[bonoboTP]

Sorry if this is too obvious or unuseful or feels condescending etc. Just a direction.

Concentrate not on the games but what it replaces. Is it a lack of community? No other outlet to feel skilled and successful? The goal isn't merely to stop playing games, it is to find more healthy but similarly satisfactory replacements (but maybe in a longer timescale). What thoughts are you avoiding, are you in some kind of guilt cycle etc? A key part is to know: your life afterwards won't and should not be merely your current life minus games. That would be terrible and frightening probably. But no, the goal is to feel satisfied through other means. Another thing is to recognize that you are in a local optimum. Perhaps it is a (short-term) rational choice to play games in your situation. To escape the local optimum you'll have to temporarily go through a worse situation where even the only thing you derive real joy from is taken away. Furthermore, it could be that your way of life is a local optimum within a pretty large volume of alternatives. Meaning that it might well be that the current social culture around you isn't giving you much better options, depending on who you are, ie society might be incentivizing this behavior through the state of dating, decaying communities, attention economy, consumerism etc. Still, wouldnt it be better to find it out yourself? For my disagreeable personality, I find it useful to feel hostile to the creators of these attention black holes, these exploiters of young men, and feel viscerally repulsed by what they are doing in the name of profit to destroy a generation. This is no way to live, it's like being a domesticated zoo animal. We are destined to more than this.

Of course a therapist specialized in the area can give better concrete steps.

[rasen58]

Wow this was definitely the best advice I got on this. Thank you so much for the time you took to share this.

I think my watching of movies or playing of video games is probably due to avoiding other things I don't want to face. I should probably try to address those things or change my environment to be in a more productive state.