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vamosalaplaya

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Everything posted by vamosalaplaya

  1. Wow, it's been a few days since my last journal entry, time starts to fly. As much as I'd like to do journal entries daily, I think I will continue to do them every few days or so instead which I feel I'm more comfortable with. I wish I could've been more active in the gamequitters forums by posting in other users threads more frequently but I'm still working on the social thing. I've come to the conclusion that in order to do that, I need to spend time working on myself first. I think other users here will understand that. If you read this just know I respect all of you and hope you all succeed every day, whether or not I choose to make posts. I got a call back from one of the jobs I applied to, it went well over the phone and now they've invited me in-store to meet face to face which I believe is the final step in the process, where they will (hopefully) choose to offer me a position. Getting back into working will really help me out in my situation I believe. I have some debts I need to pay off but aside from that the money isn't my concern at all. I genuinely will be happy to have something meaningful to fill my time with. Meanwhile my application to the military is still in the process but there seems to be some sort of error with the scheduling system and I'm having trouble setting up an appointment I was requested to set up. It's frustrating because I'm so invested in this but I have to be patient because I know that no matter what, if I make it in the end it will have all been worth it. Meanwhile for the retail job I'm applying to its cost over $200 to prepare for in advance, for something they're not even giving me a guarantee on, plus I have to have constant access to email and my cell phone etcetera. I'm very lucky and grateful to have parents who have been so willing to help me on this but I can't help feeling upset about the state of the world we live in where so many people are not as fortunate as I am. You don't even have be unfortunate, but if you're not fortunate, you're can be screwed, and then people wonder things like "Why are young people struggling to find jobs? Why do we have homeless people?" and so forth while screwing each other over to make it on top of their rat race. This is another reason that I am inspired by Cam Adair. He has given a lot in helping me the way I needed help, and so many others with the same problem. If I could help others nearly as much as Cam has helped me, it would be all the happiness I could ever need. Nearly two weeks without video games now. Thanks so much.
  2. Thanks honda that helps me feel better about it, and I will try to keep your advice in mind. Went walking outside in search of activities today. I was looking at martial arts programs and gyms but there aren't many in my area, and even less of good quality but you gotta make do with what you have I guess. The only problem is the prices are jacked up and they insist on contracts and the sort, which is problematic as although I would be as dedicated as possible to the program should I join it, there would be various more important things that must come before it. I have no intention of being charged for putting my priorities in the right order. I also applied to some new jobs. I spent about ten minutes typing on why I think it's silly that every place insists you use their poorly made online application process and won't even take your resume if you show up in person to apply, but I'll save you all the trouble of reading it. Thats about it for today.
  3. Thanks giblets and thehonasc00py for the encouragement. Unfortunately I missed making a journal entry yesterday. For some reason I had woken up feeling tired and had little motivation to do much that day. The tiredness was mostly gone today, and I spent most of the day indoors as the weather has not been so nice. I did go to the store at one point but spent most of the day reading, and learning techniques for 3D Modeling. It was not a very eventful day, I'm still searching for ways to change that which satisfy me. Today marks one full week since quitting video games so at least I can be happy about that. Even though I still wish I was making more of my days my mood seems to be significantly more positive than before. it kind of feels like I'm playing the waiting game. There are some things that are up to me to take hold of, but some are just beyond my reach and I have to bide my time in a productive way, but I still struggle with the "how"
  4. Hey, thanks for the support Daniel and Simon I had a really good day today. Spent most of it exploring a museum and afterwards a car show. Took some time to enjoy the scenery at both places, beautiful locations and perfect weather. Met daily goal for duolingo maintaining streak, had a good dinner, and spent some time reading. I was having fun and kept busy enough that I didn't experience any notable boredom today and my mood was up. Also didn't feel significantly tired during the day which is great of course. Outlook for the new week is positive.
  5. On this day I am beginning my journal on here. I quit playing games a few days ago, so if you're interested in the time between then and now, I've written about it in my introduction post here, but it's a pretty long post. Today I woke up early, a lot earlier than I would have liked, despite staying up the previous afternoon and going to sleep at a reasonable time. This caused me to feel a little bit tired through most of today, but nothing severe and I managed to stay awake. Hopefully tonight will be better. I gave a shot at cooking something for lunch that was a bit more advanced than I usually make. It wasn't terrible but it didn't turn out good either. I felt a bit sick after eating it, if I'm lucky nothing worse will come of it. I'm glad I tried, I learned from it. I also went on a walk for a few hours and listened to a podcast. I really enjoyed it and the weather was nice. I did my daily goal for duolingo, and I studied and practiced some 3D Modeling. I got bored a few times during the day but didn't let it bother me. It was a pretty good day, but there's still a nagging in the back of my head that keeps telling me I should be being more productive with my time. I want to work towards that, but I'm happy I made it through another day without games at least.
