Gaming lessons people learned the hard way

I let gaming quietly eat all my free time

I track hours the way other people track calories or steps. Client billing, commute times, grocery spend broken down by category. So eventually I opened a new sheet and put in conservative estimates. Maybe 2.5 hours on weeknights. Four on Saturdays. Multiplied it out across four years and I just sat there looking at the total. Didn't write anything in the adjacent cell. Just sat there. The setup was always the same. My partner would go to bed around ten. I'd stay at the desk. The flat blue light of the monitor. An empty mug I didn't remember filling or emptying. The queue would pop and there'd be a little sound and a button and I'd click accept, and that was sort of the decision made for me, which is probably the point.