zerozaku

I have quit ranked/competitive gaming and do only casual gaming whenever I get some interest. Honestly I was happy that I've quit gaming as a whole because it was a real addiction. Countless number of times I have uninstalled games only to get so tempted that I would download them again despite them taking 1hr to install.

From that kind of situation to come to this situation where I only play whenever I want to, is a great progress I felt I have made. I have got lots of time on me as expected, but I don't spend it wisely and infact in more "brain-off" fashion eg scrolling, chatting on discord, youtube etc.

Now I feel whenever I come across anything that needs my brain to be spent upon, I feel so reluctant to do high brain activity. I feel there's lot more difficulty concentrating and being patient with my task.

Is this because I have quit gaming? (sounds crazy I know) that my brain has become rather less active than usual?

I recently come across a random study on surgeons that game a bit during the week are doing better at their job than the ones who don't game. Not sure how of it is true but I sure have come across concepts like gaming keeps your brain active and make you perform.

Take this entire assumption as a grain of salt because I haven't done any huge experiments nor do I have any conclusive evidence but a small hunch that I just came across. I just wanted to know your experiences after you quit gaming.

(I know many of you already know it but this incident I experienced made me so paranoid about using smartphones)

To start off, I'm not that deep into privacy rabbit hole but I do as much I can possibly to be private on my phone. But for the rest of phones in my family, I generally don't care because they are not tech savvy and pushing them towards privacy would make their lives hard.

So, the other day I pirated a movie for my family and since it was on Netflix, it was a direct rip with full HD. I was explaining to my family how this looks so good as this is an direct rip off from the Netflix platform, and not a recording of a screening in a cinema hall(camrip). It was a small 2min discussion in my native language with only English words used are record, piracy and Netflix.

Later I walk off and open YouTube, and I see a 2 recommendations pop-up on my homepage, "How to record Netflix shows" & "Why can't you screen record Netflix". THE WHAT NOW. I felt insanely insecure as I was sure never in my life I looked this shit up and it was purely based on those words I just spoke 5min back.

I am pretty secure on my device afaik and pretty sure all the listening happened on other devices in my family. Later that day, I went and saw which all apps had microphone access, moved most of them to Ask everytime and disabled Google app which literally has all the permissions enabled.

Overall a scary and saddening experience as this might be happening to almost everyone and made me feel it the journey I took to privacy-focused, all worth it.

PS: Over multiple accounts