  6. I have never been a frequent user of social media. I had facebook since I was 11, but haven't used it for over a year (or maybe two?) now. I didn't bother to try shut down my account or anything, I just stopped logging in and that was it. Considering "deleting" your facebook account actually just hides it so they can hold on to all your info and history indefinitely, I felt just leaving it and never looking back was the best option. Using facebook never had any benefit to me. It was interesting in the beginning when people actually used to use it for it's purpose of sharing life activities and fun thoughts with each other but, at least on my feed, it all just devolved into dumb arguments and controversial manifestos being posted in the last couple years. It got really tiring and I felt I wouldn't be missing anything if I left it behind. My mood has definitely been better now than it was when I used facebook. Communication over facebook was rarely anything important or meaningful. There were always better ways, so that wasn't a problem. Twitter kind of seems extremely politically charged and unfun at the moment so I'm staying away from that. Reddit also has been like that recently, so I reduced my visitation to that as well. When I do visit, it's to a short list of subs that aren't rolling around in the mud. I don't have any regrets and I don't feel like I'm missing anything that would be beneficial to me in any way. Need to use the internet less anyway. People outside in the real world are a lot more positive and the world doesn't seem as shitty as these websites would make it seem. I'm gonna wait until the storm blows over
  7. Hey, I'm hoping to become an active member of this community in the near future and so it's time I write my introductory thread. I've been playing games my entire life, even since before I was old enough to understand how to actually play video games. It started out playing pokemon on gameboy I'm pretty sure. At the time I never really knew what I was doing, but I could spend all day moving aimlessly around the beginning areas letting my imagination take over. I played that kind of stuff for a number of years, moving through different games and consoles as they came out, game boy colour, advance, gamecube, playstation, whatever. My favorites were pokemon and zelda games. Obviously as I grew up I began to comprehend the idea of progression in video games, following the story to find new areas and such. I played these games a lot. Pretty much all the time if I could, but I was a very young kid, and I didn't have trouble socializing, playing with friends, and doing other activities. Then when I was about 7 or 8 I was playing outside with one of my friends when he told me about 'Runescape'. He made it sound a lot cooler than it really was, but I was really into knights and medieval stuff around that time so when I got home I decided to try it out. I had been much of computer gamer at this point, except some lego island, midtown madness, and star wars dark forces experience. Having an entire fantasy world right in the browser where I could go where I wanted to go and be who I wanted to be with a ton of people all over the world really amazed me. I went through the tutorial and I was hooked on it. I started playing it all the time, and it become all I would think about. I stopped playing it when I was about 10 and the game was becoming more well known, and people around the school started to play it. I decided that I was too cool to be playing it anymore. Instead I started to play various MMOs that were equally as uncool. Then when I was 11 years old ended up watching some video on youtube, I can't remember what it was or why I liked it so much but I remember finding out it was made with something called Garry's Mod. I had to have it. This is when and how I discovered steam. I got Garry's mod, along with Counter-Strike: Source, along with a copy of the orange box and some strange brown CD that seemed to activate every GoldSrc game released on to my account. I played all those games but I was the most addicted to Garry's Mod. I was playing it all day every day, it was all I wanted to do, and again almost all I would think about. All in all I sunk a few thousand hours into that one game alone. When I was 12 I had my first girlfriend, she was the perfect girl in my eyes and I never believed she would go out with me but by some dumb luck I managed up the courage to ask her and to my surprise she said yes. It was really good at first, but after a few months she broke up with me. She wanted to spend time together. I wanted to play Garry's Mod. And so that's what I did. A big dumb mistake that shouldn't have happened, but due to my addiction to playing video games it did, and I feel bad for her because she deserved better. This was just one of the first of many issues to begin to occur in my life as a result of video games. Over the next few years I put a lot of money into my steam account. I purchased and played many different video games. Some that I bought I didn't even play, or at least played very little of. I wasn't playing them because I was enjoying them anymore. I was playing them to fill a bottomless hole. Don't get me wrong here, I was still playing a lot of games, but it became more frequent that I was just sitting at my computer, mindlessly staring at steam and scrolling through the games I owned trying to find something to play but not having enough interest to actually choose one to play. It was weird. I had almost no interest in playing games, but I had even less interest in doing anything else... So I'd just stare. This became really common in my last couple years of highschool. I was beginning to do