Persistence is Key

The grind means everything to me.

Diablo IV Concept Art

Keep me running You keep me running ― Jessie Ware, Running

5/13/2026

My weekly routine has been the same for the last five months: Mondays and Tuesdays I get up at 6:30AM, go to the gym for at least an hour and get home to get ready for my 11a-8p shift at work. Wednesdays-Fridays, I do the same, except I get up at 4:30AM due to starting work at 9:00AM. I rest on Saturdays and sleep in on Sundays, going to gym whenever I end up waking up.

On Wednesdays, after the gym, I get home and inject myself with Zepbound (tirzepatide), a drug that I use to help manage my weight.

Without getting too deep into the weeds, the injections regulate my appetite, quieting a lot of the food noise that would cause me to snack. Most people lose weight easily on it but I wanted to see how far I could go and decided to overhaul major aspects of my life. I cut back on snacking, eliminated soda (and sugar) and reduced my carb intake. This in combination with the daily exercise has given me some pretty great results and has given me something I’ve needed for the longest time: a routine.

This routine has felt like a new lease on life, improving my mood and allowing me to focus on the things I love, mostly video games and books. However, with all this renewed focus and energy, I still find myself struggling with the same things as before:

What should I play?

Every game sucks right now

Am I depressed? Or just bored with games?

I have a few hours to kill but need to find the perfect game

I need to write but I can’t find the inspiration or drive

That last one was something I really struggled with, as I kept teasing and planning something on this blog. I wanted to do weekly check-ins where I discuss what I’ve been up to and what I’m playing but that fell through as I agonized over formatting and a general insecurity I have in my writing, especially lately.

Instead of writing, I’ve been spending my time playing stuff like Overwatch and Diablo IV. Two games that have dominated all my free time and feel like the most inconsequential, low-friction games ever. Diablo IV’s latest expansion and seasonal content has been fun to go through, although I’m not focusing on anything other than grinding for better loot.

There’s a very satisfying loop of running through these dungeons as a warlock, killing hordes of enemies, furiously clicking on every item that drops and repeating the process until I am killed by a difficult boss and forced to respec my build. Call it a hamster wheel, but the promise of getting much better rewards after each encounter has kept me playing for hours on end. Finding legendary weapons, telling myself “just one more run” and then staying on the game for another 2 or 3 hours has been an unhealthy weekend routine for me. I’m mostly breezing by the story just to enjoy the seasonal stuff, and even getting through some of the battle passes.

My plan is to play this as I would any online game once and replay it along with the base campaign as a different character to fully immerse myself in the narrative. I’m not 100% in love with the Warlock, despite thinking a lot of the abilities are solid but I feel locked into it and intend to reach the endgame before creating a new character.

Overwatch

Overwatch is a similar “turn my brain off” experience, as I’ll lose hours to playing a couple of matches each night. I’m enjoying Ashe a ton, as well as returning to Sombra every now and then. Sucks that it takes forever to get into a game if you solo queue as a DPS character, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before I pick a tank or healer!

I’ve been swapping between these two games mostly while watching some YouTube video or listening to a podcast. Recently, I’ve been enjoying MetaNerdz Lore’s content, especially their longform documentaries on Star Wars lore. I also have episodes of *The Dan Le Batard Show* queued up in video form since I usually listen to the audio version at the gym. Granted, this sort of passive, split attention stuff might not be healthy for me and chasing some quick dopamine in the form of loot or battle pass progression is definitely keeping me away from much more substantial gaming, like story-driven games. Regardless, all I want right at this moment is the grind and I’m finally fulfilling what I wrote about a while ago.

There’s a correlation between my addiction to grinding in games and me trying to improve myself both physically and mentally for sure. I’m on the hunt for dopamine in different ways, be it from exercising or from finding some gold item in a video game. It’s dumb for sure, but I’d like to think that there’s something positive to dig out of this new hamster wheel I got myself into with Diablo.

Shatterpoint by Matthew Stover

In between all of that, I’m also still reading plenty of Star Wars books, specifically stuff in The Old Republic era, like Darth Bane: Rule of Two. I recently picked up Shatterpoint by Mathew Stover, a novel centered around Mace Windu. This is a really interesting war story set during the Clone Wars, reminiscent of Apocalypse Now (or more accurately Heart of Darkness).

These past few weeks have been a little stressful and I’m trying to recharge and recenter myself as best I could. I even decided to take a break from podcasting and it took me forever to even think about writing, but I’m happy to reflect on what I’ve been up to lately.

A quick preview on what I’ll talk about next week: I finally downloaded an MMORPG.