Video Games & Adderall: the Death of the Soul.

i've been playing for eight years twenty
thousand hours extremely unhealthy relationship with the game i just went into streaming because i was just i was coping with a burnout from working too much irl in my previous career because yes i know what it is to have a boss i know what it is to work hard i know what it is to be useful to society according to some of you guys and so i was i was yeah i was pushing myself too hard in my previous job working 70 80 hours a week um and i had money saved and i was like okay you know what i i need to fix my issues because i had a lot of unresolved like childhood trauma and i was in the middle of like a therapy i'm not going to expend too much on it but i mentally boomed and the only thing that brought me comfort at this point was like shutting down my my real life and my social group because they had the tendency to party a lot it was in the music industry most people most of them are musicians so lots of alcohol lots of drugs lots of temptations of various sorts and i felt like i needed a full mental reset i was 27 years old and i did it so i isolated myself and the only thing that kind of gave me this fix was peri you know it was for me a way to numb my brain from this this life that was too hard for me for things that were too hard for me to deal with some people pick it up they put it down they don't give a darn they're done you know but for people who like really like to solve problems man it's not like this i'm always trying to get better i'm super competitive and so for me it's like i'm always trying to get to be the best that i can only to get what what at the end of the video game do you get what do you really get nothing nothing the company got rich they got your time they got your best creativity they got everything but what did you get yeah like i just don't like it literally it would just like eat me up and like tear me apart to like watch other girls like touch my boyfriend watch my boyfriend touch girls like it just like i didn't like it and like i feel like maybe because i have like an only fans like i don't know like i said like my social media isn't like you know super clean either like i know any guy or girl i'm with is gonna have to deal with that let's stop now let's go let's just let's just end this video this sucks dude okay recently not many girls who know my channel message me anymore i don't know why maybe it's because they found out that i'm too much of a weirdo even though i'm not really that famous my channel's still kind of small i've had several experiences maybe about four times it's happened before where i match someone i didn't tell them about the channel and they found out anyway either because um just just by coincidence they found out or because they showed my picture to one of their friends and one of their friends recognized me and i'm surprisingly more famous than you may realize i've been busy trying to think about what i want to do with my life and i've come to the conclusion that i still have no idea so as you can imagine i don't really feel that amazing these days because i feel like either option i take i'm doomed to misery if i focus on my channel make that priority then i'm probably not gonna do very well at the whole dating thing and i just have to be single and accept accept that fact or if i try and focus on improving my chances dating then i have to give up on making the kind of videos i want to make yeah i've come to the realization that i don't feel confident in being able to keep my channel a secret and when they find my channel the reaction most girls have is they get a bit freaked out they've got a lot of questions most of the time they block me or unmatch me or they don't want to meet me anymore because they're scared and i guess i can't be a weirdo on the internet and expect to have a normal relationship with a normal girl okay i need to i need to end this video now what the hell okay i'm fine i'm really fine i'm not stable oh my god why am i even posting this to the internet i don't know so yeah like so now back to the point uh to back to streaming yeah as you can see i'm not really a big fan of q anymore i have barely any like just just getting up and thinking i have to stream even though my livelihood depends on it like give me anxiety that's how bad it is i don't want to play this game anymore i feel like it hasn't hit me yet i don't want to make it overly emotional it's just you know it was a phase maybe i should call my mom and tell her mom you're right it was it was just a phase yeah it actually it actually hits me pretty hard but i i cannot look back it's unhealthy and i think i've got to finally start respecting myself instead of just being a beggar online for subs yeah i feel like when people kind of want to change things in their lives we tend to see it as a like black and white issue oh i don't eat like i eat too much fast food and therefore i must go like full-on like health health nuts vegan raw vegan paleo diet intermittent fasting i don't believe in this you know i'm 33 years old so i get some experience some life experience i've tested things i've done things and the thing i realized is like it never is worth it to just do a full a full turn it never lasts it it doesn't work and i don't believe in this so i won't be fully gone i'm gonna keep putting videos about random stuff i'm gonna keep it being active in my discord like me quitting poe and me quitting streaming it's more of a this will not be the focal point of my life that's what i meant i'm still gonna play some theory sometimes just i'm still playing maybe an hour a day i'm not gonna like you know like i said like throw my phone like cut the internet and live in patagonia that's not what it's about it's more just bring balance it's all about balance i've always gamed ever since i was five years old no you don't have to keep playing this game man you don't have to do it yourself okay you can uh you can break the cycle i don't believe that i'm gonna have to just run marathon every day and eat broccoli rice and chicken breast and and just go party every weekend uh to be quitting i know that's what you guys think i know that's that's what's inspiring the guy who decided to just drop it all and just live a new life that's not what it is i've been i've been a gamer my entire life i love sitting my ass i'm just putting back some balance i'm quitting modern warfare and pretty much quitting gaming too in fact i got it this morning i completely deleted everything on my xbox for people like me who like my brain works off of problem solving video games don't just stop for you when you get off the game your brand continues working on it it's like i'm done like i really want to be done with video games because not that they're bad for everybody but they're bad for me so when i started this youtube channel it was called technology interpreters if you click on some of the links in the channel they'll still say technology interpreters because i didn't get into youtube to play video games and i started doing the video game and this whole apoc persona came out and basically like i built the video my whole video was about doing minecraft and building minecraft servers it blew up me and my daughter made a few videos on it that blew up and then all of a sudden i'm a youtuber but that was not my intent my intent was that first video and i'll see if i can cut it in here and edit when i'm sitting there explaining like it's monotone video this guy sitting on a [ __ ] in front of a green screen talking about some i don't even know what my whole video was about it was funny but that was what my true heart was all kind of things that i've never gotten out because i'm too busy playing video games and i'm tired of that but literally my game is deleted cod is gone everything on my xbox is gone i'm gonna delete my