very poorly in school. Grades were dropping, of course I was never doing my home work, my sleep became very very messed up, I ended up being too tired to function during the day. I'd spend a lot of days just laying it bed, I started missing a lot of school, and it became worse and worse, eventually leading my to drop out. Afterwards I got really into Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and played that extremely competitively, putting in another couple thousand hours before deciding I didn't like the direction the game and community was headed and chose to leave it behind. Now we are getting closer to the present. I spent almost a year in bed after leaving CS:GO, sleeping a lot, sleep still messed up from playing games too late into the night. I did work a few different jobs in retail, some part time and some full time. While I struggled with them somewhat because of that due to my lack of sleep, I was able to perform but left them on my own as one was costing too much in transport versus what I was earning, and the other had neglected to provide training for the job, even months after acknowledging that they hadn't and should have. Then it was tuesday morning. I was still awake from the previous night as I had stayed up playing video games again and did not get any sleep. I was mindlessly viewing countless youtube videos I didn't need to be watching when I noticed that somebody I was subscribed to had uploaded something new. It was SoulBroRadio, in an interview with Cam Adair of GameQuitters. Game Quitters... I actually remember having seen it mentioned a few months earlier on his twitter, but I didn't think much of it at the time, and neither did I have much of an interest in watching the video, but something compelled me to click it and listen in, maybe it was just boredom. I was listening to Cam and all the things he said just hit me and made a real connection. Everything just began to click. It's not like I didn't know I had a problem with video game addiction. It's not like I didn't know I needed to quit video games, but something about GameQuitters felt like an opportunity, like I had a real chance to make it happen, so I went to the website and began reading about it as much as I could while listening to the interview. I knew I wanted to quit now, and I bought respawn to help me out. I really like it and find it very helpful. That same day I started to read it, and I removed all the games from my computer. I reinstalled windows to remove every trace of them, I unsubscribed from the channels that had to do with gaming on youtube, I removed the twitch app from my phone. Since tuesday and as of writing this introduction, I have not played a single video game, watched any gaming videos/streams, or read anything that has to do with gaming, and I'm glad. It hasn't been all smooth sailing in the following days but like Cam says, that's OK and I expected it. The hard part in getting started for me was that I started out with my sleep messed up, I was extremely tired in the daytime and that led to me passing out in the early afternoon the first few days, ultimately causing me to further mess up my sleep for the next day. It was hard to stay up long enough to reset my sleep without video games, and it was hard to find a replacement for video games while I was so tired, but I managed to stay away from the games and that's what I'm most happy for, plus I did accomplish some workouts, going for walks, language learning and cooking in the time that I could. Luckily I was able to catch a few hours of sleep last light intermittently and I feel at least rested enough to make it through today, so I will finally start getting some proper sleep now. I do experience some side effects of quitting. I had strange gaming related dreams - one where I was in the video game, and one where I was actually just sitting at the screen playing a video game, which I found strange. I also have some mild headaches that come and go plus a hard time focusing but It all seems to be getting better each day. Around 20 years of gaming over for good and I am excited for the future, but also nervous hoping that I can push myself to achieve the things I want to achieve now. I do have a goal set, which I have already started, but I'm not ready to share yet, it is not a short term goal and it is still early days, but I will include it in a post eventually when I am ready. 3 Things I am grateful for: - Game Quitters community, and especially Cam Adair, for really coming back to help others facing the same problem he once faced. I personally find it very inspiring when someone does that, and not only is Game Quitters one of, if not THE only real resource for combating this modern issue, it seriously couldn't have been better. We really are not just settling for what we can get here, I couldn't ask for something better than what Game Quitters already is. - SoulBrotha, for posting the interview from his radio show on youtube for free. Might not have found the help I needed and thus taken action if it weren't for that, - The collective people who spend their time ensuring the rest of us have easy access to all kinds of knowledge and information so that we can always be learning about something useful and/or interesting Previously I would have been too ashamed to tell anybody all that stuff about myself and my past but not anymore, because it happened, and I'm leaving it behind, it doesn't matter anymore. I think it's important to put it out there, my hope is that someone will maybe relate to it and also be motivated to take some steps in the right direction. Thanks for reading, I know I wrote down quite a bit.
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