If Magic can survive Homelands, Prophecy, and Saviors of Kamigawa, it's probably fine for the foreseeable. Even with COVID forcing many players onto Arena, and things looking a little wee-woo back around April, the consensus has roared back loud and clear that the Magic experience is still at its best on the physical tabletop against live opponents. I have some concern that the Reserved List continues to be something of a ticking time bomb, but in the progression of Modern Horizons, the Pioneer format, and the 2020 Year of Reprints, we can see Wizards setting the table for the eventual consignment of Reserved cards into unsupported play at some point. Removing the Reserved List cards from Commander is the next big step that has to be taken. Before you say they'd never do it, recognize that Wizards of the Coast has,
very recently, shown that they are ready to remove cards from tournament play purely for reasons having nothing to do with card mechanics. Anyway, even if they never printed another Magic card starting right this moment, Magic would still be played for
decades. The secondary market would undergo some pretty ferocious adjustments, but it would go on. Far lesser TCGs that have been dead for years still have avid fan bases, and when you proportion that up against Magic, you can begin to appreciate the enormity of the latter. And that's how most of us running game stores know we'll be punching our own ticket out long before Magic ever crumbles into dust. So our plan becomes to monetize it for as long as we want, on terms that work for us, in business structures that work for us, and be ready to move on when it's no longer advantageous from our vantage point to do so.
Most other fears in this industry can be broken down similarly into components, and as long as our particular game store business can find a way to answer each component problem, we are responsible for our own sustainment and we are in control of our future. It's a stark difference from the litany of retailers in many of the social media retailer groups whose first reaction to any problem of the moment is to curse the heavens and demand that someone, often a publisher, often Wizards of the Coast, rescue them somehow from whatever mundane problem their own incompetence has made blow up in their laps. Wizards just fronted game stores a free rack of Mystery money
and a loaded promo giveaway slate to help the responsible among us push forward past the difficulties of today so we can still sell their wares tomorrow. The cowardice is pathetic indeed that takes such a boon and still refuses to fuel their own engine with it.
Above all, don't be trapped by the dishonest assertion that you are failing because of fear. We can choose the coward's path, or we can choose responsibility and then attain control. That choice will determine whether fear helped us or hindered us. But there was no shame in knowing fear, and never will be.
