People who play video games are procrastinating and buying time. It becomes worse when that video game itself is an infinite loop which causes people to have a hard time quitting.

I was lucky, in that I was playing a very particular game mode which had a definitive end which could occur any moment of playing. That game was World of Warcraft Classic: Hardcore.

After dying at least a dozen times, I finally decided, “you know what, I have better things to do.”

Because the truth was I wasn’t working, I wasn’t going anywhere in life and my time was being burned faster than paper on fire.

So I did what any sensible person would do in that situation. I quit.

And ever since I did that, I never looked back. A week has gone by, and although I’m still not making money, at least I’m working every single moment I’m awake. I couldn’t even say that while I was employed.

All my time and energy has shifted from leveling and farming in a virtual game, to leveling and farming in the real world. But instead of skill points and finding loot from drops, I am gaining real world experience and gaining followers who could turn into potential customers.

It’s been a slow start, but all the work I’m doing doesn’t disappear when I log off. I get to continue where I left off on a real world project which could affect real lives. It’s at this point I realize, everyone who is actively controlling an avatar in a game is just as a NPC themselves as the ones they are surrounded by in game.

To become a real player, you have to be a real human. Doing real human shit, which means building and creating things that have an impact on the world. I may still be a nobody in the grand scheme of things, but at least I’m not longer under the illusion that doing something in a video game would affect my real life in any positive way.

Although I will say that the effort I applied to playing the game well, has and can transfer over to the things I’m doing in real life. Also the mental fortitude to break through difficult tasks like a challenging quest is also not lost on me. I seem to be doing better than ever after quitting video games, as if I died in the virtual world and was reborn in the real world.