Miguel

That totally resonates with me. I often also thought I had some unresolved psychological issue, a problem that the therapists could not find but I was sure I had it. I needed a name to my problems. But even if I really had something, just the name would not solve anything. It would only give me a excuse to justify my situation. What I really needed wasn't a name, it was action. Can see now that changes don't happen without effort! It is nice to see that in the end you managed to figure out the name of your problem, that is unfulfilling life. But it is even nicer that you are taking action! Congrats on your 50+ days of quitting! Keep strong!

Hey Tom and Watermelon, Obrigado! This new journey we are tracing now is hard, but being part of this community surly makes the way up feels a less steeper. Thanks for the support!

Bonus - the impossible list: Fitness - 1 - Run a half marathon Travel - 2 - Travel to japan during spring - cherry blossoming 2 - Visit St. Petersburg during the white nights 3 - Back packing in Scotland 4 - Live 3 months during summer in the Alpes 5 - Make a one week cruise in Greece or in Scandinavia 6 - See the Northern lights 7 - Go whale watching Creative work - 8 - Write a fantasy book 9 - Start a blog 10 - Learn how to play violin Adrenaline - 11 - Paragliding over the Sugar Loaf in Rio de Janeiro Skills - 12 - Learn a programming language (python)

Hi Travis! Thanks for the message! It is nice to be part of this supportive community where everyone have the same goal, to grow together! In particular, this struck me as kind of profound. It is very true. And conversely we can only live life fully again by turning off video games. You seem like you're motivated and off to a quick start. I wish you all the best! In my case it took me sometime to realize that I was not fully living my life . Even after I figured it out, I still could not make the move. I even thought this problem could not be solved. The game quitters gave me the motivation I needed to pursue the change. It is nice to have your support!

Day 2 - My goals: 1 - To improve my German 2 - To improve my cooking skills 3 - To learn how to work with digital content Possible projects: 1 - To create a blog or a youtube channel where I would teach the basics of German through my perspective. Other possibility is to be a volunteer in a German organization, so I would be helping people and in addition I would be improving my German. 2 - I could select one or two special recipes to cook every week and then I would photograph the final result and publish it on social media. Actually I I could even combine this one with the first one by choosing only recipes in German. 3 - I would create and design a calendar based on the photos that I took through the year. I could then use it as a souvenir for relatives. I chose the project number 3 to work on over the next 30 days. I had this idea since the beginning of the year, and I think this is the perfect opportunity to act on it. What will I need to do in order to complete this project? 1 - I have to chose the pictures I want to use from the ones I have (More than three thousand) 2 - To learn how to do photo editing 3 - To edit the photos that need editing 4 - To design the calendar 5 - To print it The main milestone is to have the concept done until beginning of December so I can print before I go for holidays.

Last, but not least - I have 15,465 days remaining. Excited to make the most of it!

Day 1 - part 2 The way people perceive you: That is a quite hard question. I think how people perceive me depends on to who you are asking. Points of view change between people, and as a result the way they perceive you will also change. I have the impression you might have opposite answers if you ask to two different people. But in general, at least back home, the feedback that I have is that they probably perceive me as a hard work guy, brave, creative and intelligent. They will also perceive as a sociable guy, which knows many people. Here, I think some also thinks the same. But I think others perceive me as unreliable, maybe superficial, socially incapable and very closed guy. I also think some also see me as a soft guy who will bend to stronger forces. The way I want to be perceived by others: First, I have to say that at the same time I like that some people perceive me as a hard working, brave, intelligent guy, it also makes a lot of pressure. I have a feeling that I am not keeping to that and this leads me to struggle. I would like to be perceived as a friendly guy, a guy that has good social skills, an engaged guy, a curious guy, a knowledgeable guy, a guy that has a dream and works towards it. Three behaviors I would like to change: 1 - I think the top behavior I would like to change is to live a more conscious life. I want to be more aware of what is happening now and also to be more able to respond to it. I want to be present in the moment I am living and not to be dragged by thoughts to somewhere else. I want my actions to be more a result of a conscious choice. 2 - I want to have a better self-knowledge. I think that having a good self knowledge helps one to know where one wants to go and what one needs to improve in order to get there. This is exactly what I need right now. 3 - I want to live a more risky life. Put in an other way, I want to live a life where I am not afraid of getting out of my comfort zone.

