Gaming and Ambition

On giving myself permission to rest

It’s 9PM on a weeknight. I’ve had a long day of work, dinner and chores are done, and I already had a good workout in the morning. I’ve even completed my essay for the week. Tomorrow is a rest day, so I don’t need to wake up early to workout. By all accounts, I should be able to lean back and do whatever I want. I should be able to play a video game and just enjoy it… but I can’t, not without feeling some degree of guilt.

Growing up, my grades in school were very average. But I was also always an overachiever. I finished assignments early and often acted as the leader in group projects. In my spare time, I would play video games at home. Yet over time, I found myself feeling guilty in doing so. There was always something more productive I could be doing. Everything from working out, studying more, trying to find an internship, or participating more in clubs at school. There was always something better I could be doing.

That feeling persisted for years, and eventually I stopped gaming. The guilt had become too heavy.

For nearly a decade, I focused on my personal growth. The cost of that though, was that a simple pleasure like video games wasn’t something I allowed myself to enjoy. I made excuses that it was a waste of time, that there were better things to do, that games cost too much, and that I simply didn’t have time. I looked at working adults who still played and wondered how they found the mental bandwidth. I projected myself into the future – between all my goals I still had yet to achieve and the time needed to raise a family, where would there ever be room?

In those years, life was rewarding and exciting. Yet in the evenings after work, when all I wanted to do was relax, I couldn’t. When the noise and distraction died down, I never let myself fully unwind. The narrative in my head about personal growth never included time to relax and just play games. Even on quiet evenings with nowhere to be, I couldn’t sit while doing nothing. There was always a voice asking what I should be doing instead.

A couple of years ago, I started doing therapy. One of the first questions my therapist asked was what I thought my values were. Ambition was never one of them. I had always assumed that ambition was reserved only for people who had the results to show for it. The ones who were top of their class, in the best jobs, and at the best companies, or even the ones starting those companies. Yet my therapist pushed me to think deeper and to ask the hard questions on why I didn’t think I was ambitious, despite everything I told her.

I pushed back. In my own narrative, my very average grades, the lack of prestigious school, and a career that didn’t feel prestigious, made me feel different – that I wasn’t ambitious. But she kept asking. Somewhere in that discomfort, I started to realize my vision of ambition was actually focused on the outcome of ambition, the results. I had been measuring myself against the end state that I hadn’t reached yet and concluded I didn’t belong at all.

It took a long time to realize that ambition and drive doesn’t only need to be defined by outcomes. For me, ambition can simply be about becoming just a little better than you were yesterday. When I ask myself if I’ve done that, the answer, most days, is yes. Calling myself ambitious still felt like imposter syndrome for a long time. But I’m learning to trust what I see when I look back at my own life.

Which brings me back to that weekday evening.

I didn’t just pick up the controller though. I ran through the mental checklist. Maybe I should read or maybe I should get ahead on something for tomorrow. I was looking for permission that I had already done enough, but that permission will never come from anywhere outside of my own head.

Eventually, I played. The guilt came anyway. Quieter than it used to be, but still there.

I’m not sure the guilt ever fully goes away. Maybe that’s not the point and maybe the point is learning the difference between feeling guilty and obeying the guilt. That night, I felt it. And I played anyway.

I still don’t have a good answer to what success looks like for an ambitious person who just wants to play video games sometimes. But I think I’m done waiting to figure that out before I let myself rest.