This piece was first published by RMIT University in March 2023.

The Melbourne Central Little Library is an odd bird, tucked away near the food court on the upper level of the shopping complex. It is a humble glass cube, bare except for a couple of benches and a dusty, mostly empty electric-blue bookshelf on the back wall. A younger man with a backpack similar to my own walks in and the quota for backpack men in the space is now met.

The Melbourne Central Little Library was brought into being in July 2012 for the dual purpose of avoiding the embarrassment of unproductive space in a shopping centre, and capitalising on the brief vogue enjoyed by de-commercialised public life in the early 2010s.

GPT, the ‘vertically integrated diversified property group’[1] that own Melbourne Central, are proud to affiliate the library with the Little Free Library movement. Although apparently not proud enough to allow the word ‘free’ to enter the shopping centre store index in any capacity. The Little Free Library organisation’s worldwide map does not include a red marker for the Little Library in Melbourne Central[2], perhaps out of spite at the omission.

Sitting inside, it is clear that the Library is, indeed, suffocatingly little. The wide doorway prevents the smell of books from gaining a foothold against the anodyne shopping centre smell. Mercifully, the benches are behind glass on either side of the doorway, positioned in such a way as to partially spare the sitter from One Direction singing their hearts out over the speakers. The centre playlist is compiled from the most inoffensive pop songs of the moment peppered with forgotten but recognisable hits of the last two decades.

Not great library music.

The library is described by GPT group as ‘self-managed’, which is to say that there is no-one taking care of the space in a professional capacity. The intended function of the library is that people donate a book and borrow a book. There is a hopeful air overhanging the whole enterprise. GPT acknowledges, however, that ‘the education of our customers to swap their books is an ongoing process and one we didn’t expect to have 100% success with overnight’.[3]

The young man with the backpack leaves the cube quickly, having failed either to leave or borrow a book. This is understandable. The books all appear to be either old, or bad, or both. Many are possessed of the black cross-mark at the base of their spine that marks them as the former property of a ‘real’ library.

There are four fake pot plants placed artfully to hide the shameful emptiness of the upper shelves. This appears to be the sole intrusion of visual merchandising — quite an achievement considering its location. A single issue of Women’s Weekly rests grimly on a lower shelf, as appealing as expired milk.

The Little Library suffers by comparison to the State Library across the road, a triumphal democratic monolith that has 99 years on its little sibling. The State Library was described at the 1913 opening of its dome as a ‘milestone of intellectual progress’[4], something which would be difficult to say about the Little Library.

Nevertheless, it serves its purpose. Shoppers may walk past and feel good about the existence of an oasis of free exchange in a commercial hub; even if the state of its collection makes it functionally useless to most.

Beside the Little Library an enormous screen is flashing ‘60% OFF’ to passers-by. Maybe I can catch a bargain on the way out.

[1] https://www.gpt.com.au/about-us

[2] https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/

[3] Contact Us Notification Email

[4] The Argus, 1913

It’s dark when we arrive. Getting out of the car into the winter air, I can hear the low roar of the ocean, away past the scrub. I go through the familial routine, turning on the water supply near the gate, and turning on the water heater from the fuse box. I’m always anxious about bringing the right key. My girlfriend hands me bags from the boot, and I ferry them up the stairs, marveling at how warm the house always feels. It’s hard not to think about how many visits I have left. My grandmother might pass away soon, and when she does, my mum and her sisters won’t be able to afford to keep the place.

I wrap a blanket around my shoulders and head out onto the balcony, breath misting in the air. The roar is stronger up here.

The pale light from the house stretches across the yard. There is a video of the first time I came to the beach house, at three years old. My grandfather loved to film the family with his clunky old camera. I’m there with my little eighties stripey shirt on and some kind of plastic trike, pootling around on the grass. The colours are washed out, almost sepia. It cuts to me kicking a soccer ball, my first of many average performances as a sportsman.

As I got older the house was my family’s sole vacation spot. We couldn’t afford anything else.

I hear cars in the driveway. My brothers and their families arrive with mum. The sound of their voices carries over to me before they know I’m on the balcony, like a secret window into their lives. The door slams and the house fills up with the sound of kids, excited at the adventure.

The next morning we all walk down the path that winds from the backyard through fifty metres of scrub to the beach. My brothers walk slowly ahead of me, laughing at some private joke, holding the hands of my nephews. My niece bolts for the beach, a free spirit. I think about my grandfather, who beat the path to the beach into existence like some colonial pioneer. I imagine him in a flannel, swinging a machete around his head, the trees grovelling before him. I don’t even know if this story is true, but if it’s not, it’s become a part of my mythos. I never thought to try to disconfirm it.

I could walk that path with my eyes closed — every turn, every dip and rise is familiar. It’s changed over the years, the plants continuing to grow, the weather warping the landscape, but I don’t try to notice them, preferring the thirty-year-old image I have in my mind. I look harder. A tree fell, and someone cleared away a bush or two. The thinning canopy is hard to ignore now that I’m taller. Every change feels like a small wound in the past, in the hole my grandfather opened up in the world.

The beach arrives too quickly. When I walked the path as a kid, it felt so much longer. It was a magical forest. There was something to play with under every tree, small things, fodder for my imagination. I would run around by myself, falling over, picking stuff up and throwing it at other stuff, climbing. No one told me to treasure it, that those dreams don’t last. Or maybe they did tell me, and I was too happy to listen.

