The Economical Advantages of Quitting Video Games
2024-12-30 09:39
video games

I played, in my youthful life, over ten thousand hours of video games. In doing so, I later experienced that phenomenon economists call "opportunity cost", realizing that I had not only failed to get laid and spread my seed, but also that if I had simply worked at a fast food restaurant for those twenty long years, I would own a house and be well on track to becoming an investor multimillionaire.

But, alas, if only cigarettes could talk to encourage you not to smoke them, a pack a day habitually!
(I may have acquired all the necessary skills to become a game developer, and perhaps sometime — God permitting — I may have the time to make the cigarettes speak to you for real. For now, all I have are these words and... haha, let's not talk about the blushing vodka which encourages you not to drink it. Ecchi! Ecchi!)

So ten thousand hours at a little above minimum wage, adjusting for inflation and also for career advancement, what starts at around $9/hour may increase to $30/hour or above. Let's say $15/hour average for simplicity reasons.
Now take 10,000 and multiply it by $15 and that's $150,000: Enough to buy a small house, or a large winter mansion, or a large rural plot, or a large piece of farmland AND enough equipment and labor to supply it with water and some buildings.

My college tuition (to which I dropped out of, quite possibly in prodrome insanity) had cost me a similar amount.
So here I am in life, twice robbed of a career, a home, and a wife!

Yet when I speak to people, they turn into hardened criminals — drug dealers — and respond to me, "You chose that life. It's your own damn fault." Then the turn into the demons of WoW and Hearthstone, playing their video game for another 10,000 hours while having a girlfriend, which automatically makes them superior in their estimation to me! ... I jest, no such people actually existed in my life and I have not talked to them. But the way the public acts, you would sure think it happens!

Now, let's examine some other things people get addicted to.

1. Cigarettes. This one is very expensive, at $5-8 per pack smoked at a rate of 1 pack per day, you would spend between $1800 and $3000 per year on filling your lungs with tar-smoke.

2. Alcohol. This one is a bargain compared to cigarettes, and you destroy yourself faster too. At a rate of 5 shots a day, you would spend $5/day on actual shots, or around $2 if consumed through bottles (assuming an average of 5 shots per day). Thus pricing the habit between $800 and $2000.

Now for a sober person, a good 2-3 shots will give a real nice buzz, and that costs around $1-2 as a 1-time thing, done infrequently. It is the best deal on a safe high you can possibly get. Biblical scriptures even encourage men to get drunk on the holy days, and say that wine was made for mirth. (If only the drunks would donate their liquor to the churches, that they may drink it instead!)

Now of course there are other expensive hobbies, like stupidly spending 6 figures on college when all you would do is read books at the library. Or stupidly buying a high 5 figure car (not literally shaped like a high-fiving hand, mind you!) instead of fixing up a $1000 used car and getting a paint job buying like 60ft of vinyl wrap to make it look pretty (dream car: $3000. Done.).
(I did not buy the expensive new car, unfortunately. It would have been a much better deal than education!)

Now for quitting a destructive video game hobby (20-100+ hours/week), you immediately get your time back to work on better things (which might come as a shock: You can spend 40 hours working a job and still have 60 hours to do something worthwhile?!).
You also save all the money you would spend on new games, which is worth something even if it's only in the low hundreds or thousands. (Worth a lot more if it was a mobile pay-to-win "game" that you quit spending money on!)

Some various steps that may be taken:
1. Get a Job
2. Rent a Place
3. Get Married, Have Kids
4. Burn your bad old games in a bonfire while publicly renouncing the hobby to the entire world, as your pile of dumb games burns in the background.

Have a nice life!