shared suffering
one of my favorite concepts ever has to be shared suffering.
when groups of people go through the same slog of bullshit,
and they all know amongst themselves that none of them are enjoying it,
but they gotta do it because it’s a requirement for something else.
as you could have probably guessed by now,
my primary example is from final fantasy xiv.
in it, there was once this grueling slog of a set of dungeons
that you would be randomly assigned to do for a daily reward (optionally, of course).
the dungeons were all similarly grueling because of their unskippable cutscenes
and poorly constructed flow in terms of enemies and objectives.
it was an all-around very obtuse section of the game for a long time.
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| praetorium gives more exp, castrum gives less (for similar amounts of time.) |
after 2021 or 2022, the infamous “MSQ Roulette” had been changed
to where those original grueling missions were now.. surprisingly..
for the most part still long, but more tolerable in general.
but back when it was still the slogfest for which its notoriety was well deserved,
people all across the FFXIV servers would queue up for it,
knowing damn well that nobody really wanted to be there,
but that everyone wanted the juicy reward of almost an entire level, if not more from the reward.
people would go AFK, people would take showers, people would eat,
anyone would do anything in the middle of that dungeon
to numb their minds from the utter boredom of MSQ roulette.
and now it’s gone.
it’s a sad thing, in my opinion.
i think a lot of genuine and good bonding can only most quickly come from
a shared experience of human suffering.
from that feeling of
knowing you’re in the trenches with everyone else,
and that there’s nowhere to go but up.
you could similarly expand this idea to something like
waiting in line at the DMV, for a more pedestrian example.
(but maybe not quite to the same effect.)
either way, i can’t believe i’m saying this after all those years of complaining,
but i kind of miss MSQ roulette.
thank you for reading today’s post.
if you think about it, we often spend money just to suffer in a specific way..