For years I laughed off the idea that video games could be an addiction. Then they cost me thousands of dollars, a lot of time I will never get back, and several years of my life. Here is where I have landed after more relapses than I like to count: I treat gaming the way I treat alcohol. It is something I cannot go back to, not a hobby I can manage. The games themselves are not the whole problem. The real problem is what I reached for every time my life went empty, boring, or lonely, and the games were the easiest thing to reach for.
Is video game addiction real, and can a person really have it? For me, yes. I played tens of thousands of hours, I got paid to play in 2020, 2021, and 2022, and I made over $100,000 in 2021 doing it. I had already quit for more than a year twice before that. The money is what makes the trap hard to see from the inside. My view now is that the biggest damage is opportunity cost: the time, money and attention that quietly leave your life while you sit in front of a screen.
My thinking has changed over the years, and the posts below show it in order. Soon after I moved in with my ex-wife, I was sure I had a video game addiction. I started a website to help other people beat theirs and sold off the games I believed were the most addictive. In I Was Convinced I Had a Video Game Addiction I describe the night I stayed up drinking and gambling $350 on Call of Duty matches. The diagnosis gave me a new story while I kept doing the same things.
The pattern kept going. In Addicted to a Card Game While Helping Mom Move, I describe late 2022, when I was streaming Gods Unchained four to six hours a day and put roughly $10,000 into it. The night before a flight to help my mom move, I felt the first ache of a cold. I called her and said I was too sick to travel. Almost as soon as I hung up, I felt better, and I found the energy to play. That is the pattern I now watch for: energy that shows up for the escape and disappears when it is time for the things that matter.
By 2025 I was back in a shooter, Call of Duty: Warzone, chasing views on a YouTube channel I was sure had been shadow-banned. I had no proof of that. In Chasing The Win That Hollowed Me Out I describe three days of solo grinding and how I nearly skipped my kids' theater show to play two more hours. I turned the stream off and went. Sitting in that audience, I felt hollow and used up.
My clearest plan for stopping came in 2024. In How I Finally Learned to Quit Playing Video Games I lay out the question that got me to quit the first time: what would my life be like if I didn't play? That break lasted a year and a half. I learned music production from nothing, put out albums, and got into crypto with the energy I got back. But I also list my relapses, and they followed the same script every time: life got quiet, a business idea flopped, or I had money and time and no plan.
Alcohol runs through every one of these posts. I have been sober for more than 10 years in Alcoholics Anonymous, and games and drinking fed each other for me. Zombie binges with a bottle of vodka beside me were how I fell back into both. That is why I now put gaming in the same category as the drink I can never go back to.
The fix started to make sense to me in Why Video Games Are a Poor Substitute for Sports, written in August 2024 after I got my tennis membership back. I had more fun in one hour on the court than I had in a long time. I also counted the cost. I spent thousands on Marvel Snap in 2024, almost enough for a full year of racket club membership.
Below this opening you will find all five posts, newest first. Three are memoir excerpts and two started as 2024 videos. If you want the crypto side of the Gods Unchained story, my play-to-earn gaming post explains why I now avoid those games.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- Addicted to a Card Game While Helping Mom Move (June 21, 2026)
- Video Game Addiction: Why I Quit, Relapsed, and Quit Again (June 21, 2026)
- Chasing The Win That Hollowed Me Out (October 30, 2025)
- How I Finally Learned to Quit Playing Video Games (August 8, 2024)
- Why Video Games Are a Poor Substitute for Sports (August 2, 2024)
Addicted to a Card Game While Helping Mom Move
Originally published June 21, 2026.
This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
At the same time, I was deeply immersed in a video game called Gods Unchained. I was addicted to it. It is a card game, similar to Magic: The Gathering Arena, but unlike most card games, it actually had a real audience on Twitch. A serious audience. I was close to qualifying for Twitch Partner, which requires seventy-five concurrent viewers on average. I hit the threshold at least once and even applied, but Twitch told me I needed more viewers who were not coming in from third-party platforms. Still, I had technically met the requirements, and I was thrilled. I still had this wild idea that I wanted to be a professional gamer despite the obvious evidence I hadn’t like it.
Gods Unchained was also a crypto game, and that is what truly pulled me back into crypto again. The developers found me somehow and sponsored me to play the game on stream. They paid me two hundred dollars to play it for an hour live on Twitch and upload a video to YouTube. Then they sponsored me again for another stream. They hooked me. I ended up dumping around ten thousand dollars into the game, buying NFTs and giving a bunch of the the $GODS currency away. I lost thousands of dollars based on what I gave away and the timing of my sales. Then, incredibly, I bought back in and sold again two more times. It was insane behavior, but the game had the best viewership of anything I could find on Twitch.
I streamed Gods Unchained every day. Sometimes I played four, five, even six hours at a time. I genuinely loved it. Customizable card games were what I loved most as a kid. My brother and I played Magic: The Gathering and the Star Wars customizable card game obsessively. Playing Gods Unchained tapped straight into that part of me. I climbed into the highest ranked division, Mythic. There were only a couple hundred players in that division, and I became one of them. There were weeks when I was the number one Gods Unchained streamer on Twitch. That felt incredible. I had just started playing the game, and suddenly I was at the top.
What frustrated me endlessly was that most of the people who had watched me play Warzone would not watch me play Gods Unchained. Even though many of them did not actually play Warzone themselves, they refused to watch a card game. It made no sense to me. If I streamed the game on Facebook, I got almost no views at all. So I focused heavily on Twitch. There was just one problem. There was no money in it. I remember waking up in the middle of the night in a cold panic, thinking, fuck, what if this game goes to zero like so many of these coins do? What am I going to do then? I am not making real money as a Twitch streamer unless I get sponsorships and play constantly, every single day. This is just going to turn into another Warzone even if the money works out.
When I bought heavily into Gods Unchained in 2022, the token price was around thirty to forty cents. I was excited because it had come down from its highs earlier in 2021. I bought tens of thousands of the Gods token in that range. The lowest I saw it while I was actively playing was around twenty cents. I could already see the pattern forming. Today, that token trades for under five cents. There were a few brief, possibly manipulated pumps along the way, but the overall trend has been straight down ever since. Even while I was fully immersed in it, I could see exactly where it was heading.
In the middle of my Gods Unchained addiction, streaming constantly and pushing hard for Twitch Partner, I already had a plane ticket booked to go visit my mom. I knew exactly what that meant. Taking a week off from Gods Unchained was going to seriously set me back. The momentum mattered. The views mattered. The consistency mattered. I was having so much fun playing the game, and it was giving me a real emotional high. I felt sharp, alive, excited. I loved that Gods Unchained was a game you won with your mind. You had to think. You had to build the right deck. To build the best decks, you had to spend money, and I did. I bought all the best cards in the game so I could build anything I wanted. I tried every deck archetype. I loved experimenting. It was mentally demanding in a way that felt deeply satisfying. On stream, every time I won, I gave money away. That created a huge rush. The energy was high. It was the best streaming experience I had created since Warzone, and a real community was forming around it. I did not want to leave that behind and I’m having euphoric recall just writing about it. I am setting all of this up because what happens next carries an important lesson. Building a real community around something you love is one of the best feelings there is, and these days I pour that energy into working with people directly — if you want that, you can schedule a one-on-one call with me and we'll work on building a life you don't need to escape from.
At the same time, my health was phenomenal. I had read a book called Breath after getting fed up with having constant little colds, runny noses, sniffles, and minor flu symptoms. I had been frustrated because I knew, based on my experiences with my mind and body, that I had more control than I was exercising. I kept asking myself what I needed to do to stop getting these stupid, nagging colds altogether. Right around that time, I walked into an AA meeting and mentioned this to someone. He immediately recommended I read James Nestor’s book. That recommendation changed everything. Reading Breath eliminated almost all of those little cold and flu symptoms for me. I still get a runny nose sometimes, but what I learned fundamentally changed how I breathe.