There’s a book, Puff the Magic Dragon, about a kid who has a jolly time with an imaginary dragon until he realises he has to get a job. After that, he can’t fit the dragon into his workweek. Memory is unreliable, but I feel like I can chart reality’s intrusion as the years have passed, into the forest, onto the beach.

We find a good spot for our towels, and the kids start hooning around. After ten minutes of sandcastles and seashells, I walk away a bit to sit on the dunes.

I sit and look, watching the waves come and go. My brothers are throwing a frisbee back and forth, mum standing at the shoreline with my niece, pointing out to sea. They all live in the hills, where we grew up, but I live in the city. I miss being in their orbit, the way their peaceful routines loop around the mountain.

I turn away from the familial scene to stare at the river, which ends in a tepid pool ten metres from the waves. The river finds the ocean about every second time I’m down here, washing its murk into the bay. When it connects, it’s cleaner and fresh. The ghost of my childhood is down there at the river, back when they were always connected, kicking furrows in the slope of the dune, hauling sand from the riverbed to build a sandbar.

When I was very young I was enraptured by the weird clumps of matter that made up the beach and the forest. Jellyfish and seaweed, cuttlefish and mother-of-pearl. Pinecones, acorns, animal poo, clumping burrows. Dark places away from the paths, brush so dense that you could hide forever.

When I was a little older, I played socially there, tiggy in the forest or hide and seek in the long grass on the dunes, competitive long jump over the thinner bits of the river, using the environment but still a part of it.

Then came puberty, and I used the beach to play at being a man, even as I saw less, and felt less. The hidden places became bolt-holes for smoking weed and drinking.

I felt alive in risk, in the craziness of the things I could get away with without injuring myself. Jumping off cliffs, beer bonging. I invented a game called ‘diveminton’, which was like the two-dollar badminton we had always played with the now-ancient set of racquets and shuttlecocks, except you always had to be in the air when you swung the racquet. Injuries ensued.

Now I’m an adult, and I relax here, imitating fun. I can see the visual beauty of the beach more clearly again, but not through the lens of adventure or physicality. Now, it’s a sort of wistful glancing, a function of relaxation.

A particularly chill wind comes along, and I shiver, thinking longingly of my regular spot on the couch, with my blanket, back at the house. I remember the last time my grandfather was here with us. When we got to the beach, he only waited a minute before pulling the clothes off his greying body and stalking down to the ocean. He did a slow breaststroke, daring the cold to pull at his age, to weaken his athleticism and force him back to shore.

But it couldn’t. Maybe it knew it was his last time here. It deferred to him like the bush did when he made us a way to get here, so long ago, unless it was just a story.

He led the walk back along his path, bright and bold, sure of his place in the world.

When we got to the house, he couldn’t remember where he’d left his clothes. He sat on a chair in the lounge room in his speedos, eyes downcast, as his wife, my mother, and my aunts, rushed in and out of the room to tut over him, to pry at the memory of his clothes, and each time they walked away shaking their heads he fell a little further inward, the power in his eyes draining away. Sitting on the couch watching him, I didn’t know what to say, how to make him himself again. A comforting word or a hand on his back would have shamed the proud elder who had pushed back the tide only half an hour ago. I said nothing.

My girlfriend returns from her walk, glowing with discovery, pulling me back from the past. We chat about our books and our shows, about our relationship, about our dreams and the ways we’ve compromised for or against them.

I walk into the water, as my grandfather did, but not with his pride or determination. I float in the cold until my feet get heavy and numb, just to stave off the passage of time for a while.

On the way back, my niece and nephew are our pace-setters, toddling along, only stopping to look back at us, to make sure we’re still following them, that they’re not alone.

The feeling of a first time is in the novelty of it, and each stage of my life has been spent trying to recapture the feeling of those that came before it. You can’t go home again, but you can watch kids have the same small joys and fears that you had, and maybe that’s a kind of home.

The bush falls away and the house looms before us. Everyone else is looking down, but I’m looking up, afraid to let it out of my sight. Maybe this will be the last time we’re here at the house, or maybe it won’t. It’s hard to say goodbye when you don’t know when the end will be.

The last time I saw my grandfather alive, he was in the hospital, confused and upset. He didn’t know where he was, or who I was. He kept calling for his wife. We explained where she was, but once he forgot he would call for her again. Was that the last? I don’t know. I remember him in his coffin, cold and heavy. I kissed his forehead. I can still feel the cold of his skin on my lips.

When we get back to the house, we take turns washing our feet at the garden tap. Another family routine, to stop sand from getting on the carpet. My grandfather always cared the most about that. I settle on the couch, warm under my blanket, my family vibrant and loud around me, and I think about my grandfather’s path and all the life crowding over it, pushing against his memory until I can’t come to this house anymore.

We Were Teenagers Learning Night Moves

My favourite of the other submissions so far is Deb Groves Harman’s evocative piece. Reflecting on early experiences of sexuality can be a bittersweet exercise, but Deb balances nostalgia and meaning effectively, gently leading us through her memories and our own.

You Can’t Go Home Again was originally published in The Memoirist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My life has been going well. Too well, apparently, because I have a familiar hunger. It comes up once every year or so.

