Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

After a lot of introspection, I was able to pinpoint exactly what it was about my "friends" that was driving me nuts. A real mark of maturity is having mutual respect in conversation. A person monologuing must respect the level of context their audience has, and speak to it. They must also respect that the audience may not care all that much, but it's the audience's job to show a certain amount of respect in listening.

For example, I don't care all that much about my mom's favourite football team. When we talk, she respects how far my attention will go when she wants to gush about it. When my parents invited me over to watch the Grey Cup finals, I joined them and had fun with them. It was fun because it was something they were passionate about. I probably wouldn't have cared about a regular exhibition game, but for the finals, there was enough passion involved to even get me into it.

The people I now refer to as the "XIV-thumpers" have no such respect. Not just for me, but for one another. When I really think about it, they've never once shown even the smallest hint of maturity: they talk over one another, they don't give any attention to anything they don't care about, they'll go on for literally hours about a topic nobody else cares about, and they genuinely just don't care about anybody but themselves.

It's been most visible to me with their whole anti-FFXI thing. I tried finding common ground with them by playing FFXIV. I didn't like it, but I wanted to give an effort to hang out with them, because they certainly weren't doing that for me. But I couldn't say a word without them bashing FFXI, a game none of them had ever tried. When I finally had enough, that's when I went to try FFXI again and realized I'd liked it. But all that did was get them to hate XI even more. They'd bring up some kind of outrageous claim they heard like "This YouTuber I watch said FFXI hasn't seen an update in 10 years. Why would you play a dead game?" and I'd show them patch notes from like a week ago. Rather than acknowledge their mistake or even take it a step further and say "Wow, maybe I should check it out if you like it so much", they'd either zip up in silence or try to find some other means to jab at me.

I'm to the point now where any time anybody says anything XIV-related or so much as shows a screenshot, it fills me with anxiety. I've been conditioned now to immediately go on the defensive any time XIV comes up, so my fight-or-flight kicks in. I'll be wide awake at 3am thinking of something one of them said so I can craft the perfect comeback, knowing I'm not witty enough to think of it on the fly. It's really painful because I'd give anything to just have a conversation with people about our mutual love for Final Fantasy MMORPGs, but it always turns into bullying.

But it goes so far beyond FFXI/XIV, and it goes beyond even me. Two people have left this circle of friends, cutting ties to everyone but me. They never really thought about what made the situation toxic, but when I brought up this introspection recently to each of them, they wholeheartedly agreed.

One of the people got fired from their third consecutive job because they "didn't feel like coming in" and have been unemployed for 6 years now, living at home. They aren't charged rent because their parents are rich, and won't even do so much as cleaning their own living space or help out around the house. In fact, they're always complaining about how their daddy asks them to do yard work when, quote, "Can't he see I'm in the middle of a game? You can't pause an online game!"

Another one of them was kind of the final nail in the coffin for my attempt to hang out with them in Eorzea. They have some mental health issues, which would be excusable if they didn't use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card all the time. They'll have an outburst to drive someone to tears, and then a day later they'll turn around and say "Whoops, mental illness LOL" - not even so much as a "sorry". We've also caught this person, who lives at home rent-free and earns an allowance from their rich parents, stealing food and other stuff from ours and other homes.

I could go on, but you get my point: they respect nobody.

It just kinda sucks because I don't really know anybody else who would even have context for the fun FFXI stuff I do. That's why I post on here every so often as well. My partner doesn't really do video games, my parents couldn't care less, and my other friends can only hear me gush about FFXI so much when they've never played it. I don't want to just tell the XIV-thumpers to not talk about it, because the point is I want to talk with them about it. But the problem is they can't have a mature dialogue because they're still at the maturity level of teenagers.