Hello everyone

[Seneca123]

Hello everyone,

as long as I can remember, I’ve been addicted to gaming. During my school time it was not such a big problem since I didn’t have my own laptop and the family PC was in a room used by all family members. So there was some social control. Moreover, I didn’t have a smartphone. It started to become a problem when I got my own laptop and smartphone after school. Currently, I play colonist.io and tower defence games a lot. I threw out my computer games but online games are a problem for me. In the past I played games like Stronghold (all versions), Rome Total War or Age of Empires 3 like crazy. I also watch Youtube quite often but not as much as gaming. I’m a student in my final year. Because of gaming I lost at least one semester altogether. I’m often unable to submit assignments in time and had to postpone them to the next semester.

My aim is to stop gaming completely now. For me it’s all or nothing. I can’t restrict my daily gaming time to let’s say half an hour per day. When I look back, I see how much time I lost through gaming. Some time ago I already stopped watching porn. But quitting gaming is far more difficult for me. I think one of the reasons why I’m playing games more often since some time is that I’m a bit unhappy with my life. I’m studying to become a teacher for secondary schools. One of my subjects is Social Sciences (mixture of economics, politics and sociology). In school, History was my best subject and it has always been my passion. It was the only course, in which I was the best student of the whole course. Moreover, I had an advanced course in History and in Social Sciences not even a basic course during my last 3 school years. Back then according to a prognosis, there is not much demand for History teachers. When I started studying there was no general shortage of teachers in my country. Nowadays, there is. That’s why I decided to not take History as a subject. However, I often regret my decision. Generally, I like teaching. My last internships went quite well. I also did private tutoring for some time and worked at a school during the last semesters of my Bachelor. However, I like social sciences far less than history. Furthermore, I suffer from feelings of shame since I’ve achieved less in my life so far than many of my peers because of wrong decisions in the past (too complex to elaborate on at his point). I intend to replace gaming partially with more studying time and partially with more productive free time activities: going to the gym more often, go for a run once a week and reading. I will upload my daily journals on the forum.  

Kind regards