As I continue to understand the importance of intrinsic desires, the way I view leisure and my relationship with video games continue to change. My gaming background consists of not a lot of games, but more so deep competitive dives into various competitive first-person shooters like CS:GO, Rainbow 6, and VALORANT. I have over 10,000 hours in those three games alone. I'm spending countless hours practicing certain skills like aiming and hand-eye coordination, learning new strategies and characters to play, spending time getting in the reps by playing matches, and enhancing team chemistry. But eventually, the way to play the game evolves, and certain characters and maps go in and out of rotation or are changed. In a way, all that effort becomes futile. With a skill like playing the piano, you can generally play that until the end of your lifetime, but with gaming, who knows how long support for the player base and competitive scene will last? But I think it's an important lesson I need to learn. In a way, it's acceptance of the impermanence of life. The importance of leisure is to combat the underlying urge for constant productivity. In _Four Thousand Weeks_, Oliver Burkman shares how, > [t]o the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means. Aristotle argued that true leisure—by which he meant self-reflection and philosophical contemplation—was among the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its own sake, whereas other virtues, like courage in war, or noble behavior in government, were virtuous only because they led to something else By having that lack of productivity, we find value in the activity through the memories and experiences in themselves which promotes a contrasting emphasis on the present moment rather than future outcomes tied with productivity. Even though I am playing for a sense of improvement through higher ranks and competitive play, I just find much more immersion in the nuances and present moment as I work towards it, which may not be as applicable to the way I perceive other productivity-oriented activities. Alternatively, instead of spending all these hours I can work towards something that could have a higher return on investment through the beauty of definite story games and experiences, but that reasoning stems from productivity and would go against this philosophy of leisure. So, what's an ideal amount of leisure? _Dopamine Nation_, a book on controlling the influence of the molecule of more, suggests a range between 2-5 hours of leisure a day to increase our overall happiness. So for me, that might like 2 hours of playing VALORANT, 0.5 hours of anime, and roughly 1-2 hours of socializing.