Throughout my life, video games have been part of my identity. I’ve done everything from playing games until the sun literally came up to rushing chores to get back to my computer screen. As a kid, it was really fun, but as I grew up I needed to learn how to balance time. I’ve talked about balancing time in my last post, so if time management is why you came to this post, that one will probably suit your needs better! In this post, I want to talk about internal thoughts I dealt with as I grew up and how I processed them. At one point, it felt like video games were my life. It was how I destressed, how I made friends, how I sought entertainment, etc. With a hobby attached to so many things I cared about, it was hard to detach myself and focus on other things that mattered.
Understanding How Video Games Fit in My Life
For me, video games were what I looked forward to at the end of a long day. It’s what I strived to be good at and what I wanted to be better at. After 10+ years of playing games, I realized that it wasn’t the lifestyle I wanted, similar to how everyone who gets into sports can enjoy it but don’t go pro. In the same sense, I learned to understand that my attachments to video games were just that. Video games were meant to help me handle emotions. After this understanding, it became easier to know when I should be playing video games. For me, it was whenever I was stressed, bored, or missed my online friends. When I compartmentalized this hobby into this mental bucket, it slowly became intuitive for me to decide when I should be playing video games and when I don’t have to play video games. For me, it helped to see video games as a hobby rather than my life.
Hobbies With Healthy Patterns
Hobbies can help you express your creativity and keep you entertained when there’s nothing else to do. I think this idea is key for understanding how to prioritize any hobby (including video games) versus the hundreds of other things happening in your life. Everybody eventually finds an activity that they could enjoy for hours, but do we really have hours to give? As a kid, teen, and maybe even young adult, I would say yes! Enjoy life to the fullest when responsibilities are at an all-time low! As an adult with responsibilities (such as myself), I would say it depends. Some days I do, and some days I don’t. On the days that I do, I’ve learned to appreciate every second, and on the days that I don’t, I’ve learned that I could step away from my hobbies and still be me. Stepping away from a hobby doesn’t mean that you’re giving it up or falling behind, it means that you’re going to get back to it one day. Hobbies are always going to be where you left them. My piece of advice is to tell yourself that you’re going to come back to it. I’ve watched plenty of people step away from something they’re passionate about but forget to do the second part. As long as you give yourself a gentle reminder, you’ll eventually come back to doing the hobby if you really wanted to do it. The magic behind it is that you don’t even have to tell or force yourself to do the hobby. Part of what makes a hobby a hobby is that it’s entertaining for us! And as humans, we seek to enjoy life, to be entertained. We just need to remember all of our options and if we have time to enjoy a hobby!
Do I Have Time For My Hobbies?
In the past, I would struggle with this concept and saw my hobby as a vice. I believed that if I wanted to achieve my dreams, do well in school, etc, I needed to put the controller down and focus my time on things that would help me attain those goals. And it did. I was able to do better in classes, and, at the time, it got me a job on my college campus and an internship. “But Joemer, these all sound like amazing things, sounds like you did the right thing!” I didn’t do the right thing. In my opinion, these hobbies are extensions of oneself, and by stopping these hobbies, we stop being ourselves. For me, stopping video games also meant that I stopped talking to my online friends, didn’t have a proper outlet for stress, and didn’t truly feel like I had a comfortable space that belonged to me. The thing that I learned after trying everything from cutting off video games cold turkey to spending years trying to find what worked for me is that there’s always going to be time for yourself, and in those moments, we should feel free to express ourselves however we would like. Everybody has 24 hours in a day which means that if I could find time, so can you!
What Worked For Me
For those that are curious, here’s what ended up working with my schedule. I treated video games like I would when deciding what to eat. Sometimes, you feel so hungry and tired that you just want to order takeout, and other times you have enough energy to cook a meal yourself. Similarly, if I was feeling stressed out I would play video games and if I had the energy to work on other things I would do that. I currently work a classic 9 to 5 job so during the week I would play about an hour or two of video games and make an attempt of anywhere from 15 mins to 3 hours for other priorities like talking with friends and family, organizing ideas, or coincidentally deciding if I should cook or order takeout! During the weekends, I would tell myself that video games and other hobbies were my “failsafe” options. This means that if there was absolutely nothing else to do, I would take the gap in my schedule to have some me time. In my particular case, I even needed to consciously define what failsafe meant to me as I would prioritize hobbies like video games over eating, cleaning, and even doing laundry which are all super important obviously! So don’t just look at your schedule, think like me, and say “Well, I’m not hanging out with anyone and no one’s coming over so I don’t have anything else to do, I’m in the clear!” Actually check, do a mental sweep, and keep a standard checklist for what you need to do in the week. If you live alone or have a similar situation to mine, I’ll leave you with my mental checklist. Hopefully, it helps you too!
Mental Checklist On The Weekend
We tend to have more time during the weekend to do what we want. Before doing other things, I like to check that I did the following to make sure that I can go into any activity knowing everything else has been taken care of
- Go to the gym
- Eat breakfast
- Take food out of the freezer if cooking (Honestly, forgetting this is like a daily occurrence)
- Do laundry
- Eat lunch
- Clean my apartment
- Eat dinner
Also good to note that this sounds like a lot of different things, but I tend to have time leftover to do some hobbies or to relax!
Post At A Glance
Whenever I look at blog posts, I sometimes end up skimming through and not really finding anything helpful. So if you don’t have enough time to read the whole post, I want to say thanks for at least checking out my page! Without further ado, here’s a key takeaway from the post! Have a great day!
Hobbies are extensions of oneself, and by stopping these hobbies, we stop being ourselves.
– Joemer
Everyone’s situation is different. Some people dive into their hobbies and convert them into their passion in life. Other people look at hobbies as a time killer. Either way, we all have enough time every now and again to be ourselves.