A Game You Can't Win

Recently I've been playing a nice browser based MMO called Travian. In the game you start out with a randomly located village. You upgrade your resource fields, construct buildings and infrastructure, create armies, band together in alliances, and so on. It's quite fun, albeit a little slow paced at times.

There's this guy in my 7X7 grid who's been raiding my village every day to get resources. At first I panicked, but then I came up with a plan and started slowly rebuilding my defensive buildings. I had founded another village a few weeks before, which I then converted into a nice little military base. I trained about 570 troops there, and about 400 in my main village, shipping them there. When I had an army, I sent all the troops to defend the main village. They held up for about 6 hours.

He sent a few of his normal attacks, consisting of 300 or so troops that I could easily wipe out. Someone from my alliance sent me some reinforcements to make the army extra strong and I thought I was all set. I replaced the few troops he managed to take out and went to work. When I got home all of my troops were dead, my wall had been destroyed, and the guy stole about 20,000 of my resources. All the strategy and effort I put into making sure my village didn't remain a farm was for nothing.

It's kind of a parallel of my life.

Two months ago, I though I was in a really good financial situation so I completely paid off my student loan and made large payments on my credit cards. Immediately, my hours at work got cut by 30%. This month I got a 50 cent raise, which I certainly wasn't expecting. Even though it's not a huge raise it does make a significant difference and I thought I could take advantage of that to quickly pay the remaining balance on my credit cards. But life happens.

I thought going to Baker college would help me get a great (paying) job within a few years. I put an enormous amount of effort into everything I did there and quickly won the recognition of my instructors, but then I ran out of money and dropped out (not really in that order). In reality, it put me in a hole that I just now, four years later, got out of. I thought moving to Chesterfield would give me a chance to save some money to go back to college. I put enormous amounts of effort into my work and trying to make living here as pleasant as possible for everyone, but I'm just digging myself into a new hole that will take another four years to climb out of.

Some days it just seems like no matter what I do and no matter how much effort I put into everything I do, the world just keeps pounding on me and nothing changes. Nothing gets better. Things only stay the same or get worse. Maybe I'm making all the wrong choices. Or maybe I'm making the right choices, but taking the wrong actions. Either way I'm doing something wrong. All I know is that there's no point playing a game you can't win unless you have fun doing so.