I trained myself to always breathe through my nose. I even started taping my mouth shut at night. Not duct tape or anything extreme, but specialized mouth tape designed to gently keep my mouth closed so my body could relearn how to nose breathe while I slept. Over the course of a few months, my nasal passages opened up dramatically. I have a deviated septum, and for most of my life I dealt with constant congestion, stuffy noses, and sinus issues. My mom dealt with similar issues herself. I was heading down the same path. Once I started consistently nose breathing and paying attention, things shifted. From the book and my own experience, I learned that you usually breathe primarily through one nostril at a time. The right nostril tends to be more active, associated with alertness and activity, while the left is more associated with rest and relaxation. As I am dictating this now, I am mostly breathing through my right nostril, which aligns with doing focused, active work. Since making these changes, I have had almost no stuffed noses, no constant runny noses, no recurring little colds. I love it.
My health reached a place where many of the everyday issues other people struggle with simply stopped affecting me. Sniffling, congestion, constant minor illness, those things disappeared. One of the biggest changes I made was stopping the habit of sniffling. When my nose runs, I blow it. I let it clear. I use a handkerchief, wipe my nose, and move on. I do not sniff mucus back up into my sinuses. I minimize mouth breathing as much as possible. With those habits in place, I was able to wipe out nearly every cold or flu symptom I used to experience. It felt incredible to realize how much power I actually had over my own body once I paid attention and changed something fundamental instead of just enduring it.
With all of that in place, we moved into late October 2022, right when I was supposed to help my mom move. The night before my flight, something strange happened. My entire body started to feel heavy and fatigued. I felt that familiar ache, the kind of dull, full-body soreness you associate with the very beginning of a cold or flu. I remember thinking, damn it, I can’t do this right now. It felt like my body was betraying me. That specific feeling where you sense illness coming on and your mind immediately protests, not now, why are you doing this to me. What made it so unsettling was how rare that sensation had become for me by that point. Even back in 2022, I almost never got sick anymore. And yet there it was.
The next morning, I was completely wiped out. I had no energy at all. I was laid out in bed, drained, certain there was no way I could drag myself onto a plane and fly to Mississippi. So I called my mom first thing. My mom has long lived as someone chronically ill, and sickness has been a defining feature of her life for a long time. I told her I was sorry, that I was sick and couldn’t fly out that day, and that I would reschedule as soon as I could. She was upset, but sickness is something she understands deeply, so there wasn’t much she could argue with. What is she going to say, you’re not sick? I apologized again and hung up.
Then something odd happened. I had been exhausted and dreading that phone call, but almost immediately after hanging up, I started to feel better. Not fully better, but noticeably different. I realized I wasn’t going to have to leave the comforts of home. I wouldn’t be away from my ex-wife, from my kids, from my routines, from my video games. That realization brought relief, and with that relief came energy. Enough energy, in fact, that I dragged myself out to the shed and sat on the floor to play Gods Unchained. That should have raised a red flag. I had enough energy to play a video game, but supposedly not enough energy to get on a plane and help my mom move. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what was happening, but in hindsight it is glaring. If you recognize that pattern in yourself — somehow finding energy for the escape but not for the things that actually matter — you can book a private call with me and we’ll look at it honestly together.
Even then, I knew I still wanted to go. I told myself, I really do want to see my mom. Come on, body, give me my energy back. I want to help her move. And yet another part of me clearly did not want to leave behind all my comforts and addictions to spend a week doing physical labor for her. It was obvious I was staring down a lot of work. After a couple of days, I booked another flight for Wednesday and went. I had just enough energy to make it there. When I arrived, my mom was genuinely happy to see me. That part mattered.
The next day, Thursday, the real work began. For an entire week, almost every day, nearly all day long, I moved my mom’s storage stuff. I mostly did it alone. I hauled roughly fifteen thousand pounds of her belongings out of storage. Most of it went straight to the landfill. I rented a U-Haul, drove load after load, and threw her things out the back onto the ground while bulldozers pushed it into the piles with the rest of the trash. There were tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of items in that storage unit. My mom had never taken the time to sort through it. I had asked her many times in the past if she wanted help, and there was always a reason it couldn’t happen. She was too sick. She didn’t have the energy. She didn’t have the time. Everything had been put off until the last possible moment.
Her house was a disaster and thankfully professional movers handled packing most of it. The whole week was exhausting. Even then, I still found ways to sneak in Gods Unchained. The computer I had with me, a MacBook Air my mom had given me, could barely run the game. It lagged, malfunctioned, and was incredibly frustrating to use. But I still played. I still squeezed in matches. I still made sure to get my play-to-earn in. Even in the middle of hauling my mom’s entire life to the dump, the addiction found a way to assert itself.
Over that week, I was genuinely amazed by how much energy I had. On Thursday, I picked up a U-Haul and started hauling box after box of books. My mom had an enormous collection of old textbooks, and I was lifting heavy shit all day, every day. We made endless trips to the thrift store as well. I loaded up cars and trucks full of belongings and donated as much as they would take. Even then, it barely made a dent. The thrift store did not want massive boxes of old textbooks, and there was simply too much stuff overall. My mom had tubs and tubs of stuffed animals. One image from that week still sticks with me. There was a blue plastic tub filled with Winnie the Poohs, Eeyores, and Tiggers. Somehow, it had fallen off the main trash pile at the landfill, maybe blown by the wind. The tub cracked open, spilled, and the stuffed animals were coated in dirt, mud, and sludge from trucks driving by. Seeing them like that was visceral. It was a harsh reminder that all the things we buy eventually end up somewhere. My mom had bought those stuffed animals with love and addiction. They spent most of their lives sealed in storage tubs, and then they ended up at the landfill, crushed back into the earth. The whole cycle felt absurd when I really looked at it.
Eventually, I did help my mom complete the move. She got settled into the house right near us. I was genuinely happy about that. Having her living next door felt like a huge win after all the years of effort it had taken to maintain and improve our relationship. I started going over to see her every day. I brought the kids over to visit her almost daily. I even started taking her to Al-Anon meetings. Those moments felt precious. I remember thinking that this was the payoff. After all the patience, all the frustration, all the distance, this was a good result.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Games playlist.
Video Game Addiction: Why I Quit, Relapsed, and Quit Again
Originally published June 21, 2026.
For years I laughed off the idea that video games could be an addiction. Then they cost me thousands of dollars, a lot of time I will never get back, and several years of my life. Here is where I have landed after more relapses than I like to count: I treat gaming the way I treat alcohol. It is something I cannot go back to, not a hobby I can manage. The games themselves are not the whole problem. The real problem is what I reached for every time my life went empty, boring, or lonely, and the games were the easiest thing to reach for.
Is video game addiction real, and can a person really have it? For me, yes. I played tens of thousands of hours, I got paid to play in 2020, 2021, and 2022, and I made over $100,000 in 2021 doing it. I had already quit for more than a year twice before that. The money is what makes the trap hard to see from the inside. My view now is that the biggest damage is opportunity cost: the time, money and attention that quietly leave your life while you sit in front of a screen.
My thinking has changed over the years, and the posts below show it in order. Soon after I moved in with my ex-wife, I was sure I had a video game addiction. I started a website to help other people beat theirs and sold off the games I believed were the most addictive. In I Was Convinced I Had a Video Game Addiction I describe the night I stayed up drinking and gambling $350 on Call of Duty matches. The diagnosis gave me a new story while I kept doing the same things.
