I'm having a weird relationship with gaming since few years.
I don't know how to express it or anyone could relate but gaming just feels like chore to me nowadays. I feel my gaming skills have gotten rusty and somewhere I'm afraid of facing the challenges especially the tough ones even though I get through all of those eventually, I'm constantly thinking about finishing the game so that I can play something else. Feels like I'm doing it to cross it off my bucket list of games just for the sake of finishing it.
If the game is too easy I feel as if it's an insult to my IQ. And if it's too difficult then I get tired of grinding and use cheese strategies to get through that tough boss fight where I was killed like 100 times (wukong for example) and then again feel bad about it, plus I can't get myself to accept the fact that it's fine to move ahead without doing all the side quests and finding all the hidden items, if I don't it feels incomplete and I get a FOMO of missing out on something important or interesting. I can't accept the fact that I'm not that hardcore gamer teen anymore.
Most of the times whenever I turn on my pc for gaming I just end up browsing and watching youtube. And on rare occasions when I find a game really engaging I feel like I should be doing something productive and I'm wasting my time. It's not that I don't like gaming anymore, I'm always excited for what I'll be playing next but rarely for what I'm playing currently. Then there's another thought my friend planted in my mind that playing against AI is like hitting a tennis ball against a brick wall. Sure, the ball comes back, but it doesn't give you the thrill of trying to outsmart a real person on the court, basically he likes playing online multiplayer battle royale games. But the thought of having to put in so much effort in it just to get fairly decent just puts me off.
I don't know if anyone can relate, but maybe this is just what growing up does to you. The kid inside slowly dies out, leaving behind a shell just ticking boxes off a list. But I still try telling myself "Don't you dare go hollow."