Title: I&#x27;m a mid 30s male, software developer, married without children.<p>I started playing a video game at the end of 2019, and played every time I could when my wife was not home. Then came 2020, covid lockdowns, also I started getting better at the game (the ladder systems are so addictive) and played more. In 2021 I just didn&#x27;t care anymore whether my wife was home or not or even if I was supposed to be working and started playing all the time. I&#x27;d wake up early to play and would go to bed late to catch up with work I had not done during the day.<p>According to Steam I played over 2.000 hours during 2020 and 2021.<p>Finally I decided I was seriously addicted and uninstalled the game, unsubscribed from everyone related to the game in youtube, quit all discord communities, and it worked.<p>I have been now &quot;clean&quot; for 4 months. But sometimes I crave to go back and play. I watched a youtube video in incognito recently of some famous player and had so much urge to play again. But I&#x27;m afraid just by installing the game I will be going back to the addiction.<p>Is it possible to have a &quot;healthy&quot; amount of playing? Let&#x27;s say just a couple of hours in the weekends? The only reason I think I have been able to not play for 4 months is because it&#x27;s time consuming for me to download&#x2F;install the game again, set my keyboard shortcuts, etc. It will take at least 1 hour for me to set up everything and that&#x27;s what is preventing me to go back. But if I had the game available and ready to launch in a click I am not sure I would be able to play only some hours on the weekends.<p>What I love about this particular game is how I can totally focus mind and body for each 30-40 minutes match where I won&#x27;t take a look at my cellphone or anything can distract me really because I&#x27;m totally focused basically in a real &quot;flow&quot; state. Of course it&#x27;s a flow state for something irrelevant to my life or society, so it&#x27;s basically a waste of time I guess... But I also don&#x27;t have the change to get to this flow state in my day job or in other activity really, adult life can be so boring sometimes...<p>Really curious if someone else has experienced something similar
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