The pattern kept going. In Addicted to a Card Game While Helping Mom Move, I describe late 2022, when I was streaming Gods Unchained four to six hours a day and put roughly $10,000 into it. The night before a flight to help my mom move, I felt the first ache of a cold. I called her and said I was too sick to travel. Almost as soon as I hung up, I felt better, and I found the energy to play. That is the pattern I now watch for: energy that shows up for the escape and disappears when it is time for the things that matter.
By 2025 I was back in a shooter, Call of Duty: Warzone, chasing views on a YouTube channel I was sure had been shadow-banned. I had no proof of that. In Chasing The Win That Hollowed Me Out I describe three days of solo grinding and how I nearly skipped my kids' theater show to play two more hours. I turned the stream off and went. Sitting in that audience, I felt hollow and used up.
My clearest plan for stopping came in 2024. In How I Finally Learned to Quit Playing Video Games I lay out the question that got me to quit the first time: what would my life be like if I didn't play? That break lasted a year and a half. I learned music production from nothing, put out albums, and got into crypto with the energy I got back. But I also list my relapses, and they followed the same script every time: life got quiet, a business idea flopped, or I had money and time and no plan.
Alcohol runs through every one of these posts. I have been sober for more than 10 years in Alcoholics Anonymous, and games and drinking fed each other for me. Zombie binges with a bottle of vodka beside me were how I fell back into both. That is why I now put gaming in the same category as the drink I can never go back to.
The fix started to make sense to me in Why Video Games Are a Poor Substitute for Sports, written in August 2024 after I got my tennis membership back. I had more fun in one hour on the court than I had in a long time. I also counted the cost. I spent thousands on Marvel Snap in 2024, almost enough for a full year of racket club membership.
Below this opening you will find all five posts, newest first. Three are memoir excerpts and two started as 2024 videos. If you want the crypto side of the Gods Unchained story, my play-to-earn gaming post explains why I now avoid those games.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- Addicted to a Card Game While Helping Mom Move (June 21, 2026)
Addicted to a Card Game While Helping Mom Move
Originally published June 21, 2026.
This is an excerpt from my full-life memoir, Un Fn Myself — my real story of addiction, recovery, fatherhood, and everything in between from 1984 to 2026, including the parts most people would cut out.
At the same time, I was deeply immersed in a video game called Gods Unchained. I was addicted to it. It is a card game, similar to Magic: The Gathering Arena, but unlike most card games, it actually had a real audience on Twitch. A serious audience. I was close to qualifying for Twitch Partner, which requires seventy-five concurrent viewers on average. I hit the threshold at least once and even applied, but Twitch told me I needed more viewers who were not coming in from third-party platforms. Still, I had technically met the requirements, and I was thrilled. I still had this wild idea that I wanted to be a professional gamer despite the obvious evidence I hadn’t like it.
Gods Unchained was also a crypto game, and that is what truly pulled me back into crypto again. The developers found me somehow and sponsored me to play the game on stream. They paid me two hundred dollars to play it for an hour live on Twitch and upload a video to YouTube. Then they sponsored me again for another stream. They hooked me. I ended up dumping around ten thousand dollars into the game, buying NFTs and giving a bunch of the the $GODS currency away. I lost thousands of dollars based on what I gave away and the timing of my sales. Then, incredibly, I bought back in and sold again two more times. It was insane behavior, but the game had the best viewership of anything I could find on Twitch.
I streamed Gods Unchained every day. Sometimes I played four, five, even six hours at a time. I genuinely loved it. Customizable card games were what I loved most as a kid. My brother and I played Magic: The Gathering and the Star Wars customizable card game obsessively. Playing Gods Unchained tapped straight into that part of me. I climbed into the highest ranked division, Mythic. There were only a couple hundred players in that division, and I became one of them. There were weeks when I was the number one Gods Unchained streamer on Twitch. That felt incredible. I had just started playing the game, and suddenly I was at the top.
What frustrated me endlessly was that most of the people who had watched me play Warzone would not watch me play Gods Unchained. Even though many of them did not actually play Warzone themselves, they refused to watch a card game. It made no sense to me. If I streamed the game on Facebook, I got almost no views at all. So I focused heavily on Twitch. There was just one problem. There was no money in it. I remember waking up in the middle of the night in a cold panic, thinking, fuck, what if this game goes to zero like so many of these coins do? What am I going to do then? I am not making real money as a Twitch streamer unless I get sponsorships and play constantly, every single day. This is just going to turn into another Warzone even if the money works out.
When I bought heavily into Gods Unchained in 2022, the token price was around thirty to forty cents. I was excited because it had come down from its highs earlier in 2021. I bought tens of thousands of the Gods token in that range. The lowest I saw it while I was actively playing was around twenty cents. I could already see the pattern forming. Today, that token trades for under five cents. There were a few brief, possibly manipulated pumps along the way, but the overall trend has been straight down ever since. Even while I was fully immersed in it, I could see exactly where it was heading.
In the middle of my Gods Unchained addiction, streaming constantly and pushing hard for Twitch Partner, I already had a plane ticket booked to go visit my mom. I knew exactly what that meant. Taking a week off from Gods Unchained was going to seriously set me back. The momentum mattered. The views mattered. The consistency mattered. I was having so much fun playing the game, and it was giving me a real emotional high. I felt sharp, alive, excited. I loved that Gods Unchained was a game you won with your mind. You had to think. You had to build the right deck. To build the best decks, you had to spend money, and I did. I bought all the best cards in the game so I could build anything I wanted. I tried every deck archetype. I loved experimenting. It was mentally demanding in a way that felt deeply satisfying. On stream, every time I won, I gave money away. That created a huge rush. The energy was high. It was the best streaming experience I had created since Warzone, and a real community was forming around it. I did not want to leave that behind and I’m having euphoric recall just writing about it. I am setting all of this up because what happens next carries an important lesson. Building a real community around something you love is one of the best feelings there is, and these days I pour that energy into working with people directly — if you want that, you can schedule a one-on-one call with me and we'll work on building a life you don't need to escape from.
At the same time, my health was phenomenal. I had read a book called Breath after getting fed up with having constant little colds, runny noses, sniffles, and minor flu symptoms. I had been frustrated because I knew, based on my experiences with my mind and body, that I had more control than I was exercising. I kept asking myself what I needed to do to stop getting these stupid, nagging colds altogether. Right around that time, I walked into an AA meeting and mentioned this to someone. He immediately recommended I read James Nestor’s book. That recommendation changed everything. Reading Breath eliminated almost all of those little cold and flu symptoms for me. I still get a runny nose sometimes, but what I learned fundamentally changed how I breathe.
I trained myself to always breathe through my nose. I even started taping my mouth shut at night. Not duct tape or anything extreme, but specialized mouth tape designed to gently keep my mouth closed so my body could relearn how to nose breathe while I slept. Over the course of a few months, my nasal passages opened up dramatically. I have a deviated septum, and for most of my life I dealt with constant congestion, stuffy noses, and sinus issues. My mom dealt with similar issues herself. I was heading down the same path. Once I started consistently nose breathing and paying attention, things shifted. From the book and my own experience, I learned that you usually breathe primarily through one nostril at a time. The right nostril tends to be more active, associated with alertness and activity, while the left is more associated with rest and relaxation. As I am dictating this now, I am mostly breathing through my right nostril, which aligns with doing focused, active work. Since making these changes, I have had almost no stuffed noses, no constant runny noses, no recurring little colds. I love it.
