keshava

Hi Anna, I thank you for sharing. I too have had trouble replacing video games with other hobbies and have relapsed multiple times. I am currently in an 8 month university program in order distract myself from video games. I think you are courageous having written and reflected on your past for us to see here. I just finished my first module in this course so I am in no position to know what will work for you. But in by brief respites from gaming I always started out with small goals like getting up and going to bed at the same time everyday, or making my bed everyday. I wish you the best of luck in your search for meaning. ~Chris.

Hi there strangers, Stay a while and listen. The first time I got introduced to video games, I was 6 years old and it was a Game Boy. My friends and I would spent hours playing super mario after school in order to break each others speed run records. Fast forward 23 odd years later and gaming continues to play a big roll in my life. I recall as a tween I would regularly wake up around 2 am at night in order to get a few games of StarCraft in while the entire house was asleep, or that during home-school I would often play games on the computer instead of studying. "Alt + Tab" had become second nature to me. I was and still am not a social person, so video games and me appeared to be a match made in heaven. Between switching schools frequently and a minimal interest making new friends, video games was the easy alternative for me to fill the social void in my life. To this day I have 0 regular friends, which I try not to think about too much, but I am concerned about what it means for my future. My lack of socializing was probably why I could game as much as I did and still make it through my engineering degree university. I have only worked as an engineer for 3 years of my life in part due to my gaming habits. As I have gotten older I have taken more time to reflect on why I enjoy gaming. This has led me to quit video games on multiple occasions throughout my life. At one point I managed to stay away from video games for one and a half years. The flip side is there have been months where all I did was eat, sleep, play video games and watch tv, sometimes playing as much as 30 hours straight. I was/am unstable and I would be constantly swinging back and forth between being hyper efficient for a couple of months to doing nothing else but play video games for another couple of months. I could support my destructive life style as that life led nowhere. It wasn't till I was 28 years old where I felt for a brief moment I was in control of my life and decided I should try having a relationship, which although I managed to have a girlfriend, it was very short lived. Then covid hit and I was out of a job. The pendulum swung as bad as it ever has in the direction of limbo and I was playing video games like my sanity depended on it. I never achieved any joy out of it, but It was something that made the time pass and pushed off my problems to another day. It was my parents who signed me up for this program, and that was 4 months ago. Not sure where I would be without them. I like to think that my life is on the mend, and that this is one of many steps in the right direction. I also know that it is likely that I can relapse into old habits and I need to be more proactive to ensure that this does not happen again. Thanks for making this program Cam and I hope to see you on the other side. ~Chris.