Realizations on Life Living

ok so the other day i was playing poker online an ended up losing about $1700 overall from the whole fiasco. felt horrible all day and was seriously thinking i could deposit more money and win some money back. then i started to think whether it was really worth it.

i started to think of all the break even months, months i would lose and break even with rakeback and all those stressful nights grinding back losses. clearly i just must not be playing good poker at all or i just make serious mistakes costing me big losses in all my sessions. then i started to think my peak bankroll at any moment was about $14k across 3 years of playing very casually. i make alot more from my job in one year. about $39k of spendable money.

considering all this, i decided playing poker in my free time to earn whatever extra cash it can bring in is not worth it. all the emotional stress and time consumption is just not worth it. i been thinking of all the other things in life i need to work on:
- learning how to program things i enjoy, video games
- how to set up and run websites, using flash animation, graphics, etc
- meeting girls
- meeting new cool fun friends
- hanging with current friends
- exercising, dieting, health
- learnign how to invest and explore other business opportunities
and instead im wasting hours after work stressing out on trying to earn "more cash" when im already putting about 40 hrs of work and 10 hrs of commuting already on earning "cash"

right now, i'm making alot more money than most of my friends, most of which are still in school, just finishing school, or got some hourly wage jobs with no plans with school. i'm already better off than alot of my friends, why am i spending so much damn time tryin to make more money if poker isnt even fun for me to play?

another thing i've noticed was, after a month of working and busy schedules hanging out with friends, i finally had an unscheduled night of nothing to do. normally i would've been killing time playing wow, but i was jus not feeling like playing computer games. so i basically just sat at home bored as hell. i actually felt like i wanted to go to work. i needed to stay busy.

on another note, i also had the mentality of if i wasnt gonna play poker, i can just be a frugal spender, save up every penny, and try to invest my way out of the rat race. however, i'm starting to believe that i should start spending more, have more fun in my day to day activites, work on learning more interesting technologies, at the same time save up money and invest. my whole perception on life revolving on making money was so wrong. afterall, we're all making money to spend money. whats the point of dying with money in the bank, i rather die with the experiences gained from spending money in enjoyable ways. that being said, i'm still going to try and budget my funds, but more loosely around sociable activites.

i also been phasing computer life completely out of my daily activities (other than work). im trying to learn more on web based technologies in my freetime, programming games, and reading books for fun and learning. at the same time, im gonna try and talk to girls online and hopefully work on game in bars. i dont think im gonna be gaming much on the ocmputer anymore until diablo3 and starcraft2 comes out. we'll see.