second xbox and i'm pretty much gonna go put the xbox on ebay and make some money selling it hey i hope y'all have fun but for me hey thanks cod thanks call of duty thanks activision you went too far with me and so i'm out peace you might not remember that at the start of this video it was said that this young man had been playing the same video game for eight years adding up to a total of 20 000 hours now i have never once in my life had to ask myself how many hours there are in a year 24 hours a day 365 days a year the correct answer turns out to be 8760. we will generously presume that you are awake for 5943 of those hours that you get eight hours of sleep per day this leads us to the conclusion that even if this were the only video game he played during those eight years and it most certainly was not that would be 42 percent of the hours that he was awake being spent playing video games for a period of eight years twenty thousand is a very round number and it's almost certain that he didn't keep track of this with pen and paper many games in the current generation will give you an update when you log in and log out as to how many hours you've spent online or how many hours you spent with the app open how many hours you spent playing the video game he's probably familiar with this number because he sees it on screen when he logs in and logs out that's not the same as having a total for all of the hours you spent playing all video games on all consoles over a period of something like eight years memorably but inexplicably the first half this video also featured the flickering image of ali hardesty the only woman on screen some of you might be wondering why i quoted her here given that she's not talking about quitting video games i believe she has never talked about quitting video games which she quit was something quite different she was given a diagnosis she was given a prescription she was given an excuse in her case the excuse was hyperactivity the prescription was adderall and for many years she had been taking the legal maximum limit of adderall per day she was taking the maximum allowable dose of this prescription drug when i was in college my adhd was really bad but now that i'm truly just doing things in my life that i'm passionate about that i can hyper focus on that are like interesting to me and fun it's not like forced or like i have to meet these requirements to like get this degree or something like it's like actually just like comes to me naturally i thrive you know that's kind of how adhd is when you're being like creatively stimulated and doing stuff that you actually want to do you're able to focus like really really well you know so i kind of realized that adderall is a powerful drug but the excuses that we make for ourselves can be even more powerful this woman during the crucial years in which she finished high school began university transferred to another university and then dropped out lived with the excuse that she could not focus her mind she could not do the type of work that all the other students could do because there was something biologically wrong with her and she believed that this drug counteracted counterbalanced or compensated for this biologically real problem that she had in the same sense that somebody with diabetes takes a drug to counteract the effects of sugar because people with diabetes really do lack something that the rest of us have something that the rest of us biologically take for granted every day every time we eat food and the thing is it's all a lie now at age 24 she finds when she suddenly stops taking the drug not under doctor's orders not under her doctor's supervision not anyone's recommendation she doesn't reflect on how it was she made the decision to as an experiment i suppose stop taking the drug she finds that at age 24 she has the mental focus she has the self-discipline now she can sit and read a book in fact it is easier for her to read a book when she is not under the effects of adderall as opposed to the way she struggled when she was not surprising if you know something with the stimulant effects of adderall she's found that at age 24 she has more maturity than she had at 17 18 or 19. and there are countless millions of people in the world who really didn't have the maturity didn't have the focus didn't have the self-discipline to undertake university level studies in their younger years but who could have developed that focus that motivation that's of this one say by age 24 like ali hardesty here i actually feel amazing not being on it i sleep better like when i tell you like and it's really sad like i don't know if i want to get into that super much in this video but i used to make a lot of adhd videos and just like content surrounding that and a lot of you guys i know follow me for that and if you don't know my story i was diagnosed when i was like really young like seven or something and i was put on pharmaceutical medication and pretty much was taking adderall since i don't even know when like years like every single day like the highest that you can get prescribed and pretty much have like a dependency on it because if i would stop taking it i would go through like withdrawal but i stopped taking it during the pandemic like kind of more recently because i was just like do i even really need to take it and to be honest i do kind of feel like i've outgrown a lot of my adhd i actually feel like better not taking it and we're left with the terrible question of what if this young woman wasn't given these drugs what if she wasn't given the excuse at such an early age what if she had taken responsibility for the development of her own character what if she had the attitude that she couldn't read a book not because she was biologically different from her classmates and that there was a cure that came in a bottle of pills what if she had the attitude that this was her responsibility something she had to overcome herself and that even if she were perhaps more immature than many of her classmates that even if she were more jittery more scattered than her classmates that this was really just a pattern of behavior that this was something she could and would eventually with the passage of years and hard work that this was something she would eventually overcome we'll never know what ali hardesty could have done or what type of person she could be today if she had to say in that period of eight years taken a path of sober self-disciplined simple effort i don't believe that i'm gonna have to just run marathon every day and eat broccoli rice and chicken breast and and just go party every weekend uh to be quitting i know that's what you guys think i know that's that's what's inspiring the guy who decided to just drop it all and just leave a new life that's not what it is i've been i've been a gamer my entire life i love sitting my ass i'm just putting back some balance and for all these guys who played video games some of whom give you the number of hours some of them you just go to their channel and scroll down and see how many videos there are hinting at or adding up to so many hours we have a similar sort of question of opportunity cost after these years after these thousands of hours poured into playing video games you have to look back and wonder at the person who was lost in there you have to compare the person that you are today to the person you might have been the opportunities you're left with today to what you would now have what you could be doing if you'd pursued other opportunities if you'd creatively come up with other opportunities during those long years when you were sitting on your ass consumed by a form of entertainment that is every bit as addictive as gambling but where you roll the dice and the question is ultimately just how much of your time how much of your mental energy it is that you're going to lose [Music] so you