One of the small tragedies of aging, for me, has been watching my relationship to video games invert along the classic time-money-energy triangle.

When I was younger I had basically infinite time and near-infinite energy, and almost no money. This meant I could grind for ten hours straight, but only if the game was free, or pirated, or ran on a potato, and only if I was willing to tolerate 200ms ping to Europe from India. I wanted the hobby very badly and could not afford to do it properly.

Now the triangle has rotated. I have the money, finally, and I went out and bought the absurd top-of-the-line PC that 16 yo me would have posted about reverently on forums. It mostly sits there collecting dust, because I rarely have the time, and more importantly I no longer have the energy. After work and adult responsibilities, launching anything more demanding than a browser feels like a project.

I hate this. Some of my best social memories are from gaming. The peak was late-night Arma sessions with my UK friends, where it would be 2am for me and completely reasonable for them, and we would spend three hours planning an operation that fell apart in ninety seconds. I was important, I was indispensable, they literally would have to pack up and quit without me. We ended up grabbing beers, almost a decade since I got to know them, and several years since I was playing with them regularly. They didn't feel like strangers at all.

I was never particularly good at Escape From Tarkov, my survival rate high because of caution and a preference to always work as part of a team, but I was patient, which turns out to be a rarer skill than good aim. I was also a good mentor, the patient kind, the kind that still remembered the many ways you had to learn to avoid the game dragging your juts over ground glass. Over a few years I ended up shepherding maybe half a dozen new players scattered around Southeast Asia from total noob panic to genuinely cracked PVP players. Most of them do not need my help anymore, but they still remember it, which feels disproportionately meaningful.

I bring up Tarkov here because it is a terrible game in almost exactly the way people mean when they joke about CBT. It is deliberately unpleasant, unfair, and stressful. And because of that, it ends up being a weirdly good test of character. You learn quickly who tilts, who blames lag, who can lose a full kit they spent a week building and still laugh and queue again. You learn, very quickly, who you can rely on to cover your back, who isn't greedy about loot, who can be trusted to repay every favor. Suffering does not automatically build character, but voluntary suffering with stakes you care about will at least reveal it.

Which brings me to the broader point I keep coming back to when people my age get sniffy about games. Video games are not a unified thing any more than books are. The medium does not determine the value, the specific activity does. Spending six hours a day on Candy Crush is cognitively equivalent to mainlining low-effort YouTube Shorts or reading vampire smut on Wattpad under the covers. It's not morally corrupting, but you are still consuming empty calories. Spending six hours building a nuclear reactor in Factorio, or watching a 3Blue1Brown series until you finally intuit linear algebra, is edifying in the same way a good nonfiction book is. In other words, it's not the act of eating, it's the difference between junk and genuine nutrition.

I do hope I get the old energy back someday, in the same way you hope an old injury finally heals. In the meantime I have mostly substituted one low-cost dopamine loop for another. I argue with strangers on the internet and indulge a pretty shameless addiction to insight porn. It is not the same as staying up all night with friends, and if I am honest it is probably a cope, but it is at least a cope I can respect. And hey, it brings me the kind of attention I really craved. Younger me would have been awe-struck to learn that he had the opportunity to meet Scott, that he's been read and re-shared by Gwern, that people genuinely remember him for his writing and express their appreciation for it. It is what it is.