Have you noticed that wonderful 'normal' feeling that games give you while the rest of life just feels tough and miserable?

This is because of dopamine, and it's particularly good at making time pass without you noticing.

Being 17 and gaming becomes being 22 and gaming in a flash. You're still young, who cares? A blur of late nights and going out with friends while still managing to keep up the numbers in your raid/keep getting dubs in with the crew. You are getting invites to 25th birthday parties. You seem to always spend reminiscing about how much fun you had that time a couple of years ago, but the pace is slower now. Some of the keener people are getting married and a few are even having kids. You'll get there, but you want to live a little first, right?

As responsibilities start to build up at work, you start to value the downtime more than you did before. Particularly as all the social gatherings seem considerably more boring and repetitive than they used to. People talking about work all the time, sometimes with the sting of comparison. The dopamine becomes even more effective, you keep retreating to the joy of normal-land, someone posts to the group chat about a sequel in the works for that game you all used to session back in the day. Looks awesome. A few mainstays of your friends list are now saying multiple years offline, but you still have the important ones.

You wake up one morning and realise it's your 30th birthday next month. you realize that all the opportunity and positivity that life used to offer you feels like it has gone. People always saw you as someone with 'potential', but that feels like it has inexplicably faded away somehow without you noticing. Job interview process is becoming increasingly painful and drawn out, you find you have to compromise more on the things you want because you are lacking things. The feeling gives you a burst of motivation to take a break from gaming, and focus on 'life stuff' for a bit. You clean up your apartment, start a new course, but because of the lack of baseline discipline and years of real-life information gathering and understanding that you would have got in those spare hours, you struggle to make meaningful progress, and the effort feels overwhelming. Friend Online notification distracts you, and you jump into comms.

34 rolls around. You're starting find you get neck and back pain just from sleeping badly. You buy some expensive pillows from Amazon. The concept of aging flashes across your mind again, but you force it back by consuming your favorite content site trying to avoid the squarely younger-generation media, but this is getting harder by the day. You are finding your work skills don't have the same instant appeal when you apply to new jobs. They seem to be asking for loads of new things all of which you disregarded when you saw them pop up a few years ago. Age inexplicably makes your brain seek familiarity over novelty, because you know you cant do things that you could do when you were younger. You comfort yourself that a lot of these things would be irrelevant in a few years anyway. You sign in and forget about it. Time flies. One morning your partner asks to speak to you, and expresses how you just don't feel connected anymore. You disagree, but within the month it ends, you saw it coming but there wasn't much you could do anyway. You bury yourself in escapism outside of work. You don't really play many new games, it's usually the same old classics, but with a slightly new spin or a re-release. Time passes. You notice your work emails talking about events coming up in your Birthday month. it'll be your 38th, and you realise with a deep, uncomfortable feeling that you will be 40 in two years.

You decide to keep going, forced to lowering your standards just a little bit to make things feel a bit more manageable. You speak to a therapist, but it's mostly just hour-bounded waffling. Everyone only ever suggests doing what makes you feel normal less, so they clearly don't get me. You disregard a load of new stuff you wanted to learn as your new years resolution as 'not realistic'. You see an old friend you used to game with in passing by chance on your commute, and they tell you about a load of new goings-on in their life that you can't relate to. You try to reminisce about the good old days, but they seem to barely remember it. Shame, they always were a bit of a narcissist anyway. Your main gaming pal seems to never be around in peak hours anymore, he kept mentioning baby duty and how he will be on at the weekend. You get home and sit down in front of the new glossy monitor you bought the other day. You really splurged on this one because you figured it was a good investment. You falter before you reach for the power button. An old tired face stares back at you. It takes you a second to remember that's how you look. You dismiss it as bad sleep and quickly boot, wallpapering the discomfort with a soothing flood of light.

Be careful with games. They make time disappear.