My health reached a place where many of the everyday issues other people struggle with simply stopped affecting me. Sniffling, congestion, constant minor illness, those things disappeared. One of the biggest changes I made was stopping the habit of sniffling. When my nose runs, I blow it. I let it clear. I use a handkerchief, wipe my nose, and move on. I do not sniff mucus back up into my sinuses. I minimize mouth breathing as much as possible. With those habits in place, I was able to wipe out nearly every cold or flu symptom I used to experience. It felt incredible to realize how much power I actually had over my own body once I paid attention and changed something fundamental instead of just enduring it.
With all of that in place, we moved into late October 2022, right when I was supposed to help my mom move. The night before my flight, something strange happened. My entire body started to feel heavy and fatigued. I felt that familiar ache, the kind of dull, full-body soreness you associate with the very beginning of a cold or flu. I remember thinking, damn it, I can’t do this right now. It felt like my body was betraying me. That specific feeling where you sense illness coming on and your mind immediately protests, not now, why are you doing this to me. What made it so unsettling was how rare that sensation had become for me by that point. Even back in 2022, I almost never got sick anymore. And yet there it was.
The next morning, I was completely wiped out. I had no energy at all. I was laid out in bed, drained, certain there was no way I could drag myself onto a plane and fly to Mississippi. So I called my mom first thing. My mom has long lived as someone chronically ill, and sickness has been a defining feature of her life for a long time. I told her I was sorry, that I was sick and couldn’t fly out that day, and that I would reschedule as soon as I could. She was upset, but sickness is something she understands deeply, so there wasn’t much she could argue with. What is she going to say, you’re not sick? I apologized again and hung up.
Then something odd happened. I had been exhausted and dreading that phone call, but almost immediately after hanging up, I started to feel better. Not fully better, but noticeably different. I realized I wasn’t going to have to leave the comforts of home. I wouldn’t be away from my ex-wife, from my kids, from my routines, from my video games. That realization brought relief, and with that relief came energy. Enough energy, in fact, that I dragged myself out to the shed and sat on the floor to play Gods Unchained. That should have raised a red flag. I had enough energy to play a video game, but supposedly not enough energy to get on a plane and help my mom move. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what was happening, but in hindsight it is glaring. If you recognize that pattern in yourself — somehow finding energy for the escape but not for the things that actually matter — you can book a private call with me and we’ll look at it honestly together.
Even then, I knew I still wanted to go. I told myself, I really do want to see my mom. Come on, body, give me my energy back. I want to help her move. And yet another part of me clearly did not want to leave behind all my comforts and addictions to spend a week doing physical labor for her. It was obvious I was staring down a lot of work. After a couple of days, I booked another flight for Wednesday and went. I had just enough energy to make it there. When I arrived, my mom was genuinely happy to see me. That part mattered.
The next day, Thursday, the real work began. For an entire week, almost every day, nearly all day long, I moved my mom’s storage stuff. I mostly did it alone. I hauled roughly fifteen thousand pounds of her belongings out of storage. Most of it went straight to the landfill. I rented a U-Haul, drove load after load, and threw her things out the back onto the ground while bulldozers pushed it into the piles with the rest of the trash. There were tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of items in that storage unit. My mom had never taken the time to sort through it. I had asked her many times in the past if she wanted help, and there was always a reason it couldn’t happen. She was too sick. She didn’t have the energy. She didn’t have the time. Everything had been put off until the last possible moment.
Her house was a disaster and thankfully professional movers handled packing most of it. The whole week was exhausting. Even then, I still found ways to sneak in Gods Unchained. The computer I had with me, a MacBook Air my mom had given me, could barely run the game. It lagged, malfunctioned, and was incredibly frustrating to use. But I still played. I still squeezed in matches. I still made sure to get my play-to-earn in. Even in the middle of hauling my mom’s entire life to the dump, the addiction found a way to assert itself.
Over that week, I was genuinely amazed by how much energy I had. On Thursday, I picked up a U-Haul and started hauling box after box of books. My mom had an enormous collection of old textbooks, and I was lifting heavy shit all day, every day. We made endless trips to the thrift store as well. I loaded up cars and trucks full of belongings and donated as much as they would take. Even then, it barely made a dent. The thrift store did not want massive boxes of old textbooks, and there was simply too much stuff overall. My mom had tubs and tubs of stuffed animals. One image from that week still sticks with me. There was a blue plastic tub filled with Winnie the Poohs, Eeyores, and Tiggers. Somehow, it had fallen off the main trash pile at the landfill, maybe blown by the wind. The tub cracked open, spilled, and the stuffed animals were coated in dirt, mud, and sludge from trucks driving by. Seeing them like that was visceral. It was a harsh reminder that all the things we buy eventually end up somewhere. My mom had bought those stuffed animals with love and addiction. They spent most of their lives sealed in storage tubs, and then they ended up at the landfill, crushed back into the earth. The whole cycle felt absurd when I really looked at it.
Eventually, I did help my mom complete the move. She got settled into the house right near us. I was genuinely happy about that. Having her living next door felt like a huge win after all the years of effort it had taken to maintain and improve our relationship. I started going over to see her every day. I brought the kids over to visit her almost daily. I even started taking her to Al-Anon meetings. Those moments felt precious. I remember thinking that this was the payoff. After all the patience, all the frustration, all the distance, this was a good result.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Games playlist.
Chasing The Win That Hollowed Me Out
Originally published October 30, 2025.
This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.
Chasing Views, Hitting Burnout
The frustration grew so heavy that I began resenting the fact that I even had more than one YouTube channel. The Jerry Banfield Live channel—rebranded from my crypto channel—was doing so poorly that I eventually gave up on it. After a few weeks, I deleted the whole channel and went all in on my original one.
That original channel, the one I had my silver plaque for, the one that had once defined my identity online, seemed cursed. Somewhere along the way, YouTube had shadow-banned me. I didn’t have proof, because YouTube never tells you if they’ve done something like that, but the numbers told me enough. Even when I did something outrageous—like live-streaming changing my race—the video barely got 12,000 views. Before the shadow ban, something like that would have pulled in hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions.
I didn’t know if it was because I had been posting nine videos a day in 2019, or because I ran five-day-long music streams in 2017, or if YouTube had simply decided that I was a “naughty boy” who deserved to be buried. Maybe it was just the algorithm punishing me for having a huge variety of subscribers who had stopped watching, dragging down my overall viewer satisfaction score. Maybe it was something manual, some switch flipped by someone inside the company. Whatever the reason, my views were drastically lower than they should have been. Videos that easily pulled 5,000 or 10,000 views on my crypto channel would limp along at 500 on my main one.
I tried harder. I pushed out up to six long-format videos every day and as many as 20 shorts. I threw everything at it—autobiography shorts, crypto shorts, music shorts. I started playing this game called Blue Prince, which was fun as hell and seemed like the kind of thing I could build momentum with. Other creators were blowing up on it, and I thought maybe I could too. I posted at least 20 shorts about it as well as some long format videos but nothing worked. Nothing gave me the views or the money I thought I deserved.
By this point, I was only making a few thousand dollars a month, despite pouring nearly all my time and energy into YouTube. The burnout hit a new level. It reminded me of the very last thing I did on Facebook before deleting my page with millions of followers where previously I had said I would never stream Warzone on Facebook again. Yet, out of sheer desperation for views, I streamed Warzone just to try and feel something again. The shame hit me instantly afterward, and I deleted the Facebook page. It was the only way I knew how to stop being that pathetic.
YouTube ended the same way. My last three days of being “all in” were spent live-streaming Warzone solos on my original channel. I wanted one more shot at winning on the new Verdansk map. I had seen that the game now used bots, which made solos surprisingly fun. Just a week earlier, I had uploaded a video saying Warzone sucked and no one should bother with it. Then I played it and, to my surprise, it was fun again. So I dove back in, streaming for hours.
