This is me. Has anyone broken this curse before it's too late?

Start a meetup for one of your own passions. Then you’re not the one that has to fit in.

My passion is retro shmup, beat’em up, and run n’ gun games — basically designed either directly for the arcade or with that style in mind for modern games. I live in a small city but I noticed a steady stream of these kinds of games coming into the hock shop where I scooped them up for my collection. Figured there must be at least a few people that like these kinds of games if they are circulating locally.

Started a meetup with barely any solo marketing in local Facebook groups. I rented a small space, and lo and behold a handful of people showed up. We had some snacks and played some games. Made a couple new friends.

Tangentially related: things like this is why Sony discontinuing physical games is a horrible move and a massive blow to gaming culture. Never would’ve had this idea if I never was able to pick up a used copy of Battle Garegga at my local hock shop.

Is it really a curse? This poem takes as axiomatic the ideas that life is a race, that winning matters, that winning involves a specific destination, and that this destination is more or less the same for everyone: but none of those premises strike me as being particularly defensible. What we are seeing in this poem is not the rambling man as he experiences his own life, but as he is seen through the eyes of a person with a very different value system.

Yeah, this poem deeply resonated with me.

In my case it turned out that all my discontent and not fitting in was a blessing rather than a curse. Kept me untethered so when I finally hit my breaking point I could look inside until I found peace.

Took almost 40 years to reach my breaking point, but I've pretty much done a factory reset on my internal OS in the past year and a bit, been wonderful.

Yeah me too. In mid 30s, suffering.

Me too. In my mid 30s and afraid it's too late.