Our desire for comfort through familiarity begins at an early age, when we seek familiar faces, such as our mothers, for food and safety. After that, the instincts stay with us, and we continue to create attachments. Unfortunately, as time goes on, that means we lose some of these attachments as well. “When we lose them, we lose our comfort,” says Stever.
Stever suspects that gangster attachments are even more common right now due to the pandemic, in which our opportunities to interact with others have been limited. This means we watch more TV, read more books and play more video games to fill these social gaps. These gangster attachments, as Stever explained in a chapter of his 2020 book Sage’s Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology“It is possible to give a person a sense of security and to feel secure as nearly as effectively as possible with an object or person of real and physically close attachment.”
In short, our media isn’t a substitute for human connection, but it’s near, and it’s the best we’ve had during the pandemic shutdown.
Some researchers analyze constraints as sociopath and consider them unhealthy, but Stever is not one of them. “I don’t agree with that at all,” she said. “It’s a normal, reasonable thing that everyone does.”
Maja Djikic is similarly cited in the book’s commentary. An associate professor and director of the Personal Development Lab at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, she said in an article for Book riot That lingering book hangover comes from the reader being “still pondering and struggling with some of the personal issues raised in the book — it could lead to personal change.” “.
How to deal
Knowing that post-game depression exists is one thing, but knowing what to do when you feel those bouts of boredom is quite another. To process these feelings, Stever looked to other examples of grief.
“Whenever you experience loss, you always seek solace in other relationships,” says Stever. This is true when we hurt friends or family, and true when we grieve with social attachments. Stever recommends connecting with the other people in your life, whether they’re playing or not and whether you discuss this loss, to ease feelings of loneliness and disconnection.
She also suggests looking for another connection to fill the entertainment void. Watch a favorite TV show (like Office, golden girls, or But you friend) or start something new on your To Watch list. Read the book. Start a new game or replay an old favorite. Go after whatever brings you comfort and remember that these feelings will pass.
If you’re not ready to give up the game you love, you probably don’t have to. You can replay it on a different difficulty, in a different order, or for a different ending (if the game allows that). Replay Breath of the Wild didn’t suit me, so I searched for adjoining games, like prequels Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, allowing me to spend more time with the same world and characters, albeit with some differences. For me, it’s both different and similar enough.