‘I wonder what gacha games are popular right now?’ I google and read a couple of articles.

The next morning, it’s ‘I’ll just look at Reddit, see if there are any standouts.’

Later that afternoon, a small hop from Reddit to the Google Play Store.

‘I’ll just download it and give it a quick try. If it’s no good I’ll delete it.’

Before I know it, I’m repeating the tutorial section over and over, downloading emulators to reroll multiple accounts at once. Hours start to disappear, then days, then weeks. If I thought about it I wouldn’t do it. But there’s no time to think when you’re in the grips of the game.

The word ‘gacha’ in this context refers to a game mechanic that monetises psychological exploitation in similar ways to gambling. You might have heard it referred to as ‘loot box’ mechanic. Games that are predominantly gacha games frequently take the form of ‘hero collectors’, meaning that the core of the game is trying to catch them all, like Pokemon.

You pay money for the chance to get the character you want, rather than to get it outright. High rarity characters will often have less than a 1% chance of showing up in any given roll.

These games give you plenty of free opportunities to get a taste of the rolling process, watching the summon animation intently for some colour or lighting effect to show that you’re a winner. Free-to-play players take what they’re given. ‘Whales’ often spend thousands of dollars. These games are built for whales, but the free-to-play players have to be incentivised to stick around so the whales have someone to beat on.

The game I’m playing this time around is Ni no Kuni: Cross Worlds. The original Ni no Kuni was a beautiful traditional jRPG designed by Studio Ghibli. The game was whimsical and charming, like their films. This new title is a free-to-play auto-battle MMO, and it couldn’t be further from the original game’s roots, despite the superficial similarities. Everything here is monetised in the most predatory way possible.

Pay to advance faster! Pay for a chance to roll a rare item! Pay outright for rare items you can’t get lucky enough to roll! Achieve something in-game without paying for it? Here’s a $100 pack you can buy to celebrate!

I’ve recently gotten serious about my writing for the first time in my life. Apparently the fact that I’m working hard and seeing results has freaked me out, because here I am again, regressing into the comfortable shame of gacha.

Shame is easy to feel when I’m spending hours and hours glued to my phone, completing all the little tasks necessary to climb the ladder, looking to other players to reassure me that it’s not insane to spend $30 on the chance to get nothing of value.

Mostly, I’m ashamed that I continue to log in to be exploited. In gacha titles, the story, the gameplay, and the art exist only to disguise and support the addiction mechanisms, to get you obsessed enough to open your wallet. I thought I had too much respect for story to watch it turn into a justification for a scammy cash grab. Apparently not.

When the game has a hold on me, I play for long hours without looking up, persisting even when my eyes start to water from too much screen time, ignoring hunger and thirst for as long as possible. At least I could still play the game when I go to the toilet.

This might seem extreme if you’ve never been in the grips of an addiction. Basic biological necessities just can’t compete. My partner wants to talk about her day, and I’m listening, but inside I feel a vague panic. I need to get back to the game, to keep climbing, to keep my characters getting stronger.

Games like this use a ranking system to keep you locked in. If you’re behind, you need to catch up, which means more time in the game. If you’re ahead, it’s worse — you can’t afford to fall behind and lose your advantages.

I’ve been through all this before. I’ve played numerous gacha titles (Epic Se7en, Genshin Impact, War of the Visions, Dragalia Lost, and Counter Side to name a few) and games with similar addictive qualities (Pokemon Go).

But knowledge of the exploitative nature of these systems isn’t inoculating. I continue to fall for it just as surely as someone who has no clue how it works. I only stopped playing these games when the shame of continuing to play was greater than the discomfort of weaning myself off the slot machine.

To get out of the cycle, I needed to think clearly about the problem. But my body wants the game. More, more, stimulation, enjoyment and reward. It’s so easy to play, instead of doing the hard work of stopping to think about what really matters. Once I did, it was easy to see just how much each game had interfered with my life.

I know I want a meaningful life, to have a balance between work and satisfaction. Gacha games are just an expensive distraction. They may be billed as free-to-play, but you will pay, whether it’s with time or money.

I still love games. But gacha games are just too dangerous. I don’t want to feel anxious every time I’m away from the game, to be itching to get back. I don’t want to be tired every day, going to sleep at one in the morning, because I lost track of time, or I had to get the next level up, the next rare item, to attend the next in-game event.

This afternoon, sitting on my couch, I look up from the phone screen for a moment. I’ve been playing the game all day. I picked up my phone when I woke up, and have since put it down exactly twice. Once to talk to my partner, and now, from a profound feeling of tiredness. I’m done with shiny prizes and long hours of grinding, with resisting or accepting the game’s endless demands for more. It’s gotta go.

But am I ready to uninstall? Maybe I haven’t gotten everything I can from it. Am I still having fun? Maybe. All the money I’ve spent would be wasted.

My finger hovers over the app icon.

A short click, and I’m playing again. Easy. I won’t have to think about this or anything.

A long click, and the word ‘Uninstall’ will pop up, with all of the gravitas of a life that’s been waiting for me to return to it.

This week, for the first time, a Medium article I wrote entitled My Family Loves Football. But Esports Feels Like Home went viral on Reddit, getting around 15k views.

