Hello again Empire Minecraft. It's been quite a while since I've done ones of these personal talks, Forever Blogs, and I have my reasons for them. Mainly, life has been going good for me over the summer. But now, a mental problem is cursing me; it's an old one from last year. So today, I want to address to you: perfectionism. Among many of us creative people of history, past and present, famous and anonymous, we may experience a need for our works to be "perfect". I'm self-defined as one of those creators. Having this desired quality can represent dedication and great effort and dreams, but achieving perfection is impossible.Something that's perfect is what's considered to have no flaws or cons which vary from person to person. Therefore, everybody has a different definition of perfection. One person may call a human sculpture perfect while someone like me may see errors and not respect the same figure because it lacked perfection. This similar scenario has happened almost all the time for me with Minecraft since 2012. If you don't know my roles here on Empire Minecraft, I do community projects: mainly mob and item farms. Ever since I made my once renovated enderman farm on SMP5, people were telling each other and me about how great my works are. Contrary to community responses, I rarely appreciated my builds, even if they were above my standards, as well as the works of others. Whatever I've done, I find choices I regret doing: both small and large scaled.One example is with that same enderman farm I became known for. After a while of community recognition, the place was becoming a mess with locked chests. I was in much regret and negativity from what could have been prevented. However, this is only a minor incident compared to me completely regretting entire builds. And when I get that much into pessimism, I'm struck with depression paralyzed. I think at this point, I've discovered perfectionism to be a leading cause of depression with Minecraft and other highly customizable environments for many dedicated players. Notch and Mojang aren't the ones to blame; those people are ourselves. We have to change our mindsets, not aim for 100% perfection accepting that we cannot be perfect; it's human nature. Being a perfectionist isn't mentally healthy. It makes us want to reach the end of an endlessly-expanding universe: a goal that will never be possible. So, don't get too precise with your works. Learn from your mistakes instead of overly analyzing for them. P.S: You may have defined imperfection in this post!
Great to see you post again. I think it's a constant struggle to know when to "call it" and move on. It's all part of the learning process. When I first went to your skeleton farms I thought, "omg, I'll never be this good, I should give up now." I kept at it and used what I learned in functionality for my own skel farm and eventually I found a project that inspired me enough to learn "texturing" as I call it and more advanced designs. Your work may not be what you consider "perfect", but it may still inspire and deliver "perfectly".
Ah, I've been missing these! Oh yes, I know that feeling so much... I recognise a lot of my traits in you. (I was writing a post, but couldn't find the right words, so made this shorter than I'm used to)
