When I was ten years old, I had no self-control. I would play video games for 12 hours a day and wake up at 4 a.m. to play video games. I would sneak around late at night to use the computer and play games. Any time one of my parents were to catch me in the act, I would swiftly change the screen and pretend I was reading, doing homework, or something more productive that I was supposed to be doing.
It would be a particular type of game I always struggled to control myself. It would be the type of game that wasn’t too difficult, where the effort and time I put in directly correlated with my progress in the game. In particular, I was addicted to MapleStory, an MMORPG where I could interact with peers, and leveling up simply required putting in a ton of time. It’s the kind of vision I wanted for real life: where a lot of sheer effort and time commitment could help you succeed at anything.
Fast forward to today, as a 26-year-old, and I am a grown-ass man. I am married. I have a full-time job in the school system. I am a law student at night, I run marathons, and I write online in my free time, so on the outside, I seem like a very accomplished, structured, and efficient person to be able to juggle so many commitments at once. At work, especially, I’m seen as running a tight ship, organized, and structured.
I’ve had some downtime over the winter break, so I’ve been searching for ways to make some extra money through gig economy work. I would rather not, but we recently bought a house and we have several friends and family members getting married next year, which is always a significant expense.
One website I found to make money was InboxDollars, which includes some offers to get to certain levels of mobile games and get cash back if you do so within a 30-day timeframe. The first game where this offer stood was Monopoly Go. This isn’t the game I was addicted to — I’m still playing it. You only have so many rolls without paying real-life money, so I looked for other possible income streams.
Another offer was to get to a certain level in another game, Puzzles & Chaos. This was an RPG puzzle game where you had to build your castle and participate in various battles. I won’t get into the details of the game because most people won’t care, but I started playing the game on Christmas and was playing it a combined two to six hours a day. On the first day, I played for almost six hours.
I was playing the game when I was supposed to be interacting with family and spending time with my wife and her niece. I played the game as I sat in the same room as them. It made me not only significantly less engaged in conversation and less present but less helpful around the house. This was especially problematic to me during the holidays and during Christmas when the whole point is to spend more time with family. There’s something to be said about a time of rest and respite, and if video games are part of that rest, it’s better to play in moderation than go completely cold turkey.
But there was an even more severe drawback: the game put me in a mental state where I did not feel like myself. I could not stop myself from playing at various points despite all the mental boundaries and deadlines I tried to set for playing.
Puzzles & Chaos was so absorbing and immersive that it made me feel completely emotionally dysregulated for three entire days. I could not sleep because the game made my mind race. I had a strange headache where it seemed like my senses were dulled and I just wasn’t myself. I Googled what was going on to see it may have just been motion sickness, like the feeling you get when you read too much in a moving vehicle. But even then, I remember it not feeling that bad.
In short, just like when I was ten years old, for these last couple of days, I lost control.
Obviously, I didn’t get as much done on these several days as I wanted to. I have an extracurricular work project I need to prepare for, side hustles to earn extra income, and readings for my first semester of law school. At home, I am working on pulling my weight and contributing equally in housework. Those several days, I had a bit of an existential crisis that I wasn’t who I wanted to be.
I told myself a simple story: I was letting video games were ruining my life, again, and if I cut this game out, everything would be fixed.
I deleted and re-downloaded the game three times. At night, when I’m fed up with myself and my inability to control myself when playing this particular game, I delete it. During the day, I realize how close I am to the level I need to reach to get the monetary goal, and I promise to set better limits. I remind myself that every day, I’ve made a significant amount of progress since that first Christmas day. I have cut down the amount of time I play, and while I still recognize that I move the goalposts often, I’ve been moving them less.
It’s important to recognize the progress. I think when something like video game use becomes problematic, the proper course of action is to stay busy, limit access, and cut off the game entirely. This certainly is my initial instinct every time I am sick of myself for wasting so much of my time away. In my mind, there is so much more of the world that I’m depriving myself of by escaping into video games.