The rush was unreal. I hadn’t played first-person shooters in over a year. I had been sticking to strategy games like Blue Prince and card games. Jumping back into Warzone hit me like a drug. It felt like what I imagined meth or cocaine must feel like—this jittery, high, euphoric, aggravated state. I’d never done those drugs, but that’s what it felt like in my body. For three days, I binged Call of Duty: Warzone. One of those days, I even broke it up with a two-hour crypto podcast in the middle of a seven-hour stream, five of those hours just grinding Warzone solos.
On the third day, the last game I played, I came in second place. I had done everything right in terms of strategy, but my skills were rusty. I hadn’t played enough games recently, and my aim wasn’t sharp. The final fight was against someone who either had insane skill or was cheating, and they shredded me. Losing that match crushed me, but what scared me more was what came next.
I almost rationalized skipping my children’s theater show. They had been in a summer camp all week in St. Petersburg, Florida, and the big performance was that afternoon. I told myself it wouldn’t matter if I was there. My ex-wife and her family would be there, so who would notice? I had already played three hours of Warzone that day, but I was itching for more. If I skipped the show, I could squeeze in another two hours and maybe finally get that win.
Thankfully, some tiny shred of self-awareness stopped me. I turned off the stream and went to the kids’ show. Sitting there, I felt hollow. Depressed. It was the same empty, used up feeling I’d had decades earlier, back when I went out on a date with that girl from the grocery store after binging video games all day. I had burned myself out before the real moment even arrived. All my dopamine and adrenaline had been spent in front of a screen, and I had nothing left to feel good with. If you know that hollow, used-up feeling after chasing a win that never actually fills you, you can schedule a private one-on-one call with me and we’ll start building healthier habits and a life you do not need to escape from.
On the drive home, a car pulled out in front of me, and I leaned on the horn. Then, instead of blaming them, I thought: “Of course you’re acting that way. You just spent 10 hours playing Warzone in the past couple of days. It makes sense you would be acting this way.”
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Games playlist.
How I Finally Learned to Quit Playing Video Games
From my video published August 8, 2024.
I want to share how I've finally obtained freedom from video game addiction. I'm going to cover the questions I had to keep asking myself: Is gaming a problem for me? Why is it so hard to quit gaming? Are some games worse than others? Can I just play normally? What exactly is a video game addiction? And if you're dealing with other people in your life who are in video game addictions, what you can do about that.
Now, if you're someone like my wife, who was playing too much Candy Crush and just literally deleted the game from her phone and was able to move on, you probably don't need any of this. But this is for you if you've ever quit playing video games and then went back to it. If you're playing more video games now than you ever have before. If you find that video games have often sabotaged your life in the past.
For example, video games crushed my dating life in college. I was playing video games, but I also picked girls up all the time. I got tons of phone numbers. Then, because I'd be playing video games all the time, it was hard to even go out on a date or have a relationship after the initial pickup. If you want more of how I've thought about that side of my life over the years, it runs through my Dating playlist.
And if video games are associated with things like drinking alcohol, smoking weed, getting knocked out, doped up on pills — if those things are happening in your life, there is definitely a video game addiction present. The question is, how are you going to address it?
I've played tens of thousands of hours, and I got paid to do it
I've played tens of thousands of hours of video games in my life. I've even been a professional gamer in 2020, 2021, and 2022. I got paid to play video games. I made over $100,000 in 2021 playing video games, after I had already quit twice for more than a year each time.
Now, you'll go through a lot of the lies you tell yourself. Well, I'll quit playing video games when I have kids. I'll quit playing video games when work gets busy. What you'll often find is that you may do it in the short term, but you'll miss the gaming, and you'll end up going back to it whenever your life gets a little chaotic, or a little open, or a little boring.
The opportunity cost is the real damage
Ultimately, the main thing with video game addiction is the opportunity cost. The video games themselves definitely are destructive. I'm going to talk about how video games warp and screw up your mind and make it harder to interface with reality, and how you don't even see that part of it. But the main thing is the opportunity cost.
I would love to see what my life would look like if I never played video games and never drank alcohol. Those two things — I blew years, tens of thousands of hours. Video games was the number one thing, time-wise, that I would say I just wasted my time on. Think about all the things you could put in there instead. All the girls I could have dated. All the sports I could have played. How great a shape my body could be in. I could have learned and mastered skills like coding, like making music. I could have traveled the world. I literally played enough video games to travel the entire world. I could have probably gone to almost every country.
There are so many amazing experiences I traded for sitting in front of a TV, shooting zombies, trying to get a Warzone solo win. That is what people don't see. Video games set you up in this cycle where, yes, I know it's fun. I know it's fun. Except for me, I've gotten to a point where, at the frequency I'm on now, video games aren't fun for me anymore. They're almost total suffering. I hope you can exit before getting to that point.
Other people helped me out of alcoholism — gaming I had to fight alone, over and over
As with alcoholism — I'm sober over 10 years in Alcoholics Anonymous — other people helped me exit my alcoholism before my life totally went down the drain. But with video game addiction, I've struggled back and forth. I wrote a book with video game addiction stories in 2012 and 2013, when I identified that I had a video game addiction in 2011. And I couldn't stop.
Then I drank, then I tried to stay sober. About a year after identifying that I had a video game addiction, I also faced that I had a problem with alcohol — which had been very obvious back in 2003 and 2004. So after seven years of denial, I was able to get out of the alcohol. But by 2012, I'm gaming and drinking. I quit drinking in 2014, but I kept playing video games up to 2017, when I quit. Then I started back in 2018. Quit again in 2019. Started back up in 2020. And then I've quit several times — in 2020, in 2023, and again in 2024.
So I know this is a difficult subject, and I'm hoping to make it easier for you, because you might not have this much time to waste in your life. I've not been burdened with a full-time job. I haven't had a so-called real job since 2009. I've had a temporary job working for the census. I've been a graduate assistant. But the last real job I had with a paycheck was 2012. If you work, and depending on the rest of your life, you might not have as much time to waste as me. I want you to figure this out sooner than I did, because you might not have that much time left. There are things you can do with your life that, if you play video games, you simply won't do.
What you trade away: a conversation with my friend about Fallout
I was just talking to a guy last night. I said, how much sex would you have with your girlfriend if you stopped playing Fallout every night for two hours? Y'all are only doing it once or twice a week? If you weren't playing Fallout, you might be doing it every day. Come on. You're like 30. Y'all aren't married, don't have kids yet. But you're playing Fallout instead for two hours a night. You're trading this cheap gaming experience for a much more fulfilling and connecting experience.
Video game addiction is hard because I know you'll tell yourself it's not that bad. I was telling myself that earlier this year. It's not that bad. It's not like I'm out drinking. It's not like I'm out doing drugs. It's not like I'm out cheating. It's not like I'm out driving a motorcycle and racing cars. It's not like I'm doing something worse. But what kind of justification is that to live your life by — well, I could be doing something worse?
Why stopping feels scary
Some of you, at this point, don't want to get better. You want to stop being a zombie and going through life on autopilot, but when somebody actually tells you exactly what you need to do, gives you the step-by-step template, and shows you totally for free exactly how to get out of video game addiction, some of you get scared. It's like, well, if I really listen to you, I don't know what my life's going to be like. That's what's really intimidating.
I remember when I got sober, I thought, if I quit drinking, I don't know what's going to happen to me. I knew what was going to happen if I kept drinking — I was just going to drink myself to death and have this pathetic loser life. But if I stopped drinking, anything was possible. And that was surprisingly scary. The same thing goes with video games. It feels safe to keep playing video games. It feels unsafe to stop and have to face the rest of your life.
