From the Editor’s Desk: Autopilot (Premium)

I went to the gym this morning for the first time in I don’t know how long: Between our trip to Mexico, our pre-moving, my Seattle trip for Microsoft Ignite, the actual move, and then the Thanksgiving long weekend, I’ve been off schedule. But like so much in life, it was like riding a bike, in that it was instantly familiar, and it helped that I saw a friend I’d not seen in months. So I felt good about everything until I left the gym and drove almost all the way to our old apartment before realizing my mistake, u-turning, and backtracking to the new place. Right. We moved.

Granted, this is how I do things: I go into a kind of autopilot mode and stop thinking about what I’m doing. This works better for some things than for others, and I’ve even rationalized this behavior as a kind of “set it and forget it” thing that I could talk myself into being healthy and even advantageous. I can’t fill my mind with the superfluous, it’s too full of useful and important information!

Except, of course, that it isn’t. My mind is full of esoteric, niche information about how Windows works, mostly, and about random writing rules, rendering me useless in the inevitable zombie apocalypse. I spent nearly the entire weekend updating the Windows 11 Field Guide, and because I’m me, I’m not just bringing it up to date with the latest release, I’m adding a lot of new content. I can’t help myself. I’m on autopilot.

Over that same weekend, my brother-in-law stopped by to fix the garage door and a few other small, mostly electrical items at our new place. He’s an engineer, and he knows what he’s doing, and the condo is owned by the family, so he’s taken on this role. And after adjusting something that I easily could have lived with as it was, we were all talking and suddenly noticed he was gone. When my sister, his wife, asked where he was, I said that he was probably out in the garage adjusting that thing that didn’t need adjusting because that’s the way he is. And he was: He couldn’t stand leaving it in what he felt was an unfinished state. He’s on autopilot too. Granted, he would be useful in a zombie apocalypse.

I guess we all have our skills, which, when we’re lucky, overlap with our vocations. That’s true in my case, as we’ve discussed, and good thing, since this isn’t just a preoccupation, it’s a lifestyle. I woke up at 2:00 last night for reasons I don’t understand—new place, different lighting, perhaps—and then stayed awake for hours thinking about some writing project I’m working on until it slowly shifted into a dream that seemed to last all night. Probably not really, but when I woke up, I skipped the coffee, sat down at my PC, and took some notes. I do my best work when I’m asleep, apparently. That might be the definition of autopilot.

To be fair, there is some science behind this notion that you can have a breakthrough when you distract yourself. This was my excuse—sorry, my reason­—for playing video games so much for so many years. I could be in the middle of a heated deathmatch, suddenly latch onto the word, phrase, or idea that would turn some article from a muddled mess into a coherent masterpiece, drop the control, turn to the PC, and get back to work. And I did just that, not so much the masterpiece bit, but at least the distraction leading to inspiration bit. It’s that maybe there are better distractions. An outside walk or other exercise. An audiobook or instructional video. Whatever.

Or maybe it’s that I felt that I had an unhealthy relationship with video games, with Call of Duty in particular, and that in this way my ability to go instantly on autopilot was perhaps a bad thing. In June, I wrote about how I had then spent three months away from the Xbox, but today that timeline is coming up on a year, with one minor exception: I have turned on the Xbox to install, update, update again, and then launch the new Call of Duty. But I have not played it. I just can’t get into it, can’t see the point. And I’m starting to think that maybe this is for the best, that I can now play games far less frequently, and with far less of a desire to reach through the screen and strangle the people I’m playing against in a fit of rage. Yeah. It’s definitely healthier.

It’s also just as productive, from what I can tell. 2023 has been a lot of things, but it has been a banner year for me generating content, at least from a word count perspective. Gary, my original writing partner, had sold me on the notion of using video games as a reward for hitting writing milestones, and that was a strategy I employed for the almost 30 years that have gone by since then. But now I feel a little more clear-eyed about it all. I’m still on autopilot—that will never change, apparently—but the days pass without any big gaps of empty time. This seems normal now.

Less normal, I had my wife accompany me to the ophthalmologist mid-day today just in case I needed to have my eyes dilated. I didn’t, so she was delighted to have tagged along. But she was even more delighted when I twice—literally twice—tried to drive towards the apartment instead of the new place on the way home. The second time she thought I was joking. I wish I had been. But autopilot is a tough thing to overcome.