Video Games are Destroying Men
Personally, I’ve been playing video games since the Playstation one came out. I remember how excited I was to get this thing on Christmas and start grinding out the first Spyro game. That turned into Pokemon on my Gameboy then to the Xbox, Gamecube, Xbox 360, then ultimately going straight to Steam. As I’ve gotten older, I realized that I’ve continued to play games since it provides an adventure that I can’t seem to achieve in my personal life or when life became difficult. I had 200 days combined through several characters in WoW, I played Vanilla, Burning Crusade, and Lich King before I stopped. I then went to Dota 2, which I have close to 6000 hours on, combined with multiple hundred of hours on Battlefield, Elder Scrolls Oblivion and Skyrim, alongside several other games in my steam library.
As I’ve begun my journey on completely quitting video games, I’ll explain why I enjoyed video games, and the detriments that I’ve experienced which have led me to finally move on from them.
Why video games are very appealing to young men
Personally, I love video games. It provides me with mental stimulation and a sense of adventure that’s hard to obtain in the modern day. Life is difficult, and its nice to hop in a chair and grind out a game where you can make constant progress without having to put in any strenuous work. Everytime life got hard, stressful, depressing, or crappy I turned to video games as an outlet. It got to a point where everytime I was bored I would hop online to play same games of Dota 2 or to play an RPG. I found this enjoyable, and men crave a sense of adventure/progression, this is the appeal.
Why video games are destructive
There are a ton of videos on Youtube that coherently and delicately describe why video games are a complete and utter waste of time when it comes to getting your life together. Or in other words, describing why video games provide absolutely no real tangible benefit to your life. On a logical and unemotional standpoint, this is absolutely true. And this is coming from me, a person who actually enjoys video games.
Funny enough, you will still see people in the comments saying it’s okay to moderate or play games if you have a job, this is an absolute cope. Let’s be real, one hour turns into three or four, then it turns into the whole day of straight gaming. This is coming from me, a person with a college degree and a decent past career of working for big corporate entities. A lot of people around me consider me decently successful for somebody my age as well.
It robs your reward system
Video games are isolating, don’t provide you with any real world progress, and by many different comparative studies, are truly addictive in the way they stimulate your brain. Several studies show that people suffer from withdrawals when quitting video games, this is directly related to video games robbing the reward system in your brain.
Let’s be real here, nothing beats a real life huge achievement. Such as graduating from college and receiving your degree or getting hired into that dream job. That’s a real achievement. Grinding out gear and levels on Baldur’s Gate 3, Skyrim, WoW, COD or anything else is nothing but a straight up illusion.
What will I be doing now with my free time
Life sucks as a man at times, its hard and we are constantly judged on our achievements and/or our shortfalls and successes. But nonetheless, we all have to start somewhere.
I plan on working harder on this, working on some video content, getting back into music production, reading books and working towards my next career move in life. I plan on waking up early, video games do rob you of your sleep hygiene due to the stimulating nature of it, and starting a routine of being productive. I plan on putting effort into real tangible things I can touch in the real world.
Anybody can do this. You just have to come clean to yourself that are certain things you do, for most men this is video games, provide no real tangible benefit to yourself or your finances. Moderating playing video games, using it as an excuse saying you’re hanging out with you buds on Discord, or anything of the sort is an absolute excuse. Unfortunately, that’s the excuse I was using.
It will be hard at first, but with enough effort you will find other valuable things you could be doing with your time.
I hope you enjoyed this article. If you want me to talk on other topics or to expand on this one, email me with a request at thedailynook@gmail.com