Marvel’s Wolverine is the latest AAA video game title going through the media ringer. It’s a story about everyone’s most beloved mutant, Logan aka Wolverine, teaming up with other X-Men to solve the disappearance of other mutants.

Reviews on PlayStation’s own platform are mostly positive. Professional critics largely enjoy it, with a few caveats. But according to my X feed at work, it’s a terrible, nearly unplayable game.

The two main lines of criticism? Cut corners and too much handholding.

If you spend $300 million on making a video game, can you really put in a water splash animation that’s basically a short GIF popping up again and again? Not really. People will notice. Alas, every budget will be shaved off at the edges.

The second criticism is more interesting: In some aspects, the game almost plays itself. Every treasure chest gives off super obvious shockwaves from hundreds of meters away. A blue trail blatantly guides you to your every next target in missions. In a motorcycle chase scene, you needn’t even hold the controller to make it to the end! And all quick-time events—cutscenes where you need to press a button to perform some action—can be completely ignored. The game will just march on. No game over, no problems.

The thing about triple-A anythings, be it movies, games, or TV shows, is that they’re not tributes to hardcore fans. They need appeal to the widest audience possible to even be in the black, let alone generate a return. And if you need to pull in folks who usually wouldn’t be here, well, then guess what you need? Handholding!

At work, we face a similar dynamic. Our engineering team naturally thinks our blockchain education courses are too basic. Of course! They know everything there is to know about the technology. But from the outside, 90% of feedback is more along the lines of: “It’s too complicated. Can you explain it in simpler terms?”

For better or for worse, an online course is the way it is after you ship it. Modern video games, however, are not. They’re software, and software can be upgraded. This is where the criticism really finds its merit: Why couldn’t the studio have made all these supportive mechanisms optional? If you want a tougher experience, just turn it off! No blue trail, no self-identifying treasure chests, no casual punch to the enemy’s face if you don’t press X on time.

How much handholding is enough? Only you, the creator, can decide. But wherever handholding can be shipped on a sliding scale, do your audience a favor: Let them decide for themselves.

I’m a relentless optimist by nature. I believe for any future event, you should look forward to it as if nothing could possibly go wrong—because that will increase the chances it’ll actually happen the way you intend to: smoothly and on time.

When I was younger, this optimism wasn’t tempered with a counterbalancing perspective. So, sometimes, when stuff inevitably went wrong, I felt my optimism thwarted without a good enough explanation. I had believed so hard—so why didn’t things work out?

In my late 20s, I managed to cultivate a different, additional perspective: There are many things in life out of your control. When they don’t go your way, accept them as quickly as you can, and move on. This view is of course in direct opposition to the other one. Yet, they work best when put together.

Take the day of my wedding registration, for example. My fiancée and I had meticulously planned the event. Until a few days before, I didn’t think anything could possibly go wrong. In the last week leading up to the big day, however, I consciously reflected on some of the potential mishaps: The weather could turn bad. A guest might cancel last-minute. We might be delayed. My fiancée’s dad could have unforeseen problems with his illness.

Once I had them present in my mind, I was okay with any of those things happening. Some did. Others didn’t. And, in the end, it still felt as if everything went off without a hitch despite some stumbles and roadblocks.

Scientists call this “integrative complexity:” the ability to hold multiple perspectives in your head at the same time, understanding they can all be true. I’m far from always mastering it perfectly, but it’s one of the most helpful attitudes you can cultivate.

Pretend you’re invincible, accept that you’re not. You can do both simultaneously, and your life will be all the better for it.

I started drafting my wedding vows very early. Like, nine months in advance. I wasn’t planning on doing so. Inspiration struck one night, and I went with it.

But then, once I had those first bits, I left them untouched until three days before the wedding. They sat on my long list of tasks, clearly visible. So it wasn’t like I was ignoring them. Yet, somehow, I felt they’d turn out best at the end.

Unlike many other wedding planning tasks, writing my vows was also the one I looked forward to the most. No surprises there. Similarly, my fiancée and I decided to do a little introductory speech before our wedding dinner with relatively short notice. That, too, was something I happily dove into with mere days to spare.

Once I started, it was easy enough to finish these to-dos. But they were more than to-dos to me. A chance to make a mark in a way that suits me—through my writing. So it felt empowering to give them the time and attention they deserved but do so at a time when the results would feel fresh and “in the moment.”

Sometimes, you need to start with the coolest ask in order to find the courage to get going at all. But every now and then, you might want to leave the most interesting work for the end. It truly can be its own reward. Try saving the best tasks for last.

