Spending a lot of time reading articles or on HN is very much not being an "adult with responsibility", IMO. Nor is much of the coding I'm doing to solve problems.

Most adults I personally know who live fulfilling lives are not doing much of these. They don't spend 90% of their discretionary free time on the browser. They play games.

Living your life based on others' opinions of what constitutes maturity is a good prescription of not living a meaningful life.

You have a mental energy budget. We all know you can't effectively code 16 hours a day, coding takes up a lot of mental budget. Similarly "good" hobbies takes up a lot of mental budget. If you spend that at work your hobbies will be boring, if you spend that on your hobbies your work will suffer. Some people have more budget, some people make choices at work where they get tasks with lower mental budget ie the "9-5" people, while others spend it all on work and look for hobbies requiring little mental budget.

I was with you until the 'play games part'

Is not wasting time playing games the same as wasting time browsing stuff online? it's all mindless entertainment and distraction.

I don't think so. Games -especiall when you get introduced first to the concept- are tonns of unique experience, logic and puzzle and bonding with other people and experimenting and exploiting and race for a win.. just to scratch the surface. Reddit on the other hand is mindless scrolling and infinite low hanging dopamine fruit where you can't remember what did you read but can't play games anymore because it's gratification is not instant enough.

In the same way that watching a TV series or a movie is mindless distraction [0], or going for a hike or a road trip is just an "escape" from normality. Reducing experiences to their fundamental value [1] devoids them of any joy they might have.

[0] Not all games are solo mobile games; a good chunk of my gaming time is spent playing online multiplayer games with friends.

[1] cooking is a chore; it's a requirement for being a healthy adult. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy the act of doing it.

“[~~~~~] is a chore; it's a requirement for being a healthy adult. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy the act of doing it.”

This is probably the most important take away in the thread for living a more fulfilling life.

> Is not wasting time playing games the same as wasting time browsing stuff online? it's all mindless entertainment and distraction.

That was why younger me used to think this:

> When I was younger I often felt I had played too many games and bemoaned the time lost.

Present me realized that if, 20+ years later I still have such fond memories of playing those games, then no - they weren't a waste.

Now it does probably depend on personality and the types of games you play. I don't think I'd think so fondly if all I did was play Tetris for hours and hours.

I'm not suggesting this is true for everyone and everyone would do better playing games. But I do realize that whatever I replaced games with was not even close to fulfilling.

Same with novels, TV shows and movies. I'm fairly selective of the ones I watch/read, and so I have good memories of them as well. If I can't find any interesting ones, I don't watch. Whereas if you just browse Netflix and pick whatever is appealing to fill the time - yeah, probably not a good idea.

Exactly what I thought too. I was where op has described, I appeared to slit in there naturally and before I even know the job ate away all my motivation and productivity.

Today I code games for fun, read lengthy articles about irrelevant things I care about and so on. I focus boring work on small time frames in between.