This post might come as a surprise after my previous happy post full of updates and pictures, but I feel the need to put it out there anyway.

For a while now I’ve been struggling with being a “gamer”. I notice it a lot on the weekend nights, Friday and Saturday, where I sit at home and play games while I feel like I should be doing something else. Mind you, it’s not like I don’t have a social life at all. I still see my friends and am out of the house a lot, but still.
Right now I’m in the position that I still live at home with no income and with people I don’t really like. My friends have all moved away, the closest one is a 15 minute drive by car now and I’m not really interested in “bar hopping” by myself.
Thus I turn to gaming. I have a lot of “online friends” who are gamers like me. Although I have fun with these people and have some sort of bond with them, it’s not the same as having real fun with real people. And after a while I find myself shunning the group of people I usually hang out with and retreating into a depressive state where I don’t like anyone or anything.

I’ve thought long and hard about why I have these moments where I absolutely despise logging or starting up any game imaginable. Is it because I’m unemployed right now? Maybe. I have more time to play than ever and when you spend hours and hours on a game it gets boring fast. However when I still had a job I’ve had more than enough of these moments aswell.
Is it because I feel lonely sitting behind my PC every night? Maybe. I’m used to being alone, being raised as an only child, and I’ve always found ways to entertain myself so this is nothing new. However I’m actually a quite extraverted person and I thrive in social situations. I love the buzz of people around me and I’m happiest when I’m in the big city where people are lively and abundant. I like doing new things and meeting new people and that’s not really something you do sitting in your room behind a computer. I also miss the social connections sometimes. Like I said, I have many online friends, but somehow it still feels shallow compared to the rich real life friendships I have.

Gaming has long been my escape from the big bad outside world. But now that I’ve finished my university and my life is actually settling down I feel it to be unhealthy to escape to a game when I feel like shit. It’s distraction, but it doesn’t make me feel better. Actually I often feel worse when I feel stressed or depressed and I start up a game. I feel like I’m avoiding why I feel this way by escaping into a game instead of tackling the issue head on.

Maybe I’m just very very bored at the moment and is this clouding how I feel about games. I’m not sure. All I know is that I’m slowly slipping into a phase of being unhappy with what I do and that I feel like shunning games as much as I can but still returning to them because there is little else to do. Which in turn kind of makes me despise the games I’m playing, thus making me more unhappy.

Maybe I’m just whiny, who knows. When I talk to my online friends they don’t really feel the same way. They find other games to enjoy or are able to just lay the game down. I don’t want to game hop too much however, mostly because of limited finances. I have tried to quit games, restrict my gametime or just play one game for a while. And although this works for a while I find myself logging more and more hours on more and more games untill I’m back to sitting behind the PC for hours and hours every day and feeling bad about it.

I don’t know if anyone else has struggled with these feelings and how they’ve tried to fix it, but I do hope I’m not alone in feeling this way…