Why I Gave Up My Tablet

In order to help my best friend who is struggling right now, I bought a tablet from her. I paid her the full price she had paid to buy it new from the store. So it wasn’t the cheapest tablet I could have gotten, but I was helping out a friend so it wasn’t a big deal.

Anyway, I decided after about a month of owning the tablet that it is not a good idea for me to have a tablet. The thing is, I am obsessed with games. It’s an addiction. If I have access to a gaming device, I will literally play on it for hours. Even after I need to go to sleep or do something more important, I will keep playing sometimes until I make myself sick. I just feel a need to get to the next level or complete the next objective and then the next one and the next one.

Why are games such a problem for me?

Because games make sense.

Games have rules and objectives that I can understand. I don’t have to try to decipher social cues or maneuver my way through awkward conversations. I can just follow the rules and everything will work out the way it’s supposed to. And the best thing about games is that if you make a mistake, you can always try again. The game isn’t over until you give up or you get it right.

Life isn’t like that. Sometimes in life it seems like you’ve lost the game before you even had a chance to start it. No matter how hard you try, you can’t make up for inadequacies. And even when you think you understand the rules, there’s always things that can happen that seems to put you back at square one.

Have you ever played a game for the first time and felt completely lost as to what the rules were and no matter how much you learned as the game went on, you always felt like you were two steps behind everyone else? That’s what life has often felt like for me. I don’t understand people’s intentions. I don’t understand how to start conversations. I don’t understand how others seem to make friends so easily or start a conversation with ease. And when I feel that lost, it makes me not want to play the game ever again.

So it’s easy to see why games can seem so much more appealing than real life. It’s easy to see why people who feel different play games so much. It’s easy to see why I can play games until I’m sick because it’s one of the few things that makes me feel not broken.

But I gave up my tablet. I gave up playing computer games. Not because I don’t enjoy them, but because life is more important to me than feeling whole all the time. Life isn’t easy for me; playing games is easy. But I’d rather be involved in something that’s not easy but has meaning than something that is easy but doesn’t have meaning.

So I gave up my tablet not because I didn’t like it, but because I’m willing to take on the hard stuff to become better. I know it’s not going to be easy because it never has been, but it is worth it.

I think sometimes the world tries to convince us that life should be easy or that we should try to make life easy for our kids or those we love. But the truth is that it’s in the difficulties that we really live the most. The most memorable lives in history have been the ones that weren’t easy. So don’t be afraid to live a hard life because that’s what makes your life great.