Room In Your Life

I’m going to be geekier than usual today and talk a little bit about board games. Well, that’s not what I’m really going to be talking about, but that’s where we’re going to start.

I’m a hobbyist board gamer, which means I own more games than most people will ever play. (It’s a whole thing if you don’t believe me.) There’s a common issue that lots of people in this hobby face, which is the realization that how many board games you own doesn’t necessarily correlate to how many board games you play.

See, buying a board game is easy. Assembling several adult friends into a common physical space for a few hours is much harder. In the best of circumstances, for many adults (especially ones like me with jobs, kids, etc.) it isn’t going to happen more than a few times a month. What often happens is that people in this hobby go through a period where they’re really more collectors of games than players of them. They get a game that they think seems neat, but some part of their subconscious is imagining that what’s actually in that box is three friends with a free evening.

At some point, if you’re honest with yourself, you just admit that many of the games you so eagerly purchased just aren’t ever going to get played. (The insider term for this is the “shelf of shame.”) When you have limited time and bandwidth, you often want to play the games that give you the most joy. The core of your collection becomes more important, and the peripherals less so.

Okay, so where am I going with this?

Well, all things take up some kind of “space” not only in your home, but in your life. You might think that a board game you’ve already bought doesn’t really demand much from you, so why bother selling it or giving it away just because there’s a 99% chance you won’t play it? But that’s not really the way human brains work. Everything in your life takes some emotional energy to maintain. Some more than others, but everything. I moved a massive collection of books across three different relocations before I got sick of carrying all those boxes and realized that in three different pack/unpack cycles, I hadn’t opened the vast majority of those books. Owning them was costing me something. I felt emotionally burdened – even guilted – by them. I didn’t want to re-read them (I’d already read them!); I wanted people to know I had read them.

I didn’t want books; I wanted erudite friends who would discuss the topics within. That was burdensome. So I gave them away – and you know what, giving them away started more conversations about those topics than having them on my shelf ever did.

You only have room in your life, your calendar, your home, your brain, and your heart for so many things. You have a limited amount of emotional connection to spread across everything in your life. And sometimes you will find yourself spending that limited energy on things that are not cycling it back to you in a healthy way.

You might think it doesn’t hurt you to keep a collection of movies you never watch, books you never read, a bike you don’t ride, people you consider friends but who never call, or an unrequited love that you never talk about. But those are all manifestations of the same thing: you pouring out energy into a void.

When I take my favorite game off the shelf and play it with some of my close friends or my children, I put it back in a few hours feeling very satisfied. I put energy into that game in the form of thinking about it idly on occasion or in the form of being excited for the next play, but it gives me energy back in the form of great evenings and experiences with people I care about. That’s a good relationship. That’s an energy cycle that maintains itself and renews me.

This same measurement applies to literally everything in your life. Nothing in your life gets a free ride – every person, place, and thing is a relationship that you’re maintaining with some amount of your limited emotional energy. If that relationship isn’t giving you energy back, then it’s just a parasite. It’s killing you, and it isn’t even trying.

Make room in your life for those relationships that make room for you. The friend who calls deserves your friendship. The book that gives you joy to read for the 8th time deserves to stay on your shelf. And the game that gives you regular evenings of enjoyment deserves to stay in your collection.

But the rest? Don’t leave those things trailing behind you, tethered by unwarranted hope until they become weights that keep you from moving towards the actual joys in your life. You don’t have room for it.