What a perfect way to describe the constant struggle I have with whittling away evenings drinking beer and playing Overwatch vs investing time in learning new skills or working on side hustles to generate additional income.
That free time you have is a luxury if you are working. It can still be very enjoyable to do interesting things after work, but I wouldn't look at them as investing time or learning new skills or hustling (i.e. working). That's a great way to get burnout. Burnout can be horrible if you never have leisure, but you can still make some that off time productive in some way without it feeling like work. For myself I like to put together projects in new tech that seem interesting for an idea that is absurd. It doesn't have to be even a full demo, just some examples where you poked at something and can talk about to coworkers. Arduino / Raspberry Pis are great too - super easy to get in to and you can make stupid fun little trick things. Same with chat bots and cloud infrastructure - slap something together and everybody can have fun.
I'm just wanting to say be careful how you look at your free time. That relaxation with video games and a beer is OK. But if you're wanting more out of it then turn it in to some way to get conversations and cool hacks working with coworkers or friends. Also - try switching up some video games with board games. There are some incredible board games out there these days and it'll be easy to get a group together at work for a quick round of some games.
I used to be fine with that. Now as I get older I see it as a vice which causes major cognitive dissonance since it is my main way to recharge.
Thought we might play together some time.
I unintentionally became more accustomed to delayed gratification, taught myself how to make micro-optimizations in my life to clear up time, chose to re-invest my time saved investing in new skills, learned (when trying to get a job/promotion) to frame my value in terms of what fulfilling someone else's needs, learned the value of researching both how to do things AND why people recommend those methods over others, and developed a decent sense of risk:reward-informed decision-making.
YMMV.
Not sure if you would put it on your resume, but IMHO if I was a hiring manager and I was hiring for an entry level mgmt position and somebody had "ran a successful wow guild with 50 members for 2 years" it would definitely be something I would see very positively