Yep, day one! Let's start with the letter: I was blindly living my life, which made me very unhappy. There were days that the calls to get up and go to work were nothing compared to the urge to play or watch series. I was feeling like everyone around me were evolving, were progressing in life, but me. I felt stuck in life, living in a eternal pause while everything and everyone else was on fast forward. You might be thinking, it sounds like a victim's talk, and you might be right, but that doesn't change the way I was feeling. The thing is, I had a lot of pressure, but I was poorly able to respond to it. I was supposed to be happy, but I wasn't. In the eyes of my friends and family back home, I was very successful. I managed to finish the university and I came to Germany to do a PhD. Sometimes it was very painful to me to know that at the same time that back home they were thinking I was progressing, in reality I was here struggling with all the compulsions I have, video games being one of them. I was unhappy with my life, in all aspects. For the social side, I am really bad in socializing, and every time I tried to socialize in the last two years I felt I was not able to and in the end it only gave me more motivations to play. From the work side, I am currently working in science, but it was never planned. Actually I never had a plan, by the time I had to do a move, I would always go where I saw an open door. And perhaps it was the fact that I did not have a plan that exacerbated the feeling that I wasn't moving forward. To be honest, today I question my self if I really want to continue doing what I am doing right now, something that I need work on to figure it out. It’s important to me to move from games because I think it was both, the cause and the consequence of the way I was feeling. It was a safe place to scape from all the bad feelings I had in life. I just needed to turn on the video game in order to turn off life. But turning off life only made me feel more stuck and more incapable. I had many ideas of things to do or to try, but it was easier to play than to take action on any of this. Reading Cam’s articles and videos made me realize that I could in fact use my free time in an more productive way and put energy towards something that I like and that make me feel good and proud of myself. It gave me the light on the end of the tunnel that I needed. Now I believe I can live a better, more conscious, more fulfilling life, and that is why I want to make this change.