Games are like a payday loan
Video games give you this cheap, easy-to-achieve dopamine dump, and sometimes an adrenaline rush, that often you're not getting in the rest of your life. So playing video games absolutely fulfills positive things in your life. I'm not saying games are purely bad. In fact, addiction is hard with video games because they do give you positive things, and they're very easy to achieve.
But it's like a payday loan. Taking a payday loan, or charging up a credit card, does not make you wealthy. It can give you the temporary illusion of wealth as you go out and dump a bunch of stupid expenses, come home with a bunch of stuff from the mall — and you just got poorer. You just got more broke. By taking that payday loan, you just lowered your net worth. Video games do that. They give you something up front. Turn on this game, here's an adrenaline rush, here's a community, here's a little bit of meaning in your otherwise purposeless existence. And you get that. Then you're thinking, if I quit playing video games, now my life is utterly meaningless. Now I don't know what to do with myself. I don't know how to have fun. I don't know how to find people to hang out with. I don't know how to get excited and care about anything. As long as you keep playing video games, you're not going to find that stuff out. This is the same reason I treat video games like alcohol now — I had to put gaming in the same category as the drink I can never go back to.
An instant escape from boredom
Video games offer you an instant escape from boredom. When I was a kid, I look at my kids now and they get so bored if they don't constantly have somewhere to go or something to do. Some days I had 12, 14 hours at home with nothing to do. I'd go play in the backyard. I'd run around, throw the football, do everything I could think of, and then I'm bored.
Instead of reading, instead of asking my dad, hey, can you get me something I can read, something I can learn — I want to read the encyclopedia and be smart and grow up to be a physicist and have really valuable skills and always make great money doing work I love — it was: let me just pick this Game Boy up and play this Star Wars Empire Strikes Back game and see if I can beat it. Most of the time I'd be frustrated, but it would be a bit of an adrenaline rush, because I wanted to beat the game.
I still remember one day I played six hours of that game, and it felt so good because I finally beat it. But what were all the things I wasn't doing in those six hours? I think video games are the key reason I got myopia, nearsightedness, because I was playing so many of them. And all the things I didn't learn, didn't do, and didn't care about. Video games are such a trap, because I know they're fun, but they also make everything else in your life seem less fun.
How they get you: from gaming to loneliness to alcohol
And that is how they get you. You jump in, you play some Fallout, you play some Call of Duty, and it's fun. You get this adrenaline rush. Then you step out of the game and everything else seems flat. I remember thinking in college, I wish I could just put myself in a video game, because regular college life was so boring compared to playing. It was like, I don't even care about college.
So what did I do? I didn't make as many friends. Then I got lonely, and the loneliness got me in the perfect position to pick up an alcohol addiction. When you're lonely from playing a bunch of video games by yourself — because you seek instant gratification instead of doing the little bit of difficult learning, instead of facing your social anxiety — you sit there and play video games by yourself. All of a sudden, you haven't gone out in quite a while, and you have pain from that. Then you drink and play video games, and now you're compounding addictions.
I used to look forward to getting a half gallon of vodka and a case of Diet Dr. Thunder, which is like a crappy Walmart version of Dr. Pepper. I'd dump a couple of shots in with a can of Diet Dr. Thunder and, all night, play Call of Duty zombies, slaying zombies on Origins — 10, 12, sometimes 18-hour binges. And then I'd wonder why my business was failing. I'd wonder why my marriage was failing. I'd wonder why my health was failing. Because the solution was the problem.
The solution is the problem
From my point of view, video games were the solution to my boring life. Drinking alcohol was the solution to my lonely life. But really the problem was that you reach for instant gratification — you reach for the game — instead of just sitting there and being bored. Sit there and be bored. Sit there and be miserable. Sit there and feel what you're feeling, and go into it. Sit there and be miserably bored, and don't do anything about it. Let it happen, and then see what happens.
Because that's what these meditation practices are. It's literally learning to sit there and be disgustingly bored, and face it. Be present. And then you get this transcendent experience. I've done so many different meditation practices, and a lot of them are literally just learning to sit there and be bored. Now I'm almost never bored, because if I'm just sitting somewhere, it's like, cool, I have time to think. I have time to plan. I have time to be present. I have time to look and put things together in my mind. I love it.
This is what our whole society is set up on: this instant gratification trap. And video games are very effective at it. There are other things, like shopping, that aren't instant gratification for me, and a lot of the things other people get that hit from don't satisfy me. But you sell me some Marvel Snap cards, and I get this card and I can go play this game against somebody.
The $2,000 I threw away on Marvel Snap
You know that I dumped $2,000 this year into playing Marvel Snap. And I rationalized it. A big part of video game addiction is rationalizing. Well, I'm going to buy these Marvel Snap cards because I'm a streamer and a content creator and people are watching my videos. And yes, people are still watching my Marvel Snap videos. I made this into a playlist on my channel. I made a video called Get Marvel Snap. I have a brand-new gaming channel — this is the third gaming channel I've made. I deleted the last two of them because I was planning to quit playing video games. So I deleted my last two gaming channels, then I made a third one. Now it's under 200 subs, and this video gets 6,000 views. People are subscribing. They want more Marvel Snap videos.
I hate Marvel Snap. It's disgusting. It's the worst use I've put my time into this year. I threw away $2,000. I threw away hundreds of hours of my time. And look at how much I charge for my time. If you want to have a call with me, I charge $300 an hour. $2,000 for a 10-call coaching package. $3,000 to spend the day with me. And I'm dumping my time into some worthless card game, giving myself meaningless achievements. I went deeper on that exact relapse in the story of spending $2,000 on Marvel Snap and quitting in 2024.
I've already conquered everything there is to conquer in gaming
When I've already conquered it all. I got to the highest rank in Magic: The Gathering — Mythic. I got to the highest rank in Gods Unchained — Mythic. I got to be one of the top Warzone solo players in the world. I beat hard games like Return of the Jedi on Super NES — that wasn't as hard — and Empire Strikes Back on Game Boy, which was brutal. I've been the number one player in the world in Call of Duty Black Ops 3 Zombies on the Revelations map. The day the Revelations map dropped, I got the number one spot in the world on the leaderboard. I've done it. I've done everything there is to do in gaming.
And the last time I played video games, I felt drained. I thought, what did I just do with my time? I dug into whether all that competition was ever worth it in my take on competitive video games as zero-sum self-sabotage.
What if I don't have as much time as I think?
Yes, I was born — this body was born 40 years ago. I think it's got around 70-something years left; I think it's going to pass in 2111, which, if you do the math, is like 90-something years from now. So I think I still have plenty of time. But what if I don't? What if I don't? Can I afford to piss any more of my time away on video games?
I made a video last year saying the biggest regret in my entire life is all the time I played video games — even more than alcoholism, because at least alcoholism got me into AA, a spiritual awakening, and helping other people. Video games have purely been trading my time for nothing. I remember playing poker and being all proud of myself for making $3 an hour. I could have learned how to make $100 an hour instead of pissing away my time for $3 an hour playing poker.
So if you can identify with this, I hope you'll go through everything I'm sharing about video game addiction, because even if you get this a little before you're ready for it, you'll have it there. My friend last night was asking, what should I do? I play a couple of hours of Fallout every single day, and then I binge on the weekend sometimes. This guy's an alcoholic who's sober, and he asked, what should I do? I said, at the point you're at, I want you to pay attention to how you feel when you play games, and I want you to think about what you're not doing because you're playing video games. He's not even ready to stop playing yet. He's just starting to think, do I have a problem? Even if this seems way too soon for you, totally unnecessary for you, maybe you can stop sooner than me.
