Thank you for reading my initial post and offering advice and encouragement, everyone. For what's it worth, I greatly appreciate being able to vent and recieve mature, practical feedback. This is the only "place" on the internet I know of that can allow me to do so. Along with you guys, and a new episode of FMA (WATCH FMA: BROTHERHOOD NOW), I have managed to trudge out of the funk I found myself in with my initial posts.
It was not my intention to drag the forums into grimdark territory. But if I have learned anything from sociology, it is that the world is hardly as black-and-white as we would like to believe: we must identify, accept and possibly alter both the positive and negative aspects of our existences.
The metaphor of economic min-maxing is brilliant. We are too preoccupied with squeezing every possible cent out of ourselves that we forget to enjoy ourselves. Like the clever DM that finds loopholes in the rules, the current economic depression is the logical result of this kind of "gameplay". Believe you me, I have no intention of joining the "powergamers". But I do not know if a certain amount of "optimization" (college degree) is required for me to enjoy life. It seems I just sink deeper into debt and become more depressed by the course content (Do you know what REALLY happened in Rwanda? I mean, what REALLY REALLY happened? Trust me, you're better off just knowing it was a terrible humanitarian crisis that the US could have easily averted.)
