3 Life Lessons I Learned Playing Animal Crossing When I Was a Child

Reading time: ~2 minutes

Summary (3 life lessons)

• Working hard and fast is not enough if you’re working on the wrong thing.
• Checking what actually works can save enormous effort.
• Anything important needs backups.

When I was a child, I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing Animal Crossing: Wild World.

In the game, you earn money (called bells), repay your home loan, and slowly build out your house and town.

Tom Nook is the shopkeeper and landlord. He sells you furniture, upgrades your house, and holds your ever-growing mortgage.

I took this very seriously.

I would grind for bells by mass-planting trees, harvesting fruit every few days, filling my inventory, and making multiple trips to Tom Nook’s shop to sell everything.

I was working hard. I was efficient.

But I was farming the local fruit.

In my save, that was pears. Each pear sold for 100 bells.

Non-native fruit, like apples or oranges, sold for 500 bells each.

Any foreign fruit I received via gift letters, I ate immediately. I was a child, and I assumed eating fruit was healthy and polite. You consume gifts.

...I didn’t know any better.

So I was doing five times the work for the same outcome.

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