This journey has been embarrassing — including giving away my PlayStation
To me, this journey with video game addiction has been embarrassing. A year ago, I said the number one regret in my life was how many video games I'd played. A few months after that, I bought a PlayStation 5 after selling my last one. I bought an Xbox Series X. I got back into playing Marvel Snap, made a new gaming channel, and bought $2,000 of Marvel Snap cards.
I gave my PlayStation 5 away last week. I gave it away to drive home a point: you're so done with video games that you need to take the entire loss. You need to take the entire financial loss on that PlayStation and realize what you did — that you sold your last PlayStation when every sign from the universe seemed to be saying, you might as well keep it, because you're going to relapse on your gaming addiction.
I sold it even though it wouldn't sell. People bought it and didn't pay for it. It got to be a joke, a meme — me trying to sell my PlayStation. And then I bought another one, hardly even played it, and felt guilty for not playing it. So I just gave it away. My yoga instructor, who I gave it to, was thrilled. He and his girlfriend were having fun playing — she has a PS5 too, and he had a PS4, so he was thrilled. And the energy of giving it away felt great. It's like, I'm that done with video games, I'm just going to give it away. My kids still have an Xbox, which we use as an entertainment system, and I gave the Nintendo Switch and Xbox to them. I still have a PC with a gaming graphics card, but I make music and do video rendering on it, so I'll keep that.
If you ever want to talk through your own version of this, that's exactly the kind of thing I help people with directly in Jerry Banfield Family.
What would your life be like if you never played video games again?
The question I'll leave you with is: what would your life be like if you never played video games again? That was how I quit the first time. The first time I quit — and the longest I've quit gaming as an adult, a year and a half — the question that got me there was, what would my life be like if I didn't play video games? And I desperately wanted to find out. I'd love to know what I would do if I didn't dump all those hours into gaming.
And what did I do? I learned how to make music. I now have 200-plus songs I've made, including a dedicated YouTube channel where I crank out one of these songs every day, and people are actually watching and listening to them. I got my Spotify going, where I've put out four albums — even with playing video games this year, I put out four albums. I made three albums in the first year and a half I didn't play video games, with no musical experience at all; I put a ton of time into learning music production. I got into crypto and made a lot of money in crypto because I had all that energy freed up from not playing video games. So I'm really excited about how much more fun I'm going to have — I'm playing tennis tonight because I'm not playing video games.
Some things just don't go together with gaming
What I've noticed is that video games and certain other things don't go together. Maybe when you live with your parents, you just graduated high school, you're starting out in college, you might have time to play five hours of video games a day and go play basketball and work out at the gym and hang out with a girlfriend, because you literally aren't doing anything else.
But at the point I'm at, I have kids I spend hours with every day, a wife, a house to take care of, and money to be made. I go to yoga and I go to Alcoholics Anonymous. I take care of my body and my mind and help others. All I have is three or four hours a day to myself. That's it. That's for work, and that's for play. So I can't play video games and basketball — those two are mutually exclusive. If I'm playing video games, it satisfies me to the point where I won't go through the discomfort to get out there and get on the basketball court. I can't play tennis.
I just got a racket club membership. I'm going to go play tennis tonight, and I love it. It's so much more fun than playing video games, and it's so much better for my body. I'm out there playing with people in person. One of the bottom lines with video games is that you're literally sitting in front of a screen by yourself. And with so many other things on screens in our lives, you can't afford more time doing that.
This is really for me — so I never go back
The guaranteed win, though, is that this is for me. Sharing all of this is so I never, ever go back to video games again. By teaching it, I've got a really good shot at not going back. If you want to think through any of this together, you can join Jerry Banfield Family.
People have literally paid me to do interventions. A girl paid me to do an intervention with her boyfriend, and I'd love to know how that worked out. I started my business online in 2011 to help people with video game addiction — and then I became a professional gamer in 2020. If that doesn't sound like absolute insanity, I don't know what does. If you enjoyed this and want to watch where I take all of it next, you can find it in my Games playlist.
Why Video Games Are a Poor Substitute for Sports
From my video published August 2, 2024.
Video games are a horrible substitute for playing sports. If you're trying to have fun, and you want to have a better life, and you play video games, I hope what I'm about to share gets you out of your comfort zone. I hope it encourages you to take a deeper look, and I hope it helps you not waste so much time like I did playing video games.
Yesterday I got my tennis membership back
Yesterday, I just got my tennis membership. I got off the waiting list at my local racket club, where they have a bunch of tennis courts and pickleball courts. I had a free coaching lesson, and then I went to a little kind of free tennis camp for members, like an hour long, and I had so much fun. I had so much fun. There were six of us total, three on each side, playing doubles and rotating. I was hitting good shots, bad shots, but I was having fun. I kept thinking while I was playing tennis, Jesus Christ, this is fun. I love it.
You know, the last time I played a video game and had that thought? I've played tens of thousands of hours of video games in my life. Video games are such a trap. They're fake fun. They take more from you than they give. I know video games can be fun, of course. I've had fun playing video games. But many of you are not even having fun playing video games anymore. Many of you sit there, and if I could watch your face, if I could read your thoughts, you're bored. You're grinding a game for some stupid piece of equipment, some meaningless reward, some useless achievement. You're grinding and competing against other people, and you're just throwing your life away.
Meanwhile, your body's deteriorating, and then you get up and you have physical pain and you suffer and you complain, like I used to. I used to have back pain. And you know what helps you have back pain? Sitting on your ass playing 10 hours of video games a day. That'll help you have back pain. Getting out there and playing tennis will help you stay in great shape. And you don't have to just play tennis. There's basketball, baseball, football, ultimate frisbee, pickleball. There are all kinds of sports you can play and have fun. And video games are a piss-poor substitute for sports. If you want to see how I keep talking myself out of the trap and back into a real life, that's a big part of what I share in my Games playlist.
It takes effort, and that's exactly why it's worth it
I know it's hard, because video games are such a trap. It takes effort to go find people to play tennis with. You have to get off your ass and face the unknown, as I did. And I'm embarrassed to say this. I'm embarrassed to look at how many video games I played when I knew I loved playing tennis. I got into playing tennis in 2020, 2021, right when all these people were stuck in their houses. I didn't go along with that. Not a day, not a second did I go along with that BS. And I'm not going to go along with whatever the next BS is either. I got out there and I was playing tennis and I was having fun.
And then I got sucked in by video games again, because tennis took time. It costs a couple hundred dollars a month to be a racket club member, although it's free to go to tennis courts anywhere around. I did play some of that, but it took effort. It took knowing people in person, building relationships to go play tennis with. And I eventually got lazy. I eventually quit putting effort into making friendships and finding people to play with. I eventually cut the cost of paying a couple hundred a month for a racket club. And then what do you know? I'm telling myself I'm trying to have fun, and I'm sitting on my freaking phone like this trying to get some fun. And you know what? I finally noticed it's not fun. Most people, most of the time, are not even having fun playing video games. It's a distraction.
If I'd reached for a game instead of a racket
When you compare the amount of fun you have playing sports, like I did yesterday, to what a game gives you, it's not close. Yesterday, the rear of my neck muscles were hurting a little bit. In the past, I would have figured this is what happens before I get a headache, and I would have tried to play video games to not think about the physical pain. And then, because I'd been sitting there playing video games tense, I would have gotten a headache. Then I would have taken headache medication like Tylenol or Advil, and then I would have gone to bed. That's what I used to do 10, 15 years ago. Or I would have drunk a lot of water. Or I would have drunk alcohol and screwed my body up and poisoned my body and felt like crap the next day.