I was ecstatic, but as I watched the view count climb, I started feeling anxious. I was refreshing the page, and obsessing over people’s reactions to the piece.

Were they reading it, or just clicking away? Did they like it?

I tried to distract myself by doing other things, but every time my mind would wander I’d pull my phone out of my pocket, and refresh the page again. ‘You need to stop,’ said my long-suffering girlfriend as I updated her once again on the ratio of up-votes to down-votes on Reddit. ‘It’s out of your control.’

It’s easy to lose touch with what’s really important when you’re writing online, or anywhere else for that matter. One very important part of the writer’s job is to reframe their inner experience of the writing process when it starts to drift off course.

In this case, it wasn’t until I reflected on what I was feeling and made a conscious effort to think differently about the situation that I started to feel great about the views. Here are the three things I learned.

Perspective is everything

One reason I was feeling bad was that I was fixating on the audience's reaction.

Putting art out into the world is a vulnerable act. Art can be closer to our true identity than other productive work, and exposing it for others to see can feel like a judgement on our worth.

Sometimes, when we writers ask ‘Do they like my work?’, we might as well be asking ‘Do they like me?’. Depending on audience reactions, this question can lead to some unpleasant headspaces.

Reframing my position helped.

I won’t be telling you anything you don’t know if I say that people are all different, and have different tastes, desires and needs.

Whether people enjoy your work or not can just as often be a question of audience preference rather than quality, and choosing always to frame the question in quality terms can miss this crucial dimension.

Given how different people are, someone not liking one piece of your work is not an indictment of you as a writer. That would be akin to saying that someone not liking blue meant that blue was a defective colour and should be removed from the spectrum.

Besides, what about all the other possible factors? Maybe a reader was brushing their teeth and had no time to upvote. Maybe their mother-in-law just turned up unexpectedly. Maybe any one of a host of other things. Empathising with our readers can help us get a better perspective.

It can be easy to assign some personal failing as the root cause of not getting what we want, but it’s just not always realistic.

Solution:

I reframed my thinking. Producing work that meant something to me, and sharing it in places where I think people might appreciate it is enough. Whether or not it takes off can be due to multiple factors that I have no control over. All I can do is keep learning, and try to deliver my best.

The gap between fantasy and reality can cause pain

I noticed that when I published my work, I was thinking about the possibility that it would be read and upvoted by hundreds of thousands of people. The Reddit community I posted it in had over 5 million users in it after all, and I knew the work was original and of reasonable quality.

So when I got around 15k views and a comparatively small number of upvotes, I felt disappointment proportional to the gap between my fantasy and reality.

At that moment, I didn’t care that the piece had more views than anything I’d ever written. All I cared about was that it wasn’t living up to my unrealistic expectations.

Solution:

I reminded myself that my fantasised outcome was just that — a fantasy. I concentrated on the engagement I did get, not the engagement that I’d hoped to get.

My Family Loves Football. But Esports Feel Like Home

It’s all data

Ultimately, I realised that whatever the reaction to my work, be it small, large or nonexistent, with every piece published I was getting valuable data about my work.

I was learning what people engaged with, based on what was different in that article from what I’d written before.

For example, with this piece I used a different approach to my headline; I used a conversational voice; I made sure to weave in a narrative for emotional impact; I shared my work with a specific community of interest that I knew would appreciate it.

Feedback and data are invaluable sources of information for a writer, and fixation on success or failure can inhibit our ability to take their lessons on board.

Solution:

The success or failure of an individual piece is unimportant in the big picture. My overall goal is to be successful as an online writer, and reader engagement metrics on one piece are only a small part of that. The real value is in growing in the craft.

Once I reframed my perspective, checked my fantasies, and looked at the big picture, I felt a lot better about my piece and was able to enjoy the good feelings that went along with that.

Lying in bed with my girlfriend that night, I showed her the Reddit marker that indicated that several people were reading my piece at that moment.

‘I feel together with them,’ my girlfriend said, as we watched the reader counter climb to 7, then back down to 6. ‘Maybe we’re all in dark rooms, our faces lit up by our individual screens, sharing something.’

I lay back and smiled. It was a timely reminder that for me, sharing is what writing is all about.

Writing Online Can Test Your Resilience was originally published in The Writing Cooperative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I live in Melbourne’s CBD, on a high floor overlooking the hustle and the bustle. Right in the centre of town. Well, the spiritual centre.

It’s close to Flinders Street station, the spiritual dirty toilet of Melbourne, in the last few metres of interesting shopfronts before the boring business stuff starts.

Perched atop an all-terrain beanbag on my tiny balcony first thing in the morning, I slurp down packet oats. I don’t remember too clearly how the beanbag came into my life, but it’s seen its share of butts. It’s faded in the sun and is peppered with guano. I periodically have to sweep it clean of cigarette butts and other thin miscellanea that have slipped through the wrought-iron floor of the identical balcony above.

Our upstairs neighbours have a creative approach to waste disposal, i.e. let the wind take it, and the state of our balcony reflects this. The wind certainly wasn’t responsible for the empty disposable vape I found there one morning, mind you.

Noise is unavoidable in the city, but that doesn’t stop me from being pissed off about it. I make a Google Keep note of every single time I hear California Love by 2Pac feat. Dr. Dre at precisely 11 pm each night, courtesy of our neighbours.

