Seasonal Events

For 2025, I decided to start treating life like the live service MMO that it is. To that end, I decided to introduce themed seasonal events to my life. This is meant to give me the opportunity and incentive to do things I wouldn't otherwise have done. The end goal of this experiment is to learn new things and grow as a human being.

Details

Each seasonal event will last for three months, during which I will be incentivized to participate in certain activities that are relevant to the season theme. As I participate, I gain points, which will unlock rewards as I progress. These are mainly meant to motivate and encourage continued participation. Each season will also have a bigger reward, which I will earn by accumulating enough points.

Think of it similarly to a battle pass, but instead of pixels on the screen, this will help me try new things and make improvements in my life. The goal is to pick up good habits that stay with me beyond the season, and maybe even drop bad ones.

According to my original plan, the themes for 2025 were as follows:

  • Season of Health - focused on physical health

  • Season of Wellbeing - focused on mental health

  • Season of Ancient Wisdom - focused on delving into stoic philosophy

  • Season of Bonds - focused on friends, family, and appreciation


Due to certain circumstances in life, however, I had to push the seasons back by one, and starting January 2025, I began with the Season of Getting Your Stuff In Order. This season features no particular rewards to speak of, and is mainly shoehorned in because I have been behind on certain things, and I need to focus on catching up.

Season of Health is now set to kick off on March 31st 2025, and then the seasonal events will continue as planned.

Seasonal Structure

Each season will have a set of rewards that are mainly aimed at keeping up participation, and a final reward that is something that I want.

In order to earn rewards, I have a set of activities and goals that I can complete, which will award points upon completion. “Activities” are meant to be repeatable and will reward a small amount of points, whereas “goals” represent bigger milestones which award a larger quantity of points. I will be using an app to keep track of points on the go.

The general setup looks like this:

The points acquired for completing these activities will be balanced around the total amount of points required for all rewards, scaling in quantity as the amount of effort required increases. The goal is to be able to obtain all rewards within the three month duration of the season, leaving some room for not always making the “correct” decision. I’m only human, after all, and whole system is about rewarding the desired behaviors rather than punishing myself for not always making the “right” choice. This is also why there is no subtracting of points.