The feeling of having time is important to me, maybe too much. In the grand scheme of things, none of us do. But in the everyday, I’m a lot happier when I feel my life and tasks are manageable. I doubt I’m alone in this.

Note this is different from actually getting all your stuff done all the time. When you feel you have enough time, you’re almost bound to squander a good chunk of it away—but in that squandering, we often find joy, and so that might be the whole point of the equation.

If you told me I could either feel stressed the whole time and complete 50 to-dos in a week or feel perfectly relaxed and complete only 25, I would choose the latter every time—even if all tasks were equally important. The former would make me feel as if I’m missing life altogether.

The problem is life doesn’t always give us a choice. Sometimes, it throws many streams of activity at us at the same time, and they all need some degree of attention. Then, we get stuck in a loop: All our time is allocated before we’ve woken up, we just don’t know exactly what it will go to and when.

I’ve never had more of these streams converge at the same time than I do now. This year. This week. This month.

Work itself is one Moby Dick of a task load. Throughout the year, I’m running after 40+ different workstreams across two teams, with the whole department shifting in personnel, responsibilities, and strategic goals. I could work 36 hours a day and still be—or at the very least feel—behind.

I’m the latest for filing my taxes I’ve ever been, but I also need to finish a paid writing gig and prepare for a talk. All the while, I’m selling off a large chunk of my Pokémon collection, which is much needed but yet another ongoing project. Questions are asked, orders are made, and parcels need to be wrapped and shipped. I still haven’t thanked everyone for their wedding presents, let alone prepared thank-you cards. And then, there’s this blog. A handful of essays so close to publication. Around 200 unread emails from readers. Friends to call, website issues to fix, and an apartment to declutter.

You understand this. You’ve felt it. The contents of your activity streams are different, but the outcome is the same: “When will I ever have enough time?” This year, I’m experimenting with being okay with the answer being “Never.” And then allow time to call the shots on some of these meandering paths.

At some point, there’ll be a break. It’ll give you an opportunity to focus on a particular aspect of your life. Maybe you can finally get your blog in order. Really, really clean out your apartment. Or catch up on every message you’ve received from friends and family over the last six months.

But, sooner or later, it’ll be back to “this needs to wait.” And, in the waiting, time will close doors and open others. One project will become moot. Another may grow from its ashes.

It’s hard to sit with the uncertainty. To not know which paths will fall away, and if the sum total of your involvement in any one area will still feel acceptable. But once you accept that, life can be nice even when you’re too busy. You show up every day. You do the best you can in several departments. And at night, you go to bed knowing you haven’t left anything on the table—not in terms of opportunity but in terms of what you’re capable of handling.

Eternity is a mindset. Let time make some decisions for you.

It’s a tiny comment commander Yáo makes in passing, literally while taking the lab tour with Dr. Ryland Grace, and yet, in 10 seconds, one line neatly ties together the entire theme of the movie adaptation of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary.

Grace, a failed biologist with kooky theories, somehow ends up in charge of analyzing the strange alien substance quickly devouring the sun. He makes great strides in understanding “astrophage,” as he dubs the mysterious organism, and even figures out how to use it to power the spaceship meant to make Earth’s last-ditch attempt at survival.

Alas, for all his wit, Grace isn’t the boldest of human specimens. So when the astronaut team of the mission swings by his workplace—all of whom know they’re going to die in space, even if their mission were to be successful—he tries his best to acknowledge their sacrifice.

“Commander Yáo, I really appreciate what you all are doing,” Grace says. “You would do the same.” Yáo answers in kind. But, to the contrary, “I would choose just not to go at all.” Despite Yáo’s laughter, Grace insists: “I don’t have the bravery gene that you all have. Trust me.” And that’s when Yáo turns Grace’s world upside down: “It’s not a gene. You just need to find someone to be brave for.”

As with many of our most important lessons, Grace does not learn this one the first time around. So when the crew’s scientist dies unexpectedly, he doesn’t exactly willingly take his spot on a rocket meant to never return. After he wakes up nearly five years later, alone in space, faced with few memories and overwhelmingly crushing odds, Grace’s first reaction is panic.

But then, flashback by flashback, bit by bit, Grace starts crawling out of the universe-sized hole he finds himself in. And of course, when the time comes to collaborate with an unlikely ally to save not one but two planets, Grace does find that someone to kick his courage into gear.

Everyone is afraid. It’s the default human condition. Always scared—but never stopping. Bravery is not a gene, yet all of us can discover it in our hearts—not for ourselves but for one another.

