So through Yakuza 0 I picked up an interest in playing Mahjong. I got fairly good against the AI, so I thought I'd try my hand against real people. Through a little research I found a japanese website for this exact purpose and got to playing against them... long story short, I'm now grotesquely demoralized. Perhaps it was just the presentation, with it being a no-frills version of the game, with no ambience, no chat or emotes or flavor, no music just silence, and a very oppressive 5 second turn limit meaning I have no time to think or breath or do anything other than give the game 110% of my focus... and it didn't help that I just got my ass handed to me by what I presume are the regulars there. Basically the experience was like playing by myself against super awesome AI's, not people. It was enough to make me feel pathetic.
The feeling was very similar to a very frequent experience I had in school 10+ years ago, where we'd start class, and everyone would already know what to do. They'd just open up the books to the correct page and start doing the right assignments and follow along with what the teacher was saying, all without being told what to do. I was good in school, but I had just utterly no clue how the fuck people knew what to do without being told or instructed in any way. Honestly that's a feeling I still have today, I don't know how people even think to know what to do with their lives, but they do, and it alienates me like nothing else. I don't know why I suddenly felt like talking about that.