Complacency breeds stagnation; it makes us wonder what to do instead of forcing us to do it.

Conflict throws us into action. We must run from or fight what is confronting us, but what we cannot do is stand still, for if we do, it will be at our own peril.

In the former situation, we will sit passively and entertain ourselves to death, while the latter forces us into a warlike stance.

When poised to go into battle, we scour our minds for solutions; what are the paths that lay before us?

This then begs the question, when given the relative ease of life in the 1st world, where do we find this conflict?

Most waste this resource in the mental masturbation of arguing with one’s self and then pulling in inconsequential nonsense to occupy a mind that requires daily gymnastics to remain plastic and ready for action. The problem herein is that the drivel many people allow in has no relevance to their own lives; it is fodder for complacency brought on by the inane.

So where do we find the kind of internal conflict that allows our creativity to build our own intellectual Trojan Horse that helps liberate us from complacency? We manifest it in desire and disappointment. When I was a young man, my conflict came from my inability to find the relationship I felt I needed. During that time, I was a voracious reader – didn’t have anyone to date, so what else was I to do? Those words I read stewed in my mind, and I continued reading to find answers, but there were none; there was just more conflict. With the fire of the mind blazing like a forest fire in its quest for knowledge and companionship, I started making stuff, digital stuff.

I was a child of the emergent personal computer revolution, just as words painted pictures in my mind; having the computer make pictures using its processing capability seemed a natural progression, and so I embarked on dabbling with digital arts in the mid-1980s. All of the reading, studying, and cultural exploration of my early 20s had produced a great curiosity; I had a million questions. It was here that I discovered, as so many others have over the course of their lives, that the mind abhors a vacuum devoid of answers, and given enough inputs, it will soon start to disgorge its contents by producing something that explains things to the curious mind. Soon, I was shooting videos and making record cover art with the wealth of knowledge I was refining.

And here begins the problem: success in one’s endeavors delivers like-minded others and validates the knowledge that produced the fruits of our labor by imbuing us with the currency of achievement: money. Time to get happy and lazy and the start of getting older.

But I don’t want to get old, nor do I want to be in teenage soul-ripping conflict either.

So how do we balance that yin and yang of two hemispheres of self and manage them so that they might remain a healthy self-governing police force of our cognitive maturity? We break the rules, our own rules. To make this simpler, we step out of our own habits.

I did not suggest we break laws; as a matter of fact, I would like to reiterate we break our rules. What are those rules? Maybe they were the knowledge that we should exercise and the realization that obesity is killing us, so we break out of routine and find a path to tackling our complacency with our diet and lack of running around. Or maybe we have been taking something for granted and have our reality shaken by a dramatic change in our situation that rattles our complacency and forces us to race against stagnation to fix ourselves.

In my case, I recently reignited my creative engine by dousing gasoline on a healthy bed of embers. While maybe nothing is easily pinpointed as being the sole flashpoint of having sparked that conflict, what helped me was a binge into guilt. I’ve not played games in a seriously long time; I’ve been too busy traveling and writing and maybe being complacent in that.

You see, I thought hours of mindless entertainment was a kind of complacency I couldn’t afford. Once something becomes normal and routine we tend to fall into a kind of mindless existence, so for me to fall into playing over 100 hours of a game at the exclusion of my “healthy” routine, I started falling into some extreme guilt. I didn’t realize it at first, but I was breaking my rules.

In a crescendo of regrets, I had to justify my losing face in playing the game to excess, and my mind started racing for answers. I had to find a path on this battlefield to conquer my conflict. What I had going for me was that I was in the process of creating a virtual environment, which might in itself be considered a game. I had recently attended Steam Dev Days and returned with a brain full of ideas regarding the valuable strategic lessons learned from Valve and their experiences in how gaming is evolving. I was inspired by the game I was lost in, too. Just as I’m cresting and about to cross this rubicon, my creative mind is rescued by my conflicting mind, and I find an important answer to a vexing monetization question regarding the VR environment I am working on.

A huge problem has been solved, but at what expense? The conflict alienated my relationships because for 12 hours a day I cast my normal to the side and appeared to be lost. I suppose I could have stayed in my new complacency, but fortunately for me, my brain enjoys a good round of gymnastics, even when thrown to the mat. I bounced up, feeling invigorated to tackle the hard issues of how to implement my genius. Oh yeah, did I tell you I like flirting with self-delusional ideas of grandeur, too?