Finally bought the home-design DLC for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but after decorating only two homes I got distracted by fishing.
Over the next few weeks, I was obsessed with filling up my creature encyclopedia.
The trouble with fishing is that it's tedious if you're aiming to catch specific fish. Digging for clams, then crafting fish bait from them, is mind-numbing busywork.
Few would call this sort of busywork fun. The funny thing is that, despite moaning and groaning about this tedium, I still subject myself to it. Why? It's not like I'm employed to fish, not even in the game's narrative. (Though you could say I'm enslaved by debt to a real-estate raccoon.)
What is this self-imposed drudgery? Call it human foolishness, perhaps, but there's a positive flip side. Could it be a good thing, too, that we're capable of subjecting ourselves to drudgery in pursuit of reward?
My mother once said that school, especially school exams, is an opportunity to develop character. Never mind that you'll forget much of what you learned in class. If you worked hard at something you felt was drudgery and stuck to it for good reasons, you were developing character muscles. That's a good thing, she said.
But I doubt my Animal Crossing labor is developing muscles of any sort...
At least Little Miss S loves watching me dig, craft, and fish. To her, the eureka moment of unearthing a clam is ever delightful.