Ah, the Valley. No, not the Silicon one. Let’s be serious. I’m reminiscing, of course, about the tranquil, highly pixelated world of Stardew Valley.

For the uninitiated, the game’s backstory is simple: one day, fed up with the monotony of corporate fealty, you/your 8-bit avatar decide to take up your dead grandfather on his offer to inherit his decrepit old farm in the middle of nowhere.

A smash hit with Tumblr e-girls and Switch casuals alike, the game has taken the world by storm with its rich world-building and sanguine motifs imploring players to slow down and smell the roses. In my 300 hours of gameplay, I’ve come to understand a set of deeper messages that have resonated with me profoundly as I look towards my future and the kind of life I want to create for myself. I’ve taken these lessons to heart, and now, magnanimously, share them with you. Namaste.

Life Lesson 1: If you want to live around more than one black person (that everyone inexplicably hates), you should probably stay in the city. If not, go ahead and skip to #2, nothing to see here.

Listen, here’s a hard truth for a lot of you: Stanford is by far the most diverse place you will inhabit for the rest of your lives. What, you think well-kept, integrated, intergenerational walkable communities with all-inclusive amenities within spitting distance are just popping up all over the country? Without the purposeful infusion of mind-numbing levels of cash, it’s not. going. to. happen.

Demetrius, the Valley’s resident person of color, is a cautionary tale. Move from the big city to your very own low-res “Get Out” situation? You’re probably going to end up a bit, well, disagreeable. Which, paradoxically, does not play well in small-town America… er, I mean “the Ferngill Republic.”

Life Lesson 2: If you want to have a healthy, lasting life partnership, marry a local goober that you can always feel intellectually and financially superior to. (This advice absolutely does not apply if you are queer, black, blonde, Deaf or otherwise unwelcome in a Princeton eating club.)

According to Stardew, you can find eligible bachelors, bachelorettes and bachelorxes:

• In the run-down saloon that everyone goes to in their free time because there is literally nothing else to do.
• Loitering near a body of water.
• That’s literally it. There are no other things to do in small towns.

You could marry the town’s only doctor or the artist/hopeless romantic with a house out in nature (or you could take your pick of any of the developmentally arrested young adults trapped in a rural nightmare), but let’s face it: at the end of the day, you’re going to have to date down a bit. That being said, my marriage to Sam is my happiest long-term relationship to date because I know where it’s going (wherever I want it to). 

So try it out. Find someone you know you’ll dominate. Yeah, you can support their dreams and give them space to pursue their passions or whatever, but at the end of the day, both of you will know who wears the pants and the purse in this family. He wants to work toward his dream of being a rock star? Steer him toward the safe though the creatively humiliating route of children’s television music production. Hey, someone’s gotta do it, and there are no freeloaders in this house. 

If they depend on you enough, you can bend them to your will no problem.

Life Lesson 3: People in small towns have no sense of punctuality and work whenever the hell they want, so rural poverty can’t possibly be that big of a deal.

If the small business owners in town were so worried about those big-city fat cats coming in and stealing their livelihood, they wouldn’t make their businesses actively hostile to human life (closed half the week for no reason).

If Marnie needed the money so badly, she would bother to show up to the job she runs out of her goddamn living room when I need to buy Cow #13 (taking name submissions by the way, pitches so far: Mootski, Hieferee Star, Palo Alto Creamery).

So go ahead and buy that house in rural Arkansas. The local economy can’t actually be that bad. It’s elitist to not want to, you know.

Life Lesson 4: Your coastal sensibilities are just what’s needed to get smaller, rural communities back on track. 

Those poor, poor hicks do not know better and would be S-O-L without your wise intervention — and intervene you shall. Enlist the help of local tiny forest magicians to make needed improvements to the town, pay a megacorporation to revitalize infrastructure while destroying the community’s third spaces, whatever you think is best.

If you’re moral and effective, it doesn’t matter how it happens; get the job done, and justify your choices later. Without your quick-witted schemes and deep, deep pockets, there’s a lot these yokels couldn’t do. (So they’d better be grateful.)

Life Lesson 5: It’s okay to sell out sometimes, actually

The Joja Corp. play-through makes it so much easier to finish all the achievements in Year 1. Don’t listen to those tryhard streamers whose “technical issues” are 10 times out of 10 a cover for restarting the day because they fell 10 minutes behind on their watering schedule. Cheating freaking lunatics. Just do the easier and slightly more reprehensible thing. It’s not exactly like large-scale animal husbandry is great for the environment (digital or otherwise), so you’re likely to get cancelled either way.

I’m not exactly sure how I could apply this to my life after Stanford, but it feels like there’s an abstract, unnameable lesson in there somewhere on some deeper level. I’m sure it’ll come to me.

There you have it: solid life lessons. Like some lunatic once tweeted about water bottles, “there are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see.” Even in cozy indie games, apparently. 

I maintain that there’s no better way to unwind after a stressful day. Sure, I need to play with a second monitor so I can see my spreadsheets, farm layout renderer, seasonal events calendar, character profiles and profit calculator all at once at any given moment to maximize my enjoyment in a totally healthy way, but that’s what works for me. After all, the name of the game is relaxation and learning to find joy in the small things.

Oh, what’s that? A lab, you say? Due tonight, you say?