Yesterday, I attended a trading card show for the first time. I learned a lot.

First, there are now a lot of card shows, even in Germany. Until a year ago or so, we basically had none. Now, there seem to be five in different cities every weekend. Granted, they vary in size a lot, but still.

Second, Pokémon is the #1 trading card game, but it’s not the only one. At this big event in Munich, there were maybe 70% Pokémon cards, 15% one piece cards, 10% sports cards, and 5% other TCGs.

As a visitor, the least profitable thing you can do at a card show is buy and sell cards. Sure, some people try to negotiate like crazy, but most vendors have bumped the market prices by 10% or a lot more before you can even get them to come back down. And when you trade in your cards, they offer you 85, 80, sometimes as little as 75% of that same market value. It’s weird and makes no sense—except to enable the vendors’ profit. When you sell online, you’ll get better prices. And when you buy online, you’ll also get better prices.

That said, a card show works best when you show up with a plan. “I want to get all the full art promos from the X & Y era.” “I want to get all the modern gold cards.” “I want to start buying commons for a Neo Destiny vintage master set.” Focus on a tiny subset, then pick off every well-priced card you can find that fits your goal. If you don’t walk in with a theme in mind, the show will eat you alive. I saw hundreds of different cards I’d like to own at some point, but with no prioritization, even if I could have bought them all I’d just have ended up with a very random assortment that wouldn’t have moved my overall collection forward in a meaningful way.

Speaking of a plan, you also need a budget and, ideally, bring it with you in cash. Cash sometimes gets you a discount. I heard vendors give up to 5%. It’s fast and efficient. It also makes it easy to keep track of your spending. It forces you to acquire cards as cheaply as possible. And it prevents you from going on a spree without any direction, which is usually when we make our worst buys.

The biggest winner at a card show is a vendor with time and nothing to lose. You show up, price your wares as you see fit, give small discounts if you feel like it, take home everything that doesn’t sell, and wait until it’s inevitably worth more in the future anyway. Most professional vendors can’t do that. They need to move inventory to make rent and their salary. But a private collector who’s doing it for fun can always wait for the next card show.

One thing a card show does have going for it is liquidity. You can show up with a suitcase full of graded cards and make deals worth tens of thousands. That’s much harder to pull off from your couch.

At the same time, most collectors are too impatient. They want the card now, so they overpay for the privilege of taking it home immediately.

Sometimes, however, overpaying is worth it. Not for the immediacy but the memory. I bought a card from a friend who was vending, mostly to support him. I’ll always remember that card. That, too, has value.

Buying in person also eliminates shipping risks, and those are bigger than you think. In Germany, DHL is very reliable. They’re also sneaky. They won’t insure Pokémon cards beyond a certain limit domestically. And if a parcel does get lost, like any insurance, they’ll still try to get out of having to pay. For big deals, meeting up can be worth it.

Another benefit: Card shows allow you to see what you’re buying. You can assess how fit cards are for grading or your binder before you take them home. This is a nice benefit but not an infinite money glitch. The vendors have usually assessed their cards beforehand, so anything that would grade a 10 has likely been removed.

Still, even a simple vendor can be a good vendor. One table was a dad and his son, sitting there with two binders, some bulk to flick through, and maybe a small display case, if that. They got visitors, just like everyone else. Your table doesn’t need to look like the Caesar’s Palace the first time you show up.

A good inventory is a well-sorted inventory. Most vendors tried to have some sorting logic to their binders. Cards for a buck, illustration rares, vintage, drawings from this artist or that one. But the best binder I saw was sorted by set with small paper inserts. “Here, Phantasmal Flames begins.” You immediately knew which cards to expect on which page.

Fireworks draw people in, staples make people buy. Many vendors had items which were technically for sale but truly only served as display pieces. A $1,000 collection box here, an elite trainer box from a rare set there. Some had high-end, not-for-sale slabs. Others did want to sell their expensive cards, but they still acted as show pieces while they were available. But once you’ve got folks at your table, you still need to sell them something—and most people don’t want $1,000 collection boxes. They want the staples. What’s popular right now. A handful of more niche, interesting new cards to consider. And then more of what everyone else also wants. A well-set-up vendor offers both: an experience and an inventory worth browsing.

The best part of a card show is the people. You’ll see like-minded folks, 99% of them are friendly and helpful, and there’s so much creative ingenuity to witness. The show I was at had a stall doing custom engravings for binders, a stall raffling off prizes with a mini wheel of fortune, even a stall where they sold tries at cracking a code to win a grand prize. Plus, everyone’s setups were so unique.