One day I will show this angry list of dates (‘11/2 LOUD’) to someone, and they will sympathise with me. Of course, I must first figure out whether it’s our upstairs, next-door or downstairs neighbour. When I’m lying in bed, Dre’s admittedly creative beats seem to be coming from all angles at once. Maybe all our neighbours are playing it simultaneously, coordinating the assault on the building Whatsapp that everyone has access to except me. ‘Ready? One, two, hit play now!’

It’s a good song but they have ruined it for me.

Repetitive songs are all the rage here. There is a particularly annoying busker on the corner of Collins and Elizabeth Streets, a violinist who plays Ode to Joy often enough to evoke its opposite. He plays right up until 10 pm, which according to research done by me but inspired by him, is the latest a busker may legally play in Melbourne on weekdays without incurring a fine.

At 9.58 on days when he is there, I switch instantly from seemingly nonchalant reading on the couch to having my ear pressed against a cup pressed against the window, waiting with breath held to find out whether he will stop in time. I of course grant him five minutes grace period after 10 pm— I’m not a monster! — and he always stops short of it, which is disappointing.

One glorious day, at 10.05, I will finally make use of the council emergency number I have saved on my phone, and my life will be blessed with a slight increase in liveability.

Our building faces onto a block of offices on the other side of Collins Street, providing me with the unenviable privilege of oversight of the work lives of around thirty drones each day. This is a fair tradeoff for the thrilling possibility of my genitals being spotted by them along the same line of sight. Every time I walk naked from the shower to the drying rack, strategically placed as it is near the window, I worry whether or not the glass is dirty enough to preserve my modesty. It is a game I play with myself.

Another game I play, this one usually clothed, is to try to learn something about the lives of these office workers. Not as easy as you might expect, given the extreme lack of context. Why is that guy standing there staring into space? Might he be thinking about his investments? Why is that group chatting away so diligently at 7.30 am? Might they be trying to convince each other that their investments are well-chosen and prosperous? One can come up with all kinds of stories.

For the most part, the people look sort of sad. I imagine I must look much the same when I am working. Industrious yet purposeless, work for the sake of work. Never is the eternal hamster wheel of the business world more starkly defined than when one spectates someone else's work while possessing no insight whatsoever into what they’re working on or why. They tap at a keyboard, they sip from a mug. There might as well be no product at all, and they are just tap-tap-tapping away the hours until 5 pm.

Last Christmas Eve, I happened to look out the window at around 8 pm as we were packing to see family the next day. One lonely-looking guy was hunched over his keyboard, staring intently at the screen. Almost all the other windows were dark. Admittedly he may not have celebrated Christmas, thereby making it slightly less depressing. I was glad I saw him, because my day had otherwise been just average, and he gave me the gift of not being him.

One New Year’s Eve, I spent a lot of the night on the balcony. I and my partner invited our closies around for a party. We were very merry, having slurped up every intoxicant we could get our hands on. I stood at the railing with a friend, the wind whistling through our hair or some equally picturesque thing, and we spoke about life.

‘Widespread disorganisation of purpose is the prelude to total societal collapse,’ I said, or something similar, ‘And that is why society is so terrified of filling out the ‘Employment’ section of their social media accounts.’

The memory of the night is characterised by wholesome pride, and a sense that I may have said some profound things that evening. It’s also possible I just spouted a bunch of inane nonsense. My memory tends, even more than the average person’s, to present events in a nauseatingly self-congratulatory light.

‘Society,’ I almost certainly said, ‘Would benefit from the reintroduction of arranged marriages, but only between the ages of ten and twelve, to persons of similar age, gender notwithstanding, entirely non-sexual marriages you understand, and this is the best way to really sober up our youth, build awareness of the price of hubris.’

Genius notwithstanding, the most important thing about the memory is that I felt as if I was being clever. Whether I actually was is irrelevant. Nothing changes either way. Whatever learning I may have gathered from the occasion has occurred, and if I learned nothing then so be it.

Best case scenario, perhaps there was someone on the balcony above, hanging on our every word, smoking thoughtfully and releasing cigarette butts into the void like Scar dropping Mufasa. ‘Long live the king.’ If so, I wish them well up there. Maybe I changed their life with my pronouncements. Wouldn’t that be something!

My family chat is full of football, as usual.

‘First win at Giant’s stadium,’ writes one brother. ‘They’re adjusting really well when there are big outs,’ writes the other. Their comments celebrate the intricacies of that great game: the players, the coaches, the umpires and the fans. I leave them all on read. Australian rules football just isn’t my game anymore.

My dad’s side of the family have always been rabid Carlton supporters. A few years ago, when my brothers and my Dad started watching footy together, it was a great excuse for us all to hang out. I would come along and try to get involved, piling onto the couch with my two brothers, dad in pride of place on the comfy armchair. I gave it a good go. I learned the players, watched the plays and got emotional about it, shouting at the screen here and there. We would share camaraderie and a few beers. It was bonding.

When the deeper conversations started, their passion for the game was obvious. They sat forward, staring intently, trading opinions onfiner points of the sport. I’d sit there with a smile plastered on my face and try to nod along, but the conversations that brought them to life left me feeling flat and a little lonely.

