I am so overwhelmed with being the singular caregiver for everyone in my home.

I work full time, cook, clean, laundry, do all the shopping, care for our 2 young children and dog.

My husband? He works 7 to 3 M-F and spends every single second at home gaming.

From 3 o'clock until 10 or 11 he games.

He ignores us.

He eats dinner at the computer.

I am a single mother with a man child ruining my life.

He gets mad when I need to ask him something.

He plays pubG with his friends (who, shocker ARE ALL SINGLE MEN).

He doesn't want to do anything else.

When I have broughten up the games before (we've been married 10 years) he gets extremely defensive.

I guess I didn't realize a hobby was supposed to be your entire life.

28 m. I was playing valheim, lost my gear to a bad run felt awful and something clicked. Idk exactly what it was but, everything has been pushed aside for games, I had nothing else to live for... I deleted my stuff but that doesn't really matter. My mind has changed, i feel there's been an internal shift. I've been running, hiding, avoiding, numbing pain for so long. I want to live. Games have stopped me from living for long enough. But I'm not angry, or cathartic, or desperate. I'm peaceful. It's strange. This is right tho. Maybe it had to take this long maybe it didn't but now this is right.

I don't know how active I'll be here, thinking about it may tempt me, I just wanna celebrate the here and now.

I don’t even like classic wow that much, despite the amount of hours I’ve put in. I’ve been playing the beta, and I’ve been realizing this. It’s an archaic game format. Leveling takes forever, endgame is just micro adjusting your gear/build to get 1% more damage all while ruining your real life. I’m an addict. I prefer OSRS greatly more (Ironman) but I had to cut it out because I cannot feel happy to put time into it at this stage of my life. I don’t feel happy even playing my favorite game, Tekken 7, anymore. I played them by justifying to myself in my head, life is bullshit, we all die, don’t make someone else rich etc etc etc you’ve heard it all before

Quit before you do irreversible damage like I have. I won’t say exactly what health ailment I’ve picked up. it’s not the worst, but it’s bad and could have been WAYYY worse. Self-gaslighting myself, telling myself what I don’t want, and justifying cheap dopamine. My 20s are gone. My prospects for a better life are objectively worse now.

I came to a realization that, ever since I was an early teenager, I pretty much always had some game that I was working on. Always some chase that I was after. Always something I would occupy my mind with when under stress. After quitting, I am hit with a profound sense of anhedonia. It's as if nothing feels like anything anymore.

I have been successful with my education and job responsibilities. In fact, I just finished medical residency and am working as a physician now. Gaming didn't really interfere with that as my policy was always treating gaming time as a luxury when all work and household chores as well as studies are done (I practice Russian every day after work in addition to always learning medicine). However, I am single and don't have many friends. I spent the remainder of my free time gaming. I wanted to develop other aspects of myself like building more genuine relationships and going to the gym. I also wanted to find pleasure from other hobbies instead of gaming. I didn't really quit because it was dramatically affecting my career or anything, but wanted to find joy from other things in life.

The issue is that one month in to quitting, it's like my brain feels broken. I can't find pleasure in anything. I definitely meet criteria for major depression, but it's weird because I am still highly functional. I go to work every day, go to the gym five days per week, have worked on relationships, etc, but my main issue is that everything just feels completely grey, flat, and pointless. I realized through all the stressful times in my life that I depended on gaming to give me that constant dopamine hit. Without it, I just feel completely awful. I am to the point of caving and starting to play something like Hearthstone again just to give me that hit of pleasure to start feeling something again.

Anybody else like this? When did the anhedonia improve for you?