this might be a good place to collect a few observations about video games that recently became obvious to me.

video games changed the timing of my thinking in some ways:

> pausing

a video game i can just stop whenever it is convenient to me. if someone calls me and i want to respond, when something was cooking (back when i ate cooked food) and i wanted to check on it, when there is something urgent happening or even an emergency i just hit the start-button or hit spacebar or whatever, the game halts and waits for me.

when there is a difficult part in a game, i can pause and take all the time i need to come up with a good plan and then resume time when i feel ready. 

REAL LIFE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! you can never pause, there is no such thing. time is a continuous river that can not be contained. 

life experience taught me something life-affirming about this though that i would not have expected as a young person and did not know about until i experienced it myself: when you need it the most if you can succeed in remaining unafraid, your brain changes the frame rate and slows down time for you to 1 fps! i experienced this multiple times during skating. i fell and could have easily injured myself seriously but i didn't. time slowed down when i needed it most and in that split second for some reason i found all the time in the world that i needed to come up with a good plan on how to swing my arms to make my upper body rotate in a way where i can absorb the energy that was about to slam into the floor and roll away unharmed like i was sonic the hedgehog.


> reloading

in many video games i can save and load whenever i want or at least at several points throughout the game. when i make a mistake or if one of my decisions on what to next was bad, i can go back in time to a point in which i did not make the mistake and choose differently.

REAL LIFE IS NOT LIKE THAT EITHER! unfortunately nothing like this exists in reality. mistakes are permanent. you can not go back and relieve your childhood without doing the mistakes.

maybe that's why video games are fun, because they don't matter and mistakes are meaningless in them.


> expectation of things being instant

a few years ago i remember being annoyed that when i try to manifest something, that i can't just do it in 10 minutes but there are just tons of points in which i can't continue and have to wait for someone or something else to occur and just can't continue and that i have to interrupt.

so when my though processes are used to video games where everything is instant and plans can be implemented in seconds, i guess i got in the habit of believing everything can be instant in reality too and some kind of expectation or entitlement became the basis of my though process that HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH REALITY. 

everything is so slow and tedious in reality. ordering something on amazon the moment i needed it and then having to wait a week for it to arrive often interrupted projects i did and i could never pick them back up once the thing arrived. this is almost shameful to admit but waiting for delivery has on occasion taken the wind out of my sails until i got used to how slow everything is outside of video games.