Real Life Highscore

I’m not talking about Big Mac and a Diet Coke type balance. I mean balancing gaming, earning money, health and fitness, friends and family and self time. Achieving a perfect balance is extremely hard, perhaps even impossible but we have to do the best we can to fit all of the things we need to do and love to do into our daily lives.

Balance is hard to define – because what a balanced lifestyle constitutes is different for everyone. In my mind a 9-5 job five days a week isn’t balanced, in fact I felt horrible when I was doing that. But this may not be the case for other people. Finding what your balance is means figuring out how much you need to work to be happy (covering expenses with enough left over to do the things you enjoy) without actually getting yourself to a point where you don’t have enough time to enjoy the fruits of your labor. You could work a 50 hour week and not have enough time or energy to even enjoy the money you earn from it.

The same thing applies to gaming, of course. It’s something we love to do but it must be balanced just like the things we don’t enjoy. A gaming friend of mine (who is in school) has recently decided to stop gaming completely until his grades improved. He has been having trouble focusing on studies and ends up gaming when he shouldn’t be. However, his decision to stop gaming completely isn’t balanced but it is a necessary upheaval until he gets his grades back in order. Once things are sorted he will need to relearn how to game without sacrificing study time, a hard challenge that I’m sure a lot of us have been through.

Getting my life into balance is something I have been working on for a long time. Currently, some of both the things I love and the things I need to do are on the computer. Which I don’t mind, I have always enjoyed using computers. I game, I work, I learn and I socialize (I have made quite a few friends through gaming) all on the computer. But this means I need to get out and do more stuff to balance it out, especially for fitness. I’m currently getting out of the house once a day to do some exercise – I’m not terribly unhealthy but I could definitely see myself going that way if I don’t keep working on it. The past few days I have been cycling a fair distance in town for various reasons, keeping this up daily is a pretty good start. Later I would like to get back into Aikido (a martial art I started 2 years back) and possibly field hockey.

There is a lot to do each day and sometimes I feel like I don’t have time for everything. This is the fundamental challenge of a having balanced lifestyle. Time-efficiency techniques (like meal planning) are a good way to increase the amount of time you have each day and I will continue experimenting with these to find ones that work for me. However, just putting in the effort each day to do a good mix of activities is a great start.

The following video is a guest post from a reader/fellow YouTuber – InDead. Check out his channel for more VLOGs like this.

Would you say that you have a balanced lifestyle? If so, how do you manage balance? If not, what are you doing to try and improve your balance of doing what you love against what you need to do? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.