I'm gonna be a bit blunt here, if your self-work was washed away in one weekend by one person, it wasn't particularly deep or impactful self-work. You need to return to that self-work. I've got friends and neighbors who focus on the negative, but I don't focus on it with them and it doesn't affect me or my ability to have positive interactions with them.
I think you've got a wrong outlook about videogames here too, like, they're a vice like any other but plenty of people have a healthy life balance with vice and plenty don't, stressing about a weekend spent playing video games sounds more like an imbalance in how you prioritize the ability to goof off versus focusing on growth. There's a quote my wife likes from Star Trek "The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play." It's really important to the learning/growth process to disengage and re-engage. Both parts are important: We're kind of living in a form of
these days, where even learning is just a quick pleasure release because so much knowledge is abstract to life. There's thousands of crafting tutorials on youtube, for example, but everyone is using tools to do those crafts so you can learn how to do something you may have no financial ability to enact. It's hard to learn practical skills in the first world, the truth is that if it doesn't make you money, it costs money, and that means there's an excess of information available and only a small pool of it is practical to you, the rest is infotainment.
So that's where life balance comes in, you spend some time thinking about what you want to do, what you can do with the resources available to you, you spend some time acting on those desires, you spend some time financing these desires through work (assuming you haven't found your
yet, and your desires and labor potential are disconnected), and you spend some time playing so that the work and time spent contemplating and seeking your ikigai don't drive you into some sort of mad spiral. This world just isn't meant to be taken seriously, that's a fact. When you consider the briefness of a human lifespan (no matter how enduring a given moment feels) and the infiniteness of the soul (conscioussness, if you prefer, in any case there is an indestructible essence that survives the vessel), it's obvious that the suffering in this life is extremely fleeting but meant to be experienced on a visceral level so that we can understand what it's like to go through these things, but we can also take into this life the lesson from outside of it that all of this is temporary and so the suffering is much less great than it appears to be.
A less-than-occult truism I've heard, by the way, is that it takes an average of 22 days for someone to change an old habit into a new habit. So as you work to cultivate an attitude of discipline, keep in mind that even with conscious effort, growth takes time. And as a metaphor, also think on how trees grow without putting any effort towards it. Just deciding that you value discipline is a step towards cultivating discipline, and beating yourself up for taking a moment to experience pleasure isn't a form of discipline. That's more like a form of emotional self-flagellation. Just, y'know, be true to yourself. If you don't like playing video games, that's fine, and you probably shouldn't then, even if a long term friendship decays a bit for it. If you do like playing video games, that's fine too. My personal take as someone who has played video games for decades: I read recently that something like 60% of gamers on Steam are playing games that are six years old or older. Graphics cards are really overpriced right now because of cryptocurrency mining demand, and that influences console gamers too. It's entirely valid to like video games conceptually, but not really be happy with any of the ones available now because the industry's going through a bit of a glut right now with no end in sight. So, y'know, that might be worth considering too. I imagine if you're gaming with an old friend, it's because you've done it since the start of your friendship. Games were more diverse mechanically in the 90s and early 00s. Since they've gotten more popular, they've also gotten more homogenized.
