My backlog is a lie
Without realizing, I kept adding games to my backlog with a quiet sense of duty behind every purchase. The classics I "should" play. The series I "should" finish. The titles that make you a real gamer if you've been through them. I ended up with 80+ games bought, 3/4 of them being games I am not really excited about.
I was buying for my aspirational self, the one with the patience, the time, and the specific kind of motivation to sit down with something old, clunky, and demanding of historical goodwill. That person exists somewhere. But she's not the one holding the controller right now. There is also FOMO of course. "I need to play them, everyone is and if I don't, I'm out of the conversation!"
Right now, I want polish. I want combat that feels tight and deliberate. I want visuals that pull me in and make me forget the room I'm sitting in. Old games, for the most part, can't give me that, not today, not with where my head is. And pretending otherwise just means that I'm not playing for fun I'm playing for checking the games off a list. A chore. Homework. Games are my leisure time, not a chore time.
So I'm not clearing the backlog. I'm not abandoning it either. I'm just letting myself play from it the things that actually call to me now. Maybe the classics get their turn eventually. Maybe they don't.
The real change I can do now is not clinging to a past self and trying to beat the backlog because of dead desires, FOMO, the person I WISH I was. But honor the present self instead by playing games I am really excited about and being a lot more mindful about new purchases. Turning my mistakes not as a punishment but a lesson to take for my future self.
It's hard, because I love seeing YouTube videos about gaming and take part in Reddit subs like this. But it can be a source of backlog guilt and FOMO. I hope someone else can see the backlog with new lenses like me because I get that the general sentiment is "you have to beat your backlog".