It's now or never! Let start introducing my self. My name is Miguel and I am a Brazilian guy currently leaving in Germany. I am at my beginning thirties and I was suffering with video game compulsion. I said I was because I decided to stop once and for all, and it has been 57 days since I did. I know I am just at the start of my journey, but it feels so good that I have managed this far… My liking to video games, as for most of you, started when I was a kid. It started when I got a Turbo for christmas and then further developed when I was upgraded with a Super Nintendo. At that time I would spend hours and hours playing "Donkey Kong" or "Metal Warriors", my favorite games by then. But interestingly, later on, from the 17 to the middle 20's, besides still liking games, I kind of stopped playing it. I did it because I did not have any console, and I was too busy studying to get in and out of the university. I did not stopped completely and I would play it whenever I had a chance, but to be honest the chances were quite meagre. One of my roommates had a computer, on which I used to play AOE, a game that enticed me completely. but as the computer was shared by all of us, which means ten people, it was hard to play on it for more than two hours in a row. During my holidays, the matters were quite different. As I studied in a city far from my hometown, I always went home during my vacation. Even with all the complaints from my family, it always ended up with me playing hours and hours without stoping. But whenever I got back to the university, due to the the fact that I did not have many opportunities to play, my game pattern would return to the baseline level. After finishing the University, everything changed when I bought a notebook. It was much easier to play, and I did play whenever I felt bored, or frustrated, which would happen quite often. I decided to go for a master at the same University, and went on to stay more two years on that city. Many things happened on that two years: I got a girlfriend, I had a new project to work on, I moved to a new apartment sharing it with only one more person instead of 9. But one thing didn't change - I was feeling alone, I did not have friends and this was affecting me a lot. I did had a girlfriend, but unfortunately she was living 750 Km away, and although we tried to talk often with each other, it was not enough to stop me feeling empty. With all this buzzing on my head, it was hard to not give in to my desire for playing, for watching porn or for anything else that would keep me away from my thoughts, doubts and frustrations. The situation was even worst by the end of my stay there, when I didn't need to go to the university and could stay "working" from home. At some point I was so desperate that I even broke the cd that I had to play AEO. It was so easy to give in when the CD was just in front of me that I decided I could not continue in that way because I had things to do and I could not waste my time playing games. It worked, well at least partially. I did stopped playing AEO but soon enough I started playing something else. I would also kill an enormous amount of time compulsively watching episodes from tv series, one after the other without stoping. When my time there was over, I did managed to finished my master, however everything else in my life was a black whole, no friends, no girlfriend, no motivation whatsoever. It was exactly at that point when I got the opportunity to come to Europe. That was something I had always in mind, and the idea was even sweeter whenever I stopped and contemplated my situation. I was depressed and had had enough of the city I was living in. Moving to Germany looked like a solution to all my problems. It would be my first time in a plane, my first time abroad, my first time seeing snow. I was going to a beautiful city, I would work in a nice environment surrounded by people from all around the world. The idea was incredibly beautiful. I would finally be happy, only I wasn't. I came thinking that changing the place I was living in would change me, but in the end I was pretty much the same. Not long after my arrival, after the ecstasy of the new beginning started to fade off, my old and annoying habits would surface again. I started again a marathon of series watching and porn, and every hour I spent like that would make me feel really bad, and to deal with all this bad feeling I would watch more and more of it. It was a vicious circle. As if all the bad habits I had were not enough, I decided to buy a console. I was so sure that I had to buy it that I bought a game even before buying the console. I bought the console and in the beginning I would manage to play ‚healthy‘. But soon after that I got hooked, and I wouldn't be able to stop it before I finished the game. After finishing it, I was able to stay clean for some time, but then I would always get a new game, and then I would play it compulsively until I finished it. It was feast or famine. The interesting thing I realized is that I think all my bad habits are somehow connected. As soon as I started giving in to gaming, I would also start to give in to series, porn, bad food, bad sleep. It’s like I needed to say „NO“ to all of these in order to stay clean, but if I said „yes“ for any of this, everything was lost. As you can imagine, this situation was only getting worse and worse, and then I decided I needed help. I looked for psychologists, I had three different in a window of two years. None of them solved my problems. The last one, with which I have sessions for two years now, started showing me that I had to be the one solving my problems, I had to stand on my own feet, no body else could do it for me. But although I wanted to get better, I kept making mistakes. I already had a console at home and had problems with it but I decided I deserved to buy a new one, I needed a PS3. And you have to agree, if things were bad with only one console, it definitely wouldn't get better with two. Add to that the fact that things in my work were in a bade shape and you have a recipe for disaster. I got to a point I was feeling bad for everything. I was feeling bad for not being responsible at work. I was feeling bad I was not taking care of my self. I was feeling bad I was alone. I was feeling bad because many people thought I was having a great time, but in fact I was depressed and desperate. I was feeling bad that once I started playing I could not stop it. I was feeling bad that even if I didn't want to play, I was not able to refrain my self from it. On that point I decided it was enough of feeling bad. I needed to do something to get out of the hole I have dug for myself. Ok, being honest, I did hit this point several times. But the last time I did, it was different. This time I had a great idea of asking google for ways of stoping playing video games and it redirected me to game quitters. Reading Cam’s article on how to quit video game forever and watching his videos on TED made so much sense to me that I did not hesitate to delve in the 60 + ideas of things to do on your free time and to purchase RESPAW. With those materials I would start to understand why some times I could not resist gaming and why it appealed so much to me. It was interesting that some strategies were not new to me, like trying to put a barrier between me and the games by leaving them at my office during weekends, or doing online courses about things I was interested in, or meditating. However those techniques used on its own were not enough, at least not in my case. I was fulfilling part of my needs, but not all, leaving open spaces where gaming could sneak in. One of the important area I was missing was the social one, even more in my case because gaming did not contribute much to it as I never played online, even when playing games that made sense doing so. Reading Cam’s article I realized I needed to combine the strategies. I needed structure, direction and purpose in order to live a more meaningful life. I have to say the true, I did not stopped playing right away after reading the materials. In between I had a trip. I did not play during it but I did play before and played once more when I was back. This last time I played from 6 pm to 3 am and on that day I decided I need to stop all that. I was tired of waiting for a solution that would never come. I decided if I wanted to change I had to try and find something that worked for me. I stopped playing games on that day and I haven't touched one ever since. It has been 57 days today and it will be 58 days tomorrow. As I said before, It’s now or never, and I consciously chose now!