And even recently, what I was doing in that scenario was grabbing my tablet and playing Marvel Snap. I dumped thousands of dollars into Marvel Snap, almost enough to pay for an entire year of family membership at the racket club, which entitles you to unlimited tennis. They have a pool there. You can sneak into the pickleball court if it's open. You get a free clinic. You can play every week with a coach. I traded all of that for some digital cards online that I have no real ownership over at all. I traded one-on-one time in person, moving my body, for some images on a phone. And I felt like an idiot.
And yet it was hard to stop, because if I stopped, then I'd have to admit I was wrong for buying all this crap. And I was wrong for buying all this crap and putting all this time into Marvel Snap to start with. So I'll just go ahead and say it: I was wrong. That was absolutely ridiculous, to just throw that money into Marvel Snap. I was wrong. I'm moving forward. We're done with this. I want to have fun. I want my body to be healthy. I want to have energy. I told that whole Marvel Snap story in detail in how I spent $2,000 on Marvel Snap and quit in 2024, if you want the full reckoning.
And you know what happened yesterday? I was feeling a bit low energy, my neck was hurting, and I went out there to play tennis. I had fun. I came home. And I realized, as I was having a little snack, that I'd totally forgotten about my neck and it felt great. Literally all I had to do was get out there and move my body and have fun and forget about any problems. Get out there and play. Get out there and feel joy. Connect with other people. And all that neck pain and low energy? My energy fired right up once I got on the tennis court. I had so much fun. I haven't done something recently, maybe in quite a while, where I thought, this is so much fun. This is awesome.
The first sign of a loss of vitality
This connects to a book I've been reading, one of the Seth books. I just did a deep, deep review of Seth Speaks, and I highly recommend you read that book. One of the things Seth said that was such a breakthrough for me is that the first sign of a loss of vitality, before you get your health problems, before you get laid out and strung out on drugs or medication, the first thing that usually happens is you stop playing and you start focusing on your personal problems. And your personal problems could include all your views on politics, and the state of the world, and your money, and your health.
The first sign of a loss of vitality is a reduction or elimination of play, taking life really seriously all the time. Everything is so serious all the time, and no fun. Even when you say you're having fun, it doesn't look like fun to someone else. If you were to watch me play video games, and I have watched myself play video games a lot, most of the time it doesn't actually look like fun. In fact, more of it is suffering than fun. Yesterday on the tennis court was awesome. Even when I missed shots, I was having fun. It was funny to watch other people miss shots. I wanted other people to hit good shots and play their best. Whereas when I played video games, I wanted other people to suck and let me dominate them. Video games are a piss-poor substitute for sports.
Get honest about how much fun you're actually having
And yet so many people today are sitting on their ass playing video games all over, and they're telling themselves it's fun. Ask your friends and family: does your video gaming look like fun? When you stay up for eight hours grinding Destiny, and then you get up late dragging it, does that look like fun? How often were you actually having fun? What really often is fun is hanging out with your friends. And hanging out with friends playing video games is better than gaming by yourself. But what is even better than that is to play sports and get your body moving.
Because so many health problems, so many mental health problems, are a function of stuck energy. And when you're playing video games, you're choosing to keep that energy stuck. Whereas when you get out there and play sports, the energy moves. Like yesterday, there was just some stuck energy in my neck, and when I got out there and ran around and played tennis, the energy moved, and I felt better. I didn't have to take any pills. I didn't have to go through any awful procedure. I literally got out there and had fun and felt better.
Little kids are often completely onto this, and that's why little kids often have great lives. And yet, if you look at a little kid, and then you look at what you think of as somebody right before they pass, usually people right before they pass are rigid. They're rigid, they're serious, they're not having any more fun in their life. And you would almost think that passing is the best thing that could happen to them. Then you look at kids that are flexible and fun and out there playing around all the time. Kids have to be convinced relentlessly to stop playing and get serious. And I'm telling you right now: undo that programming. Especially when it comes to video games, get honest about how much fun you're actually having. Most of you are not having fun most of the time you're playing video games.
Instant gratification steals from you on the back end
What's even worse about video games is that the instant gratification makes it harder to actually do the real work in the rest of your life. When you can just sit down and get an adrenaline dump playing some battle royale, why bother taking the time to make some new friends and go play basketball? Why bother? Oh, it's raining today, I'll just play Call of Duty right now. And then the next day it's sunny out, and you figure, forget going to the basketball court, I'm just going to sit here and get my adrenaline dump with the least possible energy.
You pay a price for that. There are so many things in life that take from you. They look like they give you a little instant gratification up front, but they steal from you on the back end. You play video games and it gives you some immediate gratification. You turn on your phone, you're instantly in a game, and you get this little rush of adrenaline. You feel a little something. But then you feel disgusting when you turn it off. You feel worse than before you played it. And now you also have the opportunity cost: look what you did with your time. Look what you did with your time. This is the same reason I treat video games like alcohol now — the short-term hit is real, and so is the hangover.
Isolation is how a life goes bad
Instead of getting out there and being with people in person, which is such a wonderful, natural experience, you sat at home alone on your phone. Almost everybody I know who has a life that sucks is isolated. And the way you get isolated is this: the more time you put on your devices, the less time you put with people in person, having real conversations, having fun. If you want to have a great life, having people in your life, in person, real conversation, having fun, that's how you do it. If you want to be miserable, sit with your face in front of a computer all the time and don't be around anybody.
Now, it's one thing if this is what you do for work. And if this is what you do for work, it's extremely essential to not do it in your off time, too. If you have a job where you're on a computer already, then please get off it when you're not working. Get out there with real people. Don't volunteer to just dump more time in. And man, I've wasted tens of thousands of hours playing video games in my life. The only positive thing I can think of from that is if I can help you not waste as many hours as I did.
Why I always came back, and why I'm done
I want to remember this and never get tricked into it again, because I've quit playing video games a bunch of times in my life. I always came back to video games when I got to a point where I didn't know what else to do. When there was empty space in my life, when a business idea flopped, and all of a sudden I have no money, or all of a sudden I have a bunch of money and a bunch of time, well, let's play video games. When I'm bored and I don't know what else to do, video games, instant, easy, short-term solution. But the problem is, it also blocks anything better from coming in.
If you're tired of being broke, you don't have time to play video games, because you could be using that time to learn valuable skills to make money. If you're tired of being lonely, you don't have time to play video games, because you need to get your ass out there and be talking with other people. And if you're having health issues, you could take that time to learn how to fix those issues and help other people. You don't have time to be playing video games instead of honoring your body and getting it to circulate. So video games are one of the biggest wastes of time I've ever engaged in, and they are a piss-poor substitute for sports. The hardest part is the moment you finally walk away from it for good, which is why I wrote out the whole process of how I finally learned to quit playing video games. If having people in your corner would help you do the same, you can join Jerry Banfield Family.
I'm going to be playing tennis for the rest of my life
I hope I never forget this again. Because when I'm on the tennis court, I think about it like this: this body was born 40 years ago. There are people out on that tennis court who were born 10, 20, 30 years before me. And they're still out there, still active, and they could hit balls back and forth with me. I'm looking at the rest of my life, and I'm going to be able to play tennis. If this body can't play tennis, if that looks like something it can never do again, then it's time to drop it and get a new one. Like when your car gets too many miles on it: all right, I'll let that one go to the junkyard, and we're going to go buy a nice fresh new one and drive that one around instead.
My whole mission with this is to help people get out of video game addiction and live better lives. If this was helpful for you, the energy you're putting into a game today is energy you could be putting into your body, your friendships, and your future. Get out there and move. Get out there and play. I'd love for you to come be a part of the community as you do it — that's what I keep building over in my Life playlist and inside the Jerry Banfield Family.