Snippet Of My Life Episode 16 – I Quit

I jumped out of my bed in the middle of the night, thought I saw lava flowing out from my attached bathroom, with the door left ajar.  My logical mind kicked into action.  The first thing I did was to save my phone that was lying on the floor connected to a charger near to the bathroom door.  I switched on the bathroom light, took my beloved Nokia N96 as far away from the lava as possible, and put it right next to my pillow.  Snuggled underneath my blanket with my half-opened sleepy eyes staring at the bathroom door, minutes had passed.  Reality hit me.  No, there was no lava.  I switched off the light and went back to sleep.

Work stress, economic climate, The Economist that generates more questions than answers, or maybe it was the aftereffect of my frequent visit to the World of Warcraft, my head is stuffed with dreams these days.

Workload is the same.  People are asked to go.  Departments are dismantled.  It’s cost cutting time.  I wonder who is more stressed: the asked-to-go or the left-behind.

For the past decades, time after time, I tried to read The Economist.  The drawings entice me; the article titles entice me; but I could not get pass the first paragraph of any article.  Money wasted.  Decades have passed.  I am none the wiser.  Picked up a recent issue while Cynthia was buying a loft of bread at a convenience store.  Paid twelve bucks.  And I have read almost all the articles within a week.

Oh my.  I actually enjoy reading The Economist!  What an exhilarating revelation.  I said to Cynthia: if I can read 6 issues, continuously, I may consider subscribing to the magazine for a year.

Here are some numbers that you probably won’t get from The Economist.  PC Gamer, I read mostly all the contents including the advertisements every month.  Today, there are 11 million online gamers subscribed to the online game World of Warcraft.  Each month, Blizzard Entertainment receives USD 165,000,000 from the subscribers worldwide, myself included.  That is close to USD 2 billion a year.  The total running cost is USD 200 million for the past 4 years.  Each yearly game expansion translates to one time revenue of USD 400 million from the community within days if not hours.  I am not going into the amount of money some subscribers pay to transfer the characters from one server to another, rename and change the genders of their characters, to pay for the merchandise, and etc.

Economic downturns means more people not having a job, means more work loaded onto my plate, means more people have time to play online games.  USD 15 a month doesn’t seem excessive for a dude who needs to put his talents somewhere (OK, private joke for the WoW community).

If I could choose a time to be born, I wouldn’t have picked this era of capitalism, of consumerism.  On one hand, mother Earth cannot sustain the way and the pace we consume resources.  On the other hand, we ask our people not to stop consuming in order to keep the economy going.  Our progression depends upon how effective and efficient and extensive we consume resources.  But for what purpose?  No one is interested in the true cost [determined by our predecessors] until we hit the problem (think satellite debris up in the sky).  We put our best brains together, created a risk management framework (Basel II), and now we ponder: maybe 20% capital adequacy is more resilient to the financial downturn.  We create a manmade economy and load our future generations with tons of debt.  OK, I quit.  Thank you Mother Earth for having me around.  I am moving to Planet Mars to start anew.