Card shows are for everyone. The most impressive part was not just thousands of people showing up, it was the kinds of people showing up—because they were all of them. Some local influencers were there. Cosplayers were there. Nerds in their 30s like me were there. But so were families with kids, tweens chasing their hobby, young couples collecting together, and dudes in their 50s trying to complete expensive collections. It truly showed how much card games have grown as a hobby, and why the industries building around them are getting bigger and bigger.

Next month, I’ll take the other point of view: I’m vending with a friend. I’m sure that’ll come with a whole different set of lessons. See you when I get there!

It was an accident. I had not intended to order the package to a pick-up location. Alas, that’s what I got for not double-checking my shipping option, which was set to the cheapest one as a default. So, one Thursday morning, I set out to the small kiosk in the neighborhood to collect my shipment—Pokémon cards, what else?

Unfortunately, I found myself in front of a closed door around ten minutes later. “Just my luck,” I thought. A piece of paper with some hand-scribbled opening times greeted me from behind the glass: Thursday mornings were the only slot in which the store was shut.

I double-checked the listed times on Google. “Now open.” Great. This fella had decided he didn’t have to open on Thursday mornings anymore but not updated his online profiles. So the poop I was standing in wasn’t even my own.

A few days later, I managed to collect the package. A few more days later, I found myself having to repeat the exercise. This time, I had deliberately chosen this shipping option—the others had simply been too expensive for my liking.

I made sure to not arrive on a Thursday morning. Yet, guess where I found myself? Hooray, another closed door! This time, a different sign explained the situation: “Back in 15 minutes.” I started laughing, and so did the old lady approaching, who was also hoping to buy a few essentials from the store. “15 minutes is great—but when will he be back? How are we supposed to know when he left?” Had he gone 14 minutes ago? Or two?

Thankfully, the owner showed up a few minutes later, and so did another elderly lady. Three’s a crowd, they say, and we were chomping at the bit to run our errands. As soon as the door swung open, I spotted the next misery in the making: On the inside, the guy had stored away yet another sign to ward off unwanted customers and facilitate his unscheduled breaks. “Be right back,” it said. I wouldn’t have thought you can do worse in communicating with your clientele, but here I stood, corrected.

Before he could pull it out on me, however, the elderly lady, which I let go first, delivered some karmic balance: While turning around to leave, she knocked over the entire bubble gum shelf in front of his counter. Both her and I were already bending down to start collecting Wrigley’s, but, to his only credit, he stopped the retiree—and, thankfully, also me—from overstretching our backs: “It’s fine,” he said, “Leave it. I’ll deal with this later.” Though not without a big sigh.

While trying not to pee my pants from all the suppressed giggling, I waited patiently as he took several minutes to locate my parcel. The second elderly lady behind me already started groaning. As soon as I was out of there, I burst out in laughter and told my family. That had been anything but good customer service, but the entertainment was first class!

The basics of good business are easy—and they extend well beyond the confines of business. If you’re going to be unavailable, tell everyone who needs to know, and tell them on the channels where they’ll most likely receive the information. Most importantly, tell them not just how long you’ll be gone for but when you’ll be back.

Common courtesy communication is far from enough to succeed in this life, but practiced consistently, it is already a major step in standing out from the bad kind of average.

Yesterday, I went to a new dentist. In Germany, every time you frequent a doctor’s office whom you’ve never visited before, you need to fill in an anamnesis questionnaire. It’s a simple patient record with lots of checkboxes asking you about your medical history.

I’ve filled in dozens of these over the course of my life, especially in recent years. Munich has so many doctors, yet I’m rarely satisfied with any of them. This has more to do with the German healthcare system than those doctors, and yet I find myself trying new doctors—especially dentists.

I did my usual run-through of the survey form. Heart diseases were first. Arrhythmia, angina pectoris, pacemaker? No, no, no. Next, circulatory and metabolism issues. Blood pressure? Fainting? Ever had a heart attack? No, no, no. Diabetes, nothing. Stomach problems, nothing. Thyroid? Blood diseases? Epilepsy? Nope, niente, nada.

The questionnaire asked me about allergies, asthma, and various sensitivities. It wanted to know if I had hepatitis, tuberculosis, AIDS, or Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. How about osteoporosis? Taking any medication regularly? Drugs? Recent surgeries? The answer was always the same: no.

All in all, I checked 33 boxes with “No.” That’s 33 illnesses I haven’t had a problem with in 35 years. For the first time, it dawned on me what tremendous news this was. Sure, I’m still young, but how many people can fill in questionnaires like that and decline every inquiry? Young or old, there are more than enough who can’t.