I just didn’t care enough about football to know the statistics, trades, injuries, or any other dimensions of the off-field life of the sport. Hoping to feel closer to them, I’d force myself to open up football websites occasionally, only to end up staring blankly, completely disengaged.

After the footy, I’d usually be the first to want to leave.

Then I discovered League of Legends. I’d played a little of the game before, but never really gotten into it. The first time I watched a professional match, it was overwhelming. There was a massive amount of information kicking around the screen, but the casters were engaging, and I didn’t care too much about the specifics. It was nice just to watch the characters run around and fight.

After a few matches, the ebb and flow of the game started to make sense to me. Leads could be built and thrown away. Major objectives sometimes had to be sacrificed for strategic necessity. Matches could turn on a knife’s edge. The precision required from the players was astounding. The fact that most of the action was centralised on their mouse arms didn’t matter to me at all.

It was clearly a sport. It had all of the trappings. Thrilling team play, a competitive professional scene, multiple leagues nurturing the talent of young players, international player trading, big money sponsorships, and huge viewer counts.

I started watching the European league regularly, during their regular season and in international events. I fell in love with the personalities, the interviews, and the drama. I found the casters and analysts hilarious and engaging, my kind of people. They understood and participated in the same internet culture that I did. For the first time, I knew what it was like to have the depth of feeling my family had for football.

I started following Fnatic, a team with a long history in esports terms. I watched all their games, and their wins or losses could make or break a weekend. There was no going back. I had found my sport.

But esports fandom is a lonely pursuit in Australia. Aussies are wary of esports for the most part, or just completely unaware of their existence. We’re so far away from the geographical epicentres of esports, and video games still get a bad run in the local news.

The Twitch chat alongside League streams became my community. They were always hilarious, a few thousand people dropping constant memes, gags and sledges. The LEC is often on in the middle of the night in Australia, but when I can watch it live I’ll type my own two cents into the chatbox and feel the warm fuzzy feelings that come with being a part of something, even as I watch my comment get swept away by copypasta in a few seconds.

In the first blush of fandom, I tried to get my dad and brothers into it too, but I gave up quickly. Passion for a sport is something you either feel, or you don’t. Forcing someone to enjoy League was never going to work — it has to be organic, with no pressure. Besides, they’ve already found their sport.

I have one IRL friend that watches it, and that’s enough. She’s younger than me, but just like with all internet culture, age and social differences don’t really matter that much. The internet at its best is organised by shared passions rather than by generation, country or class, and our passion is League.

My friend and I text chat on Discord during games, with messages in all-caps after big plays, and sad emojis when things aren’t going as we’d hoped. At least we don’t have to worry about umpires — the games adjudicate themselves.

I tried voice chatting with her and her pals once, but the chatter just didn’t feel right. I missed not being able to pay attention to the insights of the casters, and the shallow japery of the mob in chat. This is not something I would have ever said about football.

So I don’t get along to the family footy days anymore. I do miss the comfort of family and of our shared history. I don’t miss the football itself, and I can’t pretend to. Not now that I know what it feels like to really care.

When I see the family chat fill up with passion during a football game, I’ll smile. I’ll put whatever I’m doing aside, and take a moment to scan through the messages. I’m not reading them for the content. I review the evidence of my family’s frustrations, their insight and elation, and I feel close to them. I never reply, because what do I know about footy?

It’s enough to know that I’m one of their kind.

We all love sport.

Gratitude for your day job doesn’t make you a bad writer.

Sitting at my desk today, knee-deep in an administrative planning spreadsheet, the idea for this article leapt at me like a cat out of the rain.

With such a brilliant idea in hand, the urge to drop everything and work on it right then and there was strong. Tragically, however, my deadlines would not permit it. I had just enough time to scribble down a couple of measly notes before a new crisis reared, and I was forced to reside in worksville for the rest of the day.

Although it sucks not immediately being able to wrestle a juicy idea, it’s quite nice to have adequate shelter and food. Without the day job, I would have neither.

Writing can be a difficult and lonely habit. But even more importantly, for many people, it’s a poorly remunerated one.

Having a day job can feel like a defeat to the beginning writer. The mark of success in this narrative is an imagined future in which you slam down your bit of resignation paper on the boss’s desk, flip them the bird, and abseil out the window into the moon-roof of your Tesla Model S. The reality though is that most writers, however serious, rely on something other than their passion project to keep body and soul together.

There are only so many packets of instant noodles that one can eat without becoming a poster child for the scandalously under-used word ‘wan’.

Given that having a day job is likely a necessity, what kind of job is best to supplement your writing?

Let’s separate the almost infinite number of answers to that question into two streams:

1. Writing or writing-adjacent
2. Entirely unrelated

The obvious answer is that writing or writing-adjacent jobs are going to better support you in your heroic quest for publication. The problem with these sorts of jobs is that depending on how much actual writing you’re doing in them, you may come to loathe writing, and have very little energy left for your own projects.

If your muse is anything like mine, they have limited patience for sidling their way through a crowd of to-do-list items in your head to deliver thunderbolts of creative excellence.

Less brain-heavy non-writey jobs, on the other hand, may use little to no thinky juice, thereby allowing you to while away the hours ruminating on the eating habits of Bobby, the albino rhinoceros, who will be playing the role of protagonist’s pet in your latest YA slush-pile-warmer.

