Thanks for sharing your experience though. That's interesting news to me. I talk with coworkers occassionally, but games don't come up (and neither do other interests outside of work).
Don't regret time spent doing something you enjoy. So as long as you enjoyed it, feel good about it.
Volunteering, sure, but the rest are just as self indulgent as any other pass time. Just because you value them higher doesn't mean you should discount the things that other people do to enjoy themselves.
The elitist in me wants to say games are little more than hi-res Skinner boxes. But properly applied, games can teach us strategy, reason, and problem solving. Is that why I play God of War? No. I play it because KRATOS SMASH
You can totally min/max your entire life and only do things for self-improvement, but then to what end? What do you expect to derive out of the continuing education classes that is going to be significantly valuable to your life/career?
I think it's important to note that many people are actually quite satisfied with their position in life, a lot of us are making a lot of money engaging in interesting work, so at a certain point doing things for the sake of minimizing opportunity cost comes with diminishing returns as you've already made the most of the opportunities you've already had. The whole point of working hard is to reach some stage of life where you can actually reap the rewards and have the time and resources to enjoy yourself however you please without worrying about it.
But in the same way that learning Haskell or Lisp can change the way you write and think about code, learning a language like Japanese can fundamentally change the way you think about everything. There’s intrinsic value to being multilingual.
Of greater pragmatic benefit is that if you learn a language, like Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, or French, you gain exposure to a whole different media landscape, including information on news and world events that is drastically different from what you encounter in the anglosphere.
Certainly, an addiction to gaming is bad, as is playing games too much to the detriment of the rest of your life. Ultimately, everyone should do what they find enjoyable in the moment that they will simultaneously not regret later in life. Totally understand if video games fall under that category for you, but I dispute them as "time wasting" as a general statement.
While they all did that, I just stayed at home playing games instead and acted like the sole purpose of life was to enjoy myself which is something worth regretting (and happy I've made some progress since then).
This common saying is harmful and borderline hedonistic. Not all enjoyable activities are good activities. Should ex-smokers not regret their past smoking habit, then?
Everything must be in moderation. Playing video games, watching movies, and binging TV shows are great for unwinding after work. But if you do them too much, they can disrupt your life.
Like I said, everything must be in moderation. Regrets are effective for reminding us not to repeat the same mistakes. But of course if we regret our mistakes 24/7, it will only depress us and discourage us to do anything.