If you want an easy way to feel good about your life, get someone to ask you whether a whole bunch of bad stuff has ever happened to you. As soon as you say no for the fifth time, you’ll realize: Maybe everything is going better than you think.

From now on, filling in an anamnesis form shall be a special occasion for me. A chance to check in, be happy, and give thanks. Be grateful for all the diseases you do not have.

Pokémon cards are the perfect hobby for me. First and foremost, they’re true to who I am as a person. I played the original games when I was in third grade. I collected the first few sets of cards. I even played the game actively at a local toy store. Every week, I’d go to the Pokémon league, play other trainers, win promo cards, and so on. I genuinely love Pokémon and its trading card game.

It’s also an infinite hobby. There are so many things to do just in the card industry alone. You can collect the cards, and there’ll always be more you want to collect. Over 150 different expansion, more than 15,000 unique cards, and plenty of expensive vintage grails that will take a while to chase down. New sets release every two months or so, so you’ll also never catch up. You can collect certain sets, subsets, Pokémon, themes, and on and on. This is to say nothing of the rest of Pokémon. The video games, merch, attractions, anime, and so on.

The hobby also makes money, at least for me. You can invest into sealed products, and there’s a whole community around that. Mine have probably increased by around 100% in value since I’ve bought them. You can grade cards to increase their value, which I’ve never done but am looking into. Every now and then, I also sell doubles I’ve held on to for a few months, and even that endeavor has been rather lucky in terms of turning a profit.

That brings me to the next point: Collecting Pokémon cards is easy. It can be time-consuming, but it’s straightforward. You can work with any budget, from ten bucks a week to ten grand a month. You can collect sets exactly as they are or come up with your own complex patterns. Some people just master one set. Others try to get their favorite evolution line of three pokémon in PSA 10 grades with sequential serial numbers. How much complexity you want to introduce is entirely up to you.

It’s not just that the hobby itself is easy to participate in, it’s also easy to do well in. Buying, selling, making deals, asking for photos, providing good photos, wrapping items carefully, shipping them quickly—it’s all common sense. You want to be fair, kind, fast, organized, thorough, generous, and go the extra mile. As in any service business, good behavior is easy to spot and emulate, both for customers and vendors.

So, Pokémon cards are the perfect hobby, at least for me—and that’s exactly the problem. Why? Because this perfect hobby is keeping me from my loftier, more important writing goals. The perfect hobby is perfect until it gets in the way of a bigger purpose.

This year is Pokémon’s 30th anniversary. Lately, I’ve been trying to tell myself I’d ride the wave until that’s over. But, three years in, I’ve got a lot of momentum. Taking a proper break to focus more on writing again might be easier said than done. Still, I’d surely like to take six months off. Aside from changing prices, I actually wouldn’t miss all that much.

Like I said, the hobby is infinite. There’ll always be 10 more cards I want at any one time. And sometimes, sure, the prices of those cards get away from me. I’ve missed cards at $10 which now cost $200. At the same time, If I’m meant to have some vintage grails, I’m sure they’ll cross my path in the future. The prices might take off—but the cards themselves won’t go anywhere any time soon. And even if they do, as long as that means more books and articles flowing out of my fingers, then that, too, would be perfectly fine with me.

This weekend, I’m attending my first card show. I’ll dip my toe into the water in terms of selling some cards and sealed items. I’ll vend at another one in the fall, consolidate my portfolio, and close off some sets. When will the big break happen? I don’t know, but it feels due.

Wealth is more than money or even time. It’s also giving attention to the things you know you’ll never regret. For me, two of those things are writing and reading—even more so than Pokémon cards—and that’s worth more than the perfect hobby.

Today was the good kind of busy. I didn’t get to pass eight hours fully engrossed in writing, no. I did many chores, had half a dozen meetings, ran some errands at the mail office, went to the doctor, and cooked dinner.

Each thing led directly to the next, so there wasn’t much time to reflect. I was too busy to ponder, and that’s often not a bad thing. Even scattered productivity is still productivity. Sometimes, it’s all we need.

In fact, I was so busy, I almost forgot to write this post. That’s a rare occurrence. And while today’s tasks aren’t necessarily an indicator that I’m totally on the right track towards my goals, the mindset very much is. “Let’s knock out this, then this, then this.”

Because in the end, success is pushing over enough dominoes until the chain keeps going on its own. Don’t seek out hectic days—but don’t write them off either.