Should You Play Video Games Or Work Hard?

Introduction

The goal of self-improvement is to become better in every area of your life, and this includes your presence in the world and your maturity. If you do not spend most of your day thinking about real-life things, and if you fill your brain with garbage from fictional worlds, then you will ultimately become weaker.

I can’t take seriously someone who plays video games (not speaking about your father playing crosswords) and who tell me they’re serious with self-improvement. Listen, video games are a COMPLETE waste of time.

Some low-testosterone video gamers will tell me that playing video games is important because it helps them relax at the end of an hard day. And to this I just want to answer: Do you really think your brain is relaxing when playing video games? In reality, it is quite the contrary.

When playing video games, your brain is in a state of hyper stimulus: you are full of dopamine, the hormone of pleasure which often leads to addictions. You are hyper stimulated, your brain isn’t relaxing, it’s heating up! It’s literally making tons of chemical changes and sending tons of hormones, therefore not relaxing at all. It's a complete lie to state that video-gaming helps someone relax.

How can your brain relax in this situation? Your brain doesn’t relax by watching TV or playing video games, your brain relaxes by going to bed or watching the sunset or doing nothing but staring at a wall or meditating! But really, video-gamers like to bullshit themselves because they’ve been lying to themselves their whole lives.

I’m going straight to the point, you SHOULDN’T play video games. It’s time for you to grow up and start spending time doing things that actually help you in your life and boost your growth. Video games limits your growth.

And you might say “Oh but Mike Tyson plays video games”. The only times he plays them is for publicity reasons, and it’s very rare. Seriously, it’s time for you to grow up and live in the real world, and to start bettering yourself instead of losing yourself in virtual worlds and trying to become better through a screen because you don’t have the balls to get your ass off the chair and start living life for real.

As an intense video gamer when I was younger, who used to spend entire DAYS playing games, I can assure you, for every-type of people out there, that gaming SUCKS, and that spending time bettering yourself in real life is INFINITELY more fun and rewarding.

So, STOP PLAYING VIDEO GAMES. Start reducing the time you spend playing video games, and then erase it totally. If you’ve got a video game console, reset it, and start selling it. If you’ve got a computer, erase your video game accounts and erase the video game apps.

On your phone, erase video game apps. Use the mentality of “leveling up” in real life instead of leveling up in a virtual world. It’s fucking ridiculous, us humans spend precious time of our lives clicking on buttons to induce changes on a SCREEN, on a data code, which will then disappear forever AND which will also make us waste our precious lives and time, instead of living our lives fully in real life and being the best person we can become.

Now sure, if your video game is a crossword game on your phone that you play once a week like most father’s or grandfather’s out there, it’s not pure shit and as bad as gaming frequently on hyperstimulating games, but even playing this is unnecessary. Isn’t it better to play crossword on paper? Let’s try to avoid video games, it’s not worth our time, it’s ridiculous, and it’s extremely childish.

Also, video games undeniably lower your social status. You don’t attract the same people when you’re a gamer than when you don’t play video games at all. Some people play video games but are not “no-lives”, but even these people would benefit a ton from erasing video games. At all levels of addiction or usage of video-games, everyone would benefits from taking out video-games from the world.

And, what about television? Well, I’m going to be honest, I’m hesitant on the subject. Personally, I don’t watch TV at all and I believe that TV is a waste of time. I only watched it once or twice since the past few months for a short time.

The problem with TV is that it’s a hyper-stimulant, just like video-games, but the good side of TV is that it can be very informative and useful. Some documentaries about history, geography, or the news can prove to be useful if you are someone who’s for example into politics or who’s patriotic or simply interested in the world’s history. However, the problem with this is that we often get caught up into watching TV, and we easily can waste hours of our days on television watching.

TV is a problem I believe, and we should only watch it VERY RARELY. I’m not saying that watching TV is fundamentally bad, but it also depends on what you watch. If you watch purely fictional stories that have no life-lessons then I believe you should stop watching TV as it’s not benefiting your life.

On top of that, watching TV just makes your social hierarchy lower, especially if you watch fictional movies. You can’t be serious if you tell me you’re a Star Wars fan and in the same time you’re a “high value man”. It just doesn’t stick. The fanaticism and childish approach to watching Star Wars immediately makes you look more immature.

And, in reality, it might truly make you more immature, non-present in the moment, and childish, not only in social status but in your mind too, because by wasting your time on childish opportunities you end up passing by growth.

Personally, I don’t watch TV and I think you should do the same too. It’s simply a waste of time and it is not necessary for our growth. It’s not something that is fundamentally useful or important for us. Now if there is a TV documentary about history and you want to work in this domain and you can learn a ton of useful things, it might be useful to watch it. However, reading a book about it is better.

Watching TV for educational purposes can be alright if done rarely, but for entertainment, I don’t think TV is really useful. It’s best in this case to not watch TV. Now if you’re at a family meeting and at night you all sit down on the couch and watch a movie for example, you can go and watch the movie, even tho the best solution would be to simply spend time with your family without instant gratification.

In other words, what I’m trying to convey here, is that the time you waste watching TV could be re-used into bettering yourself, and that watching TV sucks. It should be a rare activity that you very rarely do, and it should stay at that. It’s just not worth it.

And, for the bullshitters out there who says it’s to “wind down”, understand that your brain is not winding down as well as it could be whilst watching movies. You’re not winding down when you’re stressing about the fate of a character or when you’re releasing a ton of dopamine. If you’re tired, don’t watch a movie. Instead, go and practice NSDR (non-sleep deep rest), meditation, watch the sunset, simply do nothing in your room and wait, go to sleep, take a warm shower, etc.

Much better to do things in real life that gives you better and tangible results rather than waste your time on TV. And this works for any kind of show, be it money shows, documentaries, fictional movies, cartoons, interviews, news, etc.

One great activity to replace the knowledge you could’ve gotten from your TV documentaries for example is simply reading. Reading is a non-technological, relaxing way of learning, and even tho it might not be as engaging, it helps develop your creative mind and generally it is good for brain health.

Conclusion

Watching TV and playing video games really isn’t necessary. You should reduce them slowly and in a few months stop them completely. Or, you can try to stop doing these activities altogether right now, instead of going for the “step by step” approach.

As always, thank you for reading, and I’ll see you next time.