As we grow up, we gain a lot of skills and habits which are beneficial to ourselves and others around us. From social skills, to technical ones and beyond. Unfortunately, we pick up and/or inherit some bad ones as well, that’s life after all. We’ll call those ‘baggage’ and personally I categorize them in two categories; evolutionary, and life baggage.

Evolutionary would be a trait you simply inherited, something primal and useful under different contexts but most likely problematic nowadays.

Life baggage on the other hand is little things you pick up as you grow up. Perhaps an addiction, or a propensity for being most of the time a couch potato. Arguably, some of life’s bad traits may have evolutionary root.

Darkest Dungeon makes a very accurate, in my opinion, representation of life’s character progression. In order to survive(and thrive) we picked up different traits along the way and even though each one of us is taking steps in order to gain more positive ones, not everyone is tackling their negative ones.

Identifying those bad traits is some times hard; we are all very content as we are. Sometimes though, those behaviors can be problematic for our professional and/or personal careers. A healthy amount of introspection is due in this case.

Character development is not only about addition, but about subtraction as well.