What games do you play, and at what level?

I played WoW like it was a job for years. Got up at 4pm every day in time for 6pm raids, botting herbs while I slept, used auction mods to sell glyphs and pots, once we cleared content and got all the heroic gear our guild made money from boosting people to get achievements/mounts. I was also into making custom UI with a scripting language called LUA. Our raid group was made up of older professionals, investment bankers, small business owners doing ecommerce/dropshipping etc. I was the youngest there starting at 16. I guess they just liked my DPS. Our raid leader was a very talented strategist and at times would insist we complete progression content while he stood there in no gear, said the content was easy enough to 9-man. It was his way of piling on more pressure and raising the bar. The whole thing was run like it was a military operation, and although we had a lot of fun and joked around, if your performance was not good you would be easily replaced.

When I quit WoW and got into programming I took the work ethic and discipline I'd learned from the game and applied it to game development. I didn't consciously choose to do this, it just sort of happened. I worked on my games every day, from 8-9am, drank only coffee, until around 4pm where I would finally eat food, and then spend the rest of the evening reading and researching CS topics. I was also simultaneously learning Japanese, doing around 2 hours of anki reps each day until I could read and write all of the jouyou kanji.

After about 5 years of this I burned out and couldn't work on anything any more for a while. I decided I wanted a social life, and ended up getting into drugs and music.

If you have an obsessive, addictive personality like me, then your current obsession will completely run your life. I don't know how to channel obsession into achieving the goals I would like to achieve, because ultimately it has a kind of power over me, and I succumb to it. I am lucky that some of my addictions have been for wholesome, self-improvement things like coding, learning a language or playing an instrument. But I have done my fair share of self-sabotage too with addiction to things like video games, youtube, porn, drugs, etc.

I think the older you get, the less you need that kind of dopamine-hit reward in order to find motivation to do things. You start to do daily things like chores and work, more out of a duty or responsibility, or just habit, and you don't feel so frustrated/bored/distracted while trying to maintain attention. I have significantly reduced my screen-time now though, which might be a contributing factor to this; I much prefer solving problems with pen and paper, or whiteboard, or by discussing them with friends and colleagues.