My job in e-learning is somewhere in the middle. It requires me to be creative and organised, but not to write a whole lot. I get projects, I figure them out, and I execute them. It overlaps with the writing skillset, but it doesn’t deaden me to the prospect of spending a couple of hours in the evening on the ol’ clickety-clack (that is my new word for a keyboard, apparently).

It may not be ideal, but it does pay the bills.

The thing I value the most about my day job though, other than the bread, is having a motivating reward loop that brings on the pleasant feelings of self-worth a tad quicker than waiting around for my latest bestseller to take the literati by storm.

Relevant disclaimer: I am not currently, nor have I ever been, a bestseller. And without the privilege of a day job, I never will be.

And I’m going to make you uncomfortable by telling you all about it

I am thirty-eight at an art thing full of zoomers. Are my clothes too young? Are they too old? I sit as upright as I realistically can, wondering if others can tell how sore my back is. My gut will be noticeable if I lean forward to relieve my back, even if I suck it in. After a minute of deliberation, I sag forward from necessity and sneak a glance down at my gut. It seems ok.

I have forced myself out of my city apartment and down to MPavilion, the leading architectural commission in Melbourne according to its website. It’s a seasonal structure in the park opposite the Arts Centre. This year it’s a cubic frame of white metal hung with polished sheets of a reflective substance three meters above a spongey yellow floor. The sheets are angled in such a way as to fuzzily reflect the audience below, probably conveying some kind of architectural meaning. We are all seated on these vaguely Athenian benches in a circle around the art object. I was reliably informed by the event page that this object will, in combination with one or more people, be making music. It looks like three-quarters of a square doughnut made from a tinsel-based microchip. It also has tassels.

All the art people there seem to know each other. One wears a brown hat that looks like a halo, and a triangular brown dress. There is a bald person in a fiercely brocaded blue marching coat. The two most rakishly handsome older white men in the place are chortling together at a polite volume, in their Eurotrash sports jackets and ordinary shirts. One of them has an arm around a girl that looks about half his age (literally). The two men are competitively pulling their hands through their hair to accentuate its thickness. I parted my hair aggressively before going out, to hide its thinness. It should hold if I don’t touch it.

I wonder when the performance will start. Sucking my gut in is starting to get uncomfortable. A recently arrived art consumer approaches the holy object in the centre a bit too closely. The audience tenses up, some going so far as to offer the beginnings of a frown. Are they allowed to do that? they think, and Was I supposed to do that?

The maverick consumer, hands behind their back, face about ten centimetres from the work, is now at the leading edge of what is possible in the space. They make eye contact with an obviously well-connected art person and wave. This single act is enough to turn the tide. Soon everyone is walking up and looking. It’s ordinary now, even sort of audacious not to. At least that is the vibe.

The performance begins and it’s not very good. The artist approaches the doughnut and starts stroking the tassels meaningfully. The tassels on the left make a sort of synthesized groan when fondled. The ones on the right do not. This is apparently a terminal malfunction, as the artist’s air of fey abandon wavers a little.

The artist cracks an eye open just enough to convey terror to the sound guy, who fiddles with his iPad unsuccessfully. They close the eye again with resolve and redirect their noodling back to the functional tassels, which produce only one chord. I don’t know enough about music to know which chord it is, but I do know that more than one chord is usually aesthetically preferable.

The artist starts singing ‘Oooo lalamamanya’, attempting to wordlessly evoke the ethos of a broken city, according to the pamphlet. The air of anticipation in the audience has now become an air of imprisonment. We all begin thoughtfully stroking our chins or looking around at the trees as if with a renewed sense of wonder for life, as we wait for it to be over. One or two people appear to be genuinely getting into it, or maybe they have just been to a lot of these sorts of things. I am jealous of their seeming enthusiasm. When there are quiet bits you can hear people screaming in excitement and terror from the Moomba carnival a few hundred metres away. It is a powerful juxtaposition.

The doomed warbling stops, and there is a pretty good poem that puts me in a thoughtful mindset. I stop sucking in my stomach while the poet is speaking, instead thinking about the Issues. The singing threatens to begin again so I leave and head to Moomba.

…

Moomba carnival is also disappointing. I knew I didn’t want to go on the rides that the screaming was coming from, but I hadn’t realised that I didn’t want to do any of this stuff. Maybe if I was here with someone. There are bright lights and bright youths, and I am a stumbling fossil. Maybe actually I am a sage yet cool older person that is watching it all with an air of knowingness, avoiding the rides not because I have a papier-mâché stomach and would throw up before the safety harness was lowered, but because I have Been There and am reminiscing fondly. This morsel of self-image patches the crack just enough to prevent me from running away.

‘YOU pushed into ME you fucker, I’m just standing,’ the youths say, and, ‘Did you see the new episode? She is like, so hot but in a way that makes me want to be her, she’s That Girl.’

Maybe I am dressing too young; I should act my age. Maybe age is just a number, and that will save me. Maybe I’m a sad old bastard for even thinking this sort of stuff. Are other people also sad old bastards? They are probably genuinely sad old bastards, whereas I am ironically one because I am not really old, just seasoned.

I check the website and decide on a leisurely powerwalk down to the river for the silent disco, which starts in three minutes. I get there five minutes late and no one is there discoing. They must have already discoed off to somewhere fun without me.

