20 years of habitual gaming - Intro

[Samage]

Greetings all,

My name is Sam. I'm a 37 year old kiwi living in the US. I started playing videogames when I was around 12 or 13, when it was almost more educational than leisure. This developed into a habit after high school on consoles, but eventually I got a PC and it was daily, for hours. WoW was what really sucked me in though and from 2004 onwards it has been a part of my life that I've spend well over 10's of thousands of dollars on over the last 20 years. Consoles, new PCs, new games, subscriptions to websites that talked about games, swag, merch etc. During all this time, I was a habitual marijuana smoker and masturbator. I had relationships but they weren't good ones and the more I gamed, the less it satisfied me. My first marriage fell apart because I was an unmotivated soft dick who got mad because the internet was too slow. I smoked dope to distance myself from the shame of it and the shame of accomplishing nothing as I got older and my friends went on to bigger and better things. -

As I got older, I noticed that gaming didn't satisfy me, so I spread my attention to other hobbies, like 40k (expensive and time consuming), MTG (expensive and time consuming) and other drugs that got me more distracted so I didn't ever have to face that crushing self-recrimination. Over the last 4 years I've taken long breaks from marijuana but I used gaming to cover up the hole. More recently, I decided to quit properly because I had noticed I was having obstructive issues with my lungs and my capacity for breathing had noticeably diminished. 

Day 1 I had a melt down after losing 3 card games in a row to a friend. I stormed around my "man (child) cave" wanting to break stuff and I did. After locking myself in my bedroom and failing to fall asleep I decided to let the gates open and just let it all out. The common theme I noticed in my rantings was how much of a loser I felt I was because of how much time I'd wasted on being unproductive and the main culprit was all the toys, games and other childish things I'd continued to immerse myself in. I wasn't a good husband or a man, and if I continued down this path, how good of a father would I be?

I spent the rest of the night going through my cards, games, consoles and getting every single thing related to it either trashed or setup to sell. Then the following day, I got rid of it all. That's today. 

A bing search yielded this website and here I am. Looking over the forums, it seems like this is an issue for a lot of people. As someone in the older bracket, hopefully some of you younger bucks can get this process started sooner and get motivated to do so by reading some of the older bucks stories. It's real. The guy who runs this website is bang on about life waiting for you outside of the gaming and drug funk.

So, hi.

[Martinof]

Hi, good thing you want to stop these hobbies that are destructive for you (and us).

Better late than never, good luck for the hard (but rewarding) journey ahead.

[Samage]

Thanks. I am ready for the struggle. As it is said "life is pain and you learn to enjoy it."