I ponder my life decisions at 4am, having spent the last 9 hours raising a model of everything I amn't. My Sim works hard. My Sim does the extra work. My Sim does not even own a TV to waste time on. My Sim works out. My Sim passes out daily from the exhaustion of working hard and not, as I do, from despair.

That's when it all hits me, what am I doing with my life? Here I am controlling another's core decisions, getting him fit, training him up, socialising him, making him speak to people, have a healthy life, and build a family and career - yet I sit here with the opposite of it. It makes you realise, am I missing out on potential in my own life by not treating it as such?

No. Hope is a lie made up by Big-Nothing-Ever-Happens to sell cope pills.

I won't let my Sim win for it would only set him up for pain. I make him immediately divorce his high school sweetheart Sim wife, send her back to her family and give her all of the money he has to support the 3 model children she took with her. Now it's time to scrounge. My Sim must sell his microwave for cash to pay the bills. He must sell his walls to pay his taxes. He must quit his job due to depression to fully live out the downward spiral towards a dark and bitter end. Finally, he's getting it. I see his once gleeful and motivated Sim break down into a wretched, crying, and pathetic blob who's scared to leave the house.

I force him to write music on instruments he can barely play and sell it, then I force him to read the reviews on the computer until his body sets into the stained and office chair that he salvaged from a skip. His ridiculous book that bombed is printed out, negative review by negative review, and plastered on the only remaining 4 walls of the cramped cube he lives in. His life - a fragment of the past, tormented by the pelting memory of consequences he set in motion, is ready for the approaching footsteps of Death.

March on, friend. I won't fight.