It's really hard to capture what I feel about something as specific and strange as this modpack, it's weird to me that it's even on this platform.

Like many other people my relationship with minecraft mods has always been one of mere curiosity, pecking every now and then one and another mod that seemed to me more or less interesting/fun to lately forget about it or go back to Minecraft vanilla. I never really got caught up in any of them, either on their own or playing them with others, they were just a little momentary distraction.

So what was my surprise to find myself completely ADDICTED to it when I installed it after watching a YouTube video about it, hours and hours in front of the computer, searching in the wiki, lurking the discord... I was completely hooked, although rationally I knew it was not at all revolutionary.

In fact Gregtech New Horizons seems to me to be mechanically deficient, with an artificially high difficulty that adds absolutely nothing to the game and a crafting system that obfuscates absolutely everything for the simple reason of being obfuscated. As if an experience similar to those games so famous in the 2010s on Youtube, such as Syobon Action (Cat Mario) or I wanna be the guy, was transferred to Minecraft.

And yet I kept playing, from stone age to steam, low voltage, medium voltage.... It is as if the rational part of my brain, the one in charge of critical thinking, had completely shut down.

The catch is the following: this period of irrational consumption, grind and absorption occurred during a very turbulent time in my life. I was in the midst of a deep depression that basically paralyzed me with extreme anhedonia, nothing seemed to satisfy or motivate me, a black hole that basically nullified me as a person.

Was playing this the best way to cope? No! Was it even logical? Neither, but it helped me a lot. Giving myself a little intellectual challenge every day, trying to improve and refine the production lines... It gave me a reason to at least do something during the day, to keep waking myself up.

In the art of criticism, as when we consume media we like to sketch ourselves as completely objective and rational beings, able to discern the sacred from the profane and to distance ourselves from any relationship, toxic or not, that we have with any product. I try it myself when I talk about my tastes with a friend, but I think we are all fooling ourselves, denying a part of our nature that is simply undeniable.

Can one look "objectively" at the sun while ignoring the heat on one's skin? It is a chimera, or at least I am not intellectually sufficient to do so.