But I’m brought back to that time period as a kid and early teen, when I was completely immersed in MMORPGs and they were, for all intents and purposes, what my life revolved around. They were completely an escape from the real world I found unsatisfying. My parents fought all the time, and I felt trapped in a chaotic home. Video games were my place of peace, solitude, and the world I wished I could live in.
Flash forward 16 years later, and I have this game re-downloaded. I gave myself somewhat strict instructions to only play for 10-minute increments while I have downtime. As I sit here, I am waiting at the doctor’s office, and I have met my goals with minimal moving of the goalposts. In this all-or-nothing mindset, I so often have, I am challenging myself to simply move forward with moderation, not a scenario where I either waste my whole day away playing video games or don’t play at all.
Even today, when I played the game for less than 30 minutes while waiting on line, I still had headaches and kept having this existential crisis. Just eliminating the game did not fix everything.
The headaches were somewhat concerning, but that is what I am at the doctor’s office for. I had a dental procedure to install three fillings and a crown about half a year ago. I’ve started to recognize these headaches that made me feel incredibly dysregulated coinciding with surges of intense sensitivity and pain in my new crown.
These surges of pain have come the past three days, and have disrupted my ability to sleep and my peace of mind when just sitting around and spending time with my family. I tried numerous quick-fix solutions on the Internet, including gargling a bunch of salt water, but the pain has persisted and the headaches usually follow. I only delayed seeking medical attention until now because the pain would be intermittent: it comes in waves every 20–30 minutes, and otherwise, I’m living my normal life. And because I feel normal the vast majority of the time, I think, “I’m fine — I don’t need to see the doctor,” until another wave of intense pain and sensitivity comes. One dentist I was able to get in touch with told me to simply go to the emergency room to be proactive in case my crown is infected.
As I am spending my holiday with my in-laws, it has been a struggle getting a hold of my dentist at home. I tried to call several dentists while on vacation, but the dentists and their dental assistants have, more often than not, also been on vacation. I realize that a lot of my mental discomfort of the last several days, of not being able to sleep because of headaches, may have come from this physical pain rather than simply playing video games for two hours. I don’t know and I can’t say for certain because, well, I’m still waiting at the doctor’s office.
Perhaps I just wanted to pin all my problems on video game use because I have, historically, tried to find one quick fix or one habit change as a panacea for all my life problems. It’s not like playing video games for 12 hours a day on Saturdays and Sundays wasn’t problematic, but I used to think, “If only I didn’t play video games, I would be the top student in the class” or “If only I didn’t play video games, I could have read hundreds of books this year.”
I don’t know what the reason for my mental and physical discomfort and existential agony has been the past couple of days. Obviously, I should have seen the doctor sooner. It could also be a combination of the headaches and pain caused by my dental situation combined with playing too many video games, or it could be a combination of a million other things.
We often give ourselves simple stories with simple solutions. A lot of us have dichotomous, black-and-white thinking when real life comes in a lot of shades of gray. It’s not like we try to, but we have the tendency as people to scapegoat one thing in our lives as the source of our dismay and unhappiness.
We look for quick fixes, and it’s not wrong to think one small positive change can cascade a lot of other positive improvements. However, according to Dr. Christine Adams, a psychiatrist with over 40 years of experience, these quick fixes often don’t work to create lasting improvement and change because they’re in the intellectual realm of knowledge and advice. People discover who they are in an emotional context, by knowing who they are and the root causes for why they respond the way they do.
By examining the structure and inner workings behind our behaviors and predispositions, people can work on themselves internally and find change and growth.
At the end of the day, our problems are a lot more complicated than we think, and the solutions to those problems are also very complicated. This season during the holidays is one of a lot of reflection and contemplation, so it is fitting that many of us, including myself, have existential crises over who we are and who we want to be.
No quick fix can solve these crises.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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