As someone who tries to limit time wasting activities and be more productive, have more motivation and so on, I decided to drastically lower my video game time. From a few hours every day, to maybe an hour or two every few days…which at one point I did naturally without focusing on it, I had a period where games became boring and I essentially stopped playing them for weeks and months at a time.
Then after a while I realized that even though I “freed up” massive amounts of time I could spend on productive stuff, like learning my target foreign language or learning some IT skills I used to learn before or at least to do some chores around the house, I continued to waste the exact same amount of time in different ways, mostly through binging shows, scrolling and youtube.
So in the end, I was equally wasting time by watching shows and by playing games, I got nothing done and yet if I told people that I watch shows all day, they wouldn’t see it as that big of a problem and will even discuss the shows, but if I told them that I spent entire days playing video games, I would come out across as a loser that won’t grow up.
What is the reason for this hypocrisy? The outdated view from the 90’s and early 2000’s when video games were still probably mostly played by kids and teenagers?
What about watching sports games? Unless you are a grown up “fan” that jumps to cheer every now and then, chances are you aren’t much more physically active than a gamer or show watcher and are equally unproductive. At best, at worst you might be throwing money on bets, tips, booze,etc.
As for me personally, I finally became productive when I started looking into stuff about dopamine baseline, which gets lowered after any ultra stimulating activity such as gaming, binging shows, doom scrolling,etc, so once I cut or minimized all of those activities for a few hours prior to doing house chores, I suddenly managed to get a lot more stuff done, even things like dusting which I hate. Yet, back when I quit gaming, but was still doing these equally unproductive activities, I had zero motivation to do any chores that I didn’t absolutely have to do.