Well, I'm 31. I was like 17 when I started making conlangs, and back then life was simple and leisurely: I had three months free every year, plus basically no responsibilities outside school, and school is stupidly easy. University wasn't hard either. But, as it turns out, being as old as I am right now means basically having very little leisure time indeed. I remember back in the day I would fill pages and pages of random notes, doodles and whatnot for conlangs, cultural notes about the development of philosophy in the bronze age of one conworld or other. It was super fun and I loved it. Frankly, I miss it. Now I just can't get invested in this sort of leisure work (cause, in a way, conlanging is work, in the sense that its only pleasant and rewarding if you put in time and intentioned exertion of various faculties into it). As I've become older and busier, fantasy seems to have become less and less of my life, to the point that I don't think I've seriously done any conworlding or conlanging in years. I keep getting ideas, like, I'll play Crusader Kings 2, say, and I'll think "man, this feudalism thing is a whole system of international relations! in a way, feudal christendom was itself sort of a big integrated system even though it wasn't one unified empire. it's interesting how this works, I wonder if I could integrate this idea into this age in this conworld, except instead of personal relationships, with tribes, and instead of the main class being warriors (...)" or, "hell, wouldn't it be cool to make a logogram? yeah, for a language with a bunch of tones, but with complicated syllables, kinda like old chinese but agglutinating instead of isolating. yeah! and all straight lines, like to write into clay tablets." And its not like I don't have leisure, don't get me wrong, I've learned to play the piano, I've gotten some ways into chinese, I bike up the hill near my apartment... but conworlding and conlanging, its like I've lost that loving feeling for it, and I kinda miss it.
Maybe this has happened to the rest of the board: after all, we're all aging at (barring one of you being an astronaut for some secret near-luminal mission) the same rate. has it? how have you dealt with this?
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