No Video Games and Existential Boredom
One of the things I am trying this year is to not play video games. Let me preface this by saying that I used to waste a lot of time on them, like 10-20 hours a week, sometimes more. I’ve played thousands of hours in my adult life. Video games are a great way to delete 100% of your free time without using one calorie of willpower.
So what happens if you stop? What happens if you have no outlet for your boredom? No tv series to watch, nothing to read and nothing to play?
There’s 168 hours in a week.
112 waking hours.
My rough weekly routine: 12 biking, 20 watching tv/eating with family, 4 hours weights/shower/preparing/misc, 2 hours cooking and doing errands.
That’s around 70 hours a week of unstructured time left.
What did I spend some of this on so far this year?
1- Made this here blog and backed up my old site
2- Made an Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/poxpower/ and resurrected my Newgrounds account.
3- Did that for the purpose of spamming and selling a bunch of new drawings and magic card paintings:
4- Planned a new game and made a bunch of concept art for it:
5- Worked a lot on the car / car camping things. Lots of research. Lots of purchases.
6- Organized my massive MTG collection into spreadsheets for documentation. Huge time sink there for no immediate gain but it’s easy mindless work.
7- Planned this big biking/car road trip, with dozens of mapped out researched rides: https://www.thepoxbox.com/posts/draft-route-car-camping-and-biking-across-canada
But most of the time, I’m so damn bored and tired.
You only have so much willpower in a day and doing new things drains it really fast.
Since I’ve stopped with the video games, all I’ve done is learn new things.
Signing up to make a new video game in a style I haven’t worked in yet is hugely draining. It requires solving so many new design / creative problems right from the start. I even bought a new tablet laptop just for it so I could work while traveling:
This required watching lots of YouTube videos. Then shopping. Then setting it up. Then buying a pen ( more videos and shopping ). I spent an entire afternoon negotiating on marketplace and then buying a keyboard that isn’t even compatible. Now I have to figure out what software to use for what I want to do. Then I have to learn how to use it. All these micro tasks require huge amounts of mental energy, at least for me.
Now I have to learn how to actually draw with this. That’s something you could build an entirely new career and life around and I’m making myself learn it on a whim while retired.
Stacking all these small new tasks together never allows me to get into a state of flow, i.e. working without seeing the time go by and without burning your brain out.
Wasn’t this about video games?
So what happens if you undertake all these things ( plus 15-20 hours of sports a week ) but you have an easy outlet for your boredom and you pay people to solve your problems for you?
Well you do and learn jack shit is what I’ve noticed. But you’re almost never bored! Feel like playing Stardew Valley today? Sure. Let’s do that. I can do things tomorrow. And there you go, 10 hours gone.
When I got stuck in WA state last year because of covid and the weather was shit, all I’d do for the entire day is play Stardew valley. Probably played 70+ hours that one week. Given my situation, nothing prevents me from repeating that week until I die.
The only thing you have to contend with when you do that is the extreme loneliness and the existential dread that overtakes you when you go to bed at night. But in the day? Video games make it all better!
But without a boredom outlet? You get BORED. Really really BORED. Every day I basically bored myself into being productive.
I waste many hours a day now mindlessly scrolling through social media and watching youtube. Not because I’m addicted and really putting off anything important but because I’m super bored and everything on my to-do is not urgent and requires expending tons of mental energy.
Procrastinate by cycling through projects!
The fascinating thing I’ve discovered however is that if you have a ton of projects and you just get bored enough, you eventually start working/advancing whichever one requires the least amount of effort.
Right now the most urgent thing to do should be some card alter preparation work I want to make on my new tablet laptop. But I don’t feel like expending the energy of learning how to do it with new software and how to port it back to my desktop. So I’m writing an article on this blog! There goes a couple hours of my day that I’d otherwise have spent playing Civilization 5.
Instead of nothing, there is now this thing I wrote that you’re reading.
My standards may be too high…
My goals might be too ambitious compared to what most people consider success and I may judge myself unfairly. There is just always this feeling that I should be doing something more. Probably a large part of it is from quitting dating after getting nowhere. At my age, with covid and on this island, dating feels like it’s just become a futile exercise in people thinking “I don’t want to be part of any club that would have me as a member”.
So if that fails, what do you do? I can’t help but feeling alone all the time, even when I hang out with friends and family. Does everyone feel like this? I didn’t feel like this when I was in a relationship, but turns out she was.
Is all this shit at this point me dodging having to arrange my entire god damned life around becoming someone else, again?
Maybe it’s time to stop and just play video games?
NICE TRY, BRAIN
You almost got me!