How ‘Modern Warfare 2’ Completely Altered The Direction Of My Life

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Excerpt: Spoiler alert! It altered the direction of my life away from video games forever. Modern Warfare 2 was my addiction, now MoveMe Quotes is.

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Imagine for a few minutes where you might be if:

• All of the time you have spent watching TV was instead spent reading books…
• All of the time you spent on social media was instead spent volunteering…
• All of the time you spent playing video games was instead spent creating your own website…

Think about what you would do if you could repossess all of the time that you feel may have been wasted and you could, instead, reinvest it into something else—something more…

Let me tell you a story.

For Christmas one year, I was given Modern Warfare 2 (a video game for PS3) as a gift. I never considered myself a ‘gamer’ but (just as the game’s producers intended), quickly became addicted and spent a lot of (most of) my downtime playing.

Fast forward to a day about 6 months later when the game decided that it wanted to show me how much time I had spent in total playing the game…  Spoiler alert: That was a very bad decision on the games part.

It told me that I had spent a total of 312 hours—that’s 13 days!—actively playing the game over the course of 6 months!  I was mortified.

I quit there and then and haven’t played since.

‘Downtime’ meant something completely different to me after that day. I always thought that in order to recharge and refuel the mind, body, and spirit, that you need to ‘shut down’ and engage in potato-like, mind-numbing, passive activity.

But what really clicked in my head that day was that that wasn’t the case… Here’s how Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbs, puts it:

“We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery – it recharges by running.”

I knew that if I had 13 extra days added to my life, I wouldn’t want to spend that time playing video games, watching TV, or trolling social media sites—so why would I continue to invest any more time into those activities moving forward?

That was my rationale and I decided to cut out TV and video games as much as possible and reduce the total amount of time I spent on social media sites so that I could invest that time into myself, my art, and in others.

It was a snap decision that completely altered the direction of my life.

Here is a small list of some of the chain of events that followed:

1. I dedicated most of my newfound downtime towards creating, editing, optimizing, posting to, and improving MoveMe Quotes (my art).
2. I improved my skills in web design, seo, photoshop, and of course content management and quote organization in the process.
3. I was inspired to improve the quote quality and decided to upload only quotes from primary sources (i.e. books, blog posts, articles, etc.)  Which meant no more posting quotes from a quote website that was from another quote website that was from another quote website. This, in turn, lead me to develop a strong habit of reading.
4. I became more confident in myself and my ‘voice.’

You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight.

I sometimes wonder where I might be today if I never saw that stat or had that trigger moment.  Probably on a couch, in front of a screen, ‘prestiging’ for the 50th time. Yikes.

TV, social media, and video games are all instant gratifiers but, for the most part and at least for me and my life—have very little long term meaning.

Doing things like reading books, volunteering in your community, and expressing yourself by creating your art, on the other hand, are all invaluable in the long run.

How might you start better spending your downtime? What would you do with an extra 13 days of life? Make the decision to be more constructive and creative with your downtime and start repossessing your time, today! Good luck.

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