There are a bunch of squalling families on the riverbank, and I devote a moment to silent gratitude that I am not a parent. This cheers me up enough to sit on the grass and wait for one of the water-sportspersons to do a jump or flip in the river as advertised. No one does anything. I head home.

At home on my couch, I ache with involuntary eldership. I go out onto the balcony with a mild interest in jumping from it, losing myself in the smell of the night air instead. Someone is frying something yummy nearby. The river is so close still.

There were places I walked past on the way back that had fewer young people and the sort of dim candlelight reflecting off the water that would have let me laugh freely, without any awareness of my stomach or the spot on top of my head where more hair used to be. Maybe some other night I’ll go out for real, not like the half-pretend-but-still-quite-brave going out that I managed tonight.

I didn’t really get into anything tonight. Next time I’ll probably spend the whole evening in a dreamy flow-state, the kind that crowds out any possibility of going home without saying goodbye to anyone, to spend quality time with my support blanket. I’ll belong in the vibe, out there, and that will be that. It will be social fun and the comfort of the beat, just like the website, and the impossibly large fissure between me and everyone else will have shrunk so much as to be unnoticeable.

Time for a training montage.

Empathy can help you become a more capable, more efficient, and more loving person. But empathy isn’t a trait, it’s a practice. The core of the practice is imagination, but the real secret sauce is in imitation.

For most of us, our ordinary habits shape our lives into unique but repetitive patterns like work, bar, home, work, yoga, home. Anything beyond the familiar can be uncomfortable, which explains the crazy lengths people will go to to avoid changing.

But what do you do when your ordinary patterns aren’t working anymore, and you actively want to change?

Our comfortable routines only become comfortable in the first place through repetition. Take a step back to how these routines are learned, and things get interesting. It is possible to learn patterns of behaviour through trial and error, but more often than not they are imitated.

Empathy and learning

When we see someone do something we want to do, we imitate it. When they behave in a way that shows that they are the kind of person we want to be, we imitate them. Unconscious imitation happens all the time, but our skill in conscious imitation can improve the quality and diversity of our problem-solving toolkit.

If you want positive change in your life, it’s important to use this capacity as effectively as possible. It’s a broad topic, but I’m going to focus on a common problem that can seriously reduce your ability to imitate: a limited capacity for empathy.

I’ll define empathy here as imagination applied to someone else’s inner experience. For example, imagining the (most likely extremely apologetic) inner experience of a friend who has just stepped on your bare toe with their shiny new workboots will help you not immediately unleash hell.

Empathy has a tendency to highlight similarity rather than difference, helping you not to sweat the small stuff. It can be casually important in all kinds of situations, like romantic relationships, long queues, and international relations.

Empathy is a kind of inner imitation, which can boost the process of learning.

For anyone more advanced than a novice, imagining a complex task, like dancing, is almost as effective for skill development as actually practising it. Empathy can similarly grant all kinds of juicy life hacks.

Rather than reading about the deeds of historical figures in reverential silence, why not imagine being them? What it would be like to live the life of Gandhi, Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Fran Liebowitz? Without necessarily agreeing with all of their decisions, you might learn something inexpressible about what it’s like to be another complex human making complex decisions about complex situations. Even if those situations seem entirely dissimilar to your own at first, it’s likely there’ll be more than a few generalisable lessons.

The practice of empathy

Empathy is an active practice, not just a trait. However empathic we think we are, our images of people we don’t know well can sometimes be as simple as caricature portraits, emphasising a couple of larger-than-life traits while ignoring the rest. The act of empathy can help you towards the reality: that other people have inner lives that are completely foreign to you. You can’t see their thoughts and feelings directly, and you can’t ever fully understand why they do things. But the effort it takes to try is noble.

So how do you practise empathy?

Try this short exercise. Sit somewhere comfortable, and close your eyes. Take three deep breaths. Imagine someone you know well and like, and think about as much as you can of their history. Imagine what you know of their childhood, adolescence and adulthood. If you don’t know the details, it’s okay to be a little creative. This isn’t about total factual accuracy. Think about key decisions they made, and what motivated them. Think about the turning points in their history, and how that influenced them to become the person you know.

So far so good? Now repeat the exercise with someone you don’t necessarily like, but don’t dislike either. How is it different? What emotions and thoughts came up for you?

For bonus points, try it out with someone you actively dislike. Now that’s a trip.

To imitate or not to imitate

Once you’ve tried the practice, you may find yourself noticing the universal human qualities in your imaginative wanderings — and that’s where the magic happens. You may have gained a few reasons why imitating their actions, choices, and worldviews might be a good idea. Now all that’s required is to put those lessons into practice.

Don’t agree with their actions, choices, or worldviews, even after doing the exercise? Great! You’ve successfully learned about and eliminated a few possibilities that aren’t right for you, without having to rule them out through trial-and-error. You’ll probably find that you’re more understanding when other people take these actions in the future, too.

Of course, it’s possible to be uncomfortable with the idea of imitation as somehow threatening our authenticity or spontaneity. Well, shucks. Do we really think of ourselves as free agents, completely independent of our family, our culture, and the actions of our peers?

Empathy can be great to switch on when you need some insight into others or a solution to a difficult problem. After all, imitation is an always-on function of how you learn most of you think and do. I’m only suggesting you learn how to use it.