On Pokémon and Productivity

An essay about being productive & a tiny cartoon.

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Hi folks!

Thank you so much for reading/subscribing to this newsletter. I really appreciate it! Since this is the first issue, I want to do a bit of explaining before I jump into things.

As of right now, the newsletter will come out every other week, and will include a short essay accompanied by a few illustrations. This piece is quite a bit longer than they usually will be. I had a lot to say! My hope is that, generally, this newsletter is something you can read over a cup of coffee in the morning.

Anyways! I had a lot of fun putting this together. I hope you enjoy it!

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THE POKEMON ESSAY (or: on Pokémon and Productivity)

Five days into winter break, I still hadn’t figured out how to stop. I embroidered flowers onto all of our face masks. I tried to write, staring at a blank screen for at least an hour every day. I alphabetized the bookshelf. I double and triple-checked my calendar, hoping I’d missed something (which, of course, I hadn’t). And, when all else failed, I paced around the apartment, trying to conjure up something to do.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve structured my days with to-do lists. These lists include both small tasks (answer an email, read that article you’ve had bookmarked for days) and bigger ones (finish an assignment, file your taxes). Suddenly, my lists were empty for the first time in what felt like years. School was done for the semester. The holidays put the freelance work I do on pause. COVID-19 meant that seeing family and friends wasn’t an option. 

In theory, a break like this sounds nice. It seemed like an opportunity to relax and recoup after what had been an exhausting year. Instead, I quickly grew anxious. Though I’d long dreamt of time off, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with it.

My girlfriend would still be in school for another few weeks, the two of us confined to the same little apartment. Exasperated with my nervous energy, she’d offer suggestions.

“Why don’t you watch a movie or something?” Danielle would say, looking up from an essay she was working on. 

“I can’t focus on that sort of thing,” I answered. Outside, the snow fell in thick, drowsy flakes. “I should be doing something productive.”

*

My first ever job was an under-the-table position at a tiny used bookstore, where I was paid with a $50 bill at the end of every shift. When the owner was out, I organized the shelves and manned the cash register. On especially slow days — say, when it rained — I might be there by myself for hours at a time, the radio crackling in through the shop’s old speakers. I’d read behind the counter, always picking books I didn’t own or had never heard of. Sometimes, if the books weren't valuable, the owner let me keep them, my personal collection growing steadily. 

I was 14 at the time, and obsessed with that job. When I wasn’t at the bookstore or at school, I was usually reading whatever the owner had gifted me: black-and-white copies of the Scott Pilgrim comics; books about the birds of Southern Ontario; weathered collections of poetry with dog-eared pages.

That would be the first of many jobs to come. Though I didn’t know it at the time, it would also be the nicest. In the years that followed, I worked at Tim Hortons and Coffee Culture; at independently owned cafés with questionable ethics; at a Kumon learning center; at a bicycle store and at The Gap. Working quickly went from being a novelty to a necessity. My life became structured such that, at all times, I was either a full time student or someone’s employee (if not both). And, slowly, I started reading less, always a little too exhausted to focus on a book. 

In university, freelance work got added to the mix. I felt strongly that when I wasn’t at work or school, I should be writing. After all, my ambition wasn’t to be a barista (though I’d gotten quite good at it!) or a sales rep — it was to write. And so, I wrote, and I became accustomed to a certain lack of balance: whenever I wasn’t doing one kind of work, I was doing another.

***

As the winter break dragged on, I grew increasingly restless, falling into a little cycle. Whenever I tried to do something productive — say, if I pushed myself to read or to write — I felt uninspired and frozen. If I tried to take a break, I felt guilty for not reading or writing. In sum, I was unable to work and equally unable to rest. The result was that I spent my days idly scrolling through Twitter, a nervous-sick feeling in my stomach. 

It was two weeks into the break that Danielle finally broke through to me. “Listen, honey,” she said, sitting beside me on the couch where I’d been sulking all afternoon. “You’re on holiday. You don’t need to do anything. Okay?” 

I shrugged. 

“You’re allowed to do something for fun.” She squeezed my hand. “In fact, you really should.”

As she got back to her schoolwork, I opened my computer. A few weeks prior, inspired by a conversation with a classmate, I’d downloaded a few of my favourite video games from childhood: Pokémon. There, on the couch, I clicked one of them open. 

***

Back in March, as the pandemic changed the world we knew, people immediately looked for silver linings. There was one idea in particular that I saw repeated all over Twitter: lockdown meant that people finally had time to work on personal projects. 

Some felt inspired and excited by the possibilities of time spent at home. Shakespeare wrote all of King Lear during a plague, people wrote. What’s stopping you? 

Others were harsher. In attempts to be motivational, they said things like if you don’t work on your goals right now, when you have all the time in the world, you never will. They framed the pandemic as a golden, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be as productive as possible.  You’ve always wanted to get in shape, they said. You’ve always wanted to work on that big project. The novel. The play. Yourself. Well, what’s your excuse now? 

I, like many others, fundamentally disagreed with this stance. We were living through a traumatic and—yes—unprecedented series of events. Everything suddenly became scary and uncertain. We had to deal with so much collective loss. Pushing people to be more productive seemed harmful and unnecessary. And still, I poured myself into side projects. I worked harder on my writing than I had in a long time. Even as I spent the summer working a thankless customer service position, I continued to write on my days off. While I agreed that we shouldn’t be expected to be productive in such extreme circumstances, I expected it of myself. 

