TV, Video Games, Booze, and Brotato

Not sure what I’m here to talk about. It’s late. I try to go to bed at midnight but that’s a light try, a half-assed try. I have 23 minutes to.
Roommate’s been playing Brotato all day long. The constant beat of that game is sinking into my soul, it’s right below me. She’s unlocked just about every item and still going. It’s on my account so I get all the achievements. Too bad I don’t care haha.
I turned my XBox gamepass back on, saying it was just for one month. Now I’ll feel bad she’s gonna get cut off suddenly when my month is up. I’ve been playing Harold Halibut which is actually a pretty good, well written game with interesting art style. There was some other indie game with weird art style that I wanted to try. As usual I tried out a bunch of other games and didn’t like any of them. For me, most games are awful, frustrating, boring, with cringe writing. But like maybe one in 15 will really capture my imagination. There’s actually a lot of games that I do like and I started to list some but no. No we are not doing that. That’s like the most boring possible topic: “this game is good for these reasons and this other game is not so good for these other reasons”. But so many YouTube channels are based on this conversation.
So boring.
I hope I’m not coming off as condescending here to people who love video games and watch YouTube videos about them.
I don’t love video games.
But I’ve spent a whole lot of my life playing them.
They’re more of an addiction for me. They say it’s a release or escape and yeah, it does feel that way, but it also feels very similar to how alcohol used to be an escape or release for me and I thought that because I only had one or two drinks a night it wasn’t a problem but it was a problem because it was causing more harm than good in the long run even if I was “enjoying” it in the moment, except I wasn’t actually enjoying it. I was just escaping, like the feeling of taking off tight uncomfortable shoes: it’s not really a good feeling, it’s just a temporary end to a bad one but your mind tricks you into thinking it’s good.
My Tv and video game addiction has been getting better the last couple years. I’m down to probably less than an hour a day on average and most of that is time that I’m also eating or sometimes I lift my weights and try to keep moving, so watching TV is still a somewhat active thing for me, but still I’d like to cut it out almost entirely except for like special movie night events and stuff or when a friend is really excited to show me something.
And educational stuff. I do watch a lot of those self help videos on YouTube but it’s hard not to be sucked into things like Daily Dose of Internet.
But yeah, it’s an ideal to work toward.
I guess that’s what I’m talking about tonight. My TV and video game addiction, even though most wouldn’t consider it an addiction since most people I know watch or play more than me. But I see it as a problem, because just like alcohol I see now the huge advantages you get out of life when you cut it out almost completely. Alcohol and TV are just things I don’t do. At least that’s how I want it to be. I don’t need to be all strict and weird about it. But TV is much harder for me than alcohol. I have a desire to watch TV. I see one on and I get sucked into it and start ignoring my friends. Now that I’m mindful of it, I see how damaging it is to my relationships and my health, but it still sucks me in. It still takes willpower to resist. Alcohol isn’t like that with me. I have no desire to drink alcohol even though I spent almost 20 years averaging four to maybe eight drinks a week. Sure it wasn’t a “problem” but when you add it all up, I did a lot of damage to my mental and physical health.
I find it interesting when parents drink in front of their kids, but they only show them the fun and reasonable side. When someone gets stupid and shitfaced, suddenly they hide the kids away so they can’t see it. When someone’s mind starts to go from years of boozing, they just kind of ignore it and roll their eyes. So the kids only see the positive side of drinking.
If I had kids I’d let them see that kind of stuff, granted with reasonable safeguards in place. That’s what my parents did. Sheesh my parents didn’t shield me from anything. They told me the harsh truth about the world and thank God they did. I really appreciate them for that. I learned real early that adults don’t know what the fuck they’re doing, even though my parents had their shit together far better than most. Some kids are shielded from all the mistakes and awfulness of the world and from the perspectives that brought that awfulness so they can go through life never realizing that no one, I mean absolutely no one, not one single person actually knows what the fuck they’re doing and genuinely has things figured out. We’re all just trying our best to survive, many of us faking our way through life and others who open up to honestly work through their problems. But I guess most of us are a little of both.

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