I compared how much I had written to my peers and my colleagues, and I wrote more.

I saw my body changing in quarantine and I chastised myself. 

I pushed and pushed myself until I burned out. And then, for the last two months of summer break, as I waited for graduate school to start, I found myself unable to write. I worked my retail job. I came home and opened my notebook. I didn’t have the energy to set words down.

***

Opening Pokémon, I was immediately hit with a wave of nostalgia. Though I hadn’t played in nearly a decade, the music and design were immediately familiar. The game I’d chosen — Pokémon LeafGreen — was an updated version of the same game I’d played as a kid, with better graphics and colours. 

Most of the games start the same way: you pick and name your character; you meet a professor doing important Pokémon research; and then, in an especially crucial decision, you choose your first Pokémon out of three options.  

“Dan, who should I choose?” I called out. Not knowing anything about the game, Danielle pointed to the one she said was the cutest (Charmander, an orange reptile with a flaming tail). 

I’d asked the same question so many times growing up, always to my older brother, Thomas. He and I were very different kids. Our interests hardly ever aligned, and the gap between us was widened by the fact that he was five years older than me. Most of our time together was spent arguing, with one exception: we got along when it came to Pokémon. 

He had amassed a collection of about 50 VHS tapes from the original anime, all purchased at garage sales, and we watched each one so many times we could speak along with the characters. To my mother’s chagrin, we memorized and constantly sang the theme song, along with the God-forsaken Pokérap that aired at the end of each episode. We poured over trading cards together. And I sat beside him as he played the low-resolution games on his Gameboy, watching over his shoulder.

When he outgrew the console in high school, Thomas gifted it to me. I immediately became obsessed with the Pokémon games, wanting to live in the world they contained. Long after I was supposed to be asleep, I would tip toe into my brother’s room with questions like “what should I name my Pikachu?” or “which one do I pick?”.

“Shh, you’re going to get us both in trouble,” he’d say. But then he would relent, and I would sit beside him in bed and we would weigh my options, speaking quietly so our parents wouldn’t hear. We almost always chose Charmander — Thomas argued that it was the strongest of the three, and I thought it was the cutest.

Halfway through winter break, snow piling up on the windowsill, I played for three hours without realizing. I explored the pixelated world I’d been so familiar with as a kid, delighted by how much I remembered as well as how much I’d forgotten. I got to learn how the game worked over again, getting used to the controls and the options. When Danielle turned on a lamp and asked what I wanted to do for dinner, I was genuinely surprised to see that it was dark out.

For the rest of the night, I felt a little gross and disappointed in myself, like I’d wasted the whole afternoon. But the next day, finding my to-do list empty and my calendar blank, I opened the game again and continued to play.  

It took a few days to stop feeling guilty. I kept having nagging thoughts about all those things I convinced myself I should be doing: about the stories I should be writing and the books I should be reading. The joy of playing Pokémon conflicted with the fact that it wasn’t productive — catching an Abra wouldn’t help me be a better writer, nor would it help me pay rent. But eventually, I allowed myself to play without thinking about productivity. I spent entire days on the couch with my headphones on, completely enthralled by the same game I’d loved as a child.

Thomas called me one day, as he does every few weeks, and we chatted about what we’d been up to. He’s an electrician now, like our father, and he told me about the work he was doing out in Hamilton. 

“What about you? What’re you up to?”

I told him I’d been playing. We talked for a while about strategy — what I should do next, which ones I should choose. 

In the following days, I did little other than play Pokémon. As Danielle’s semester finally drew to a close, we would sit on the couch together and both play different video games, allowing ourselves to be immersed in worlds other than our own. 

After about a week and a half, I’d played through an entire game (by which I mean I defeated the Elite Four — I didn’t catch them all). As the credits rolled, the console told me I’d logged nearly 70 hours. 

“Being a Pokémon master is a full time job,” I joked with Danielle. 

She laughed. “So, what’re you going to do now?”

I downloaded another — Pokémon Heartgold — and guiltlessly played through that one, too.  

***

As the break finally ended, I was genuinely refreshed. Rather than feeling guilty for having spent so much time unproductively, I felt renewed and excited to start new projects. 

I had spent so long not allowing myself to do things purely for fun. I was convinced that not working or reading or writing meant I was lazy — that I didn’t want my positions as either a writer or a student badly enough. And while I didn't expect my favourite childhood franchise to be the thing that finally pushed me to take a break, it somehow was. 

I’m not saying that Pokémon cured me of the constant, nagging need to be productive altogether. But the game allowed me to take a break that I didn’t know I needed. And, as I returned to life as a student and a freelancer, it forced me to reconsider my work-life balance.

Though I’m no longer playing Pokémon full-time, I’m creating a little bit of time purely for myself every day. Whether that means taking a walk, watching a movie or playing Pokémon (which it often does), I’m committing myself to taking real breaks.

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And lastly, a little cartoon. The truth is that I’d never choose a first generation starter other than Charmander.

Thanks for making it this far! Feel free to reach out with comments/concerns/questions so I can keep improving this thing.