5000 hours of Dota 2 - A Lesson Learned from Wasted Time

I've crossed the threshold of playing 5000 hours of Dota 2⁵. Dota 2 is a competitive video game where a team of 5 human players play against an opposing team of 5 human players and that's all you need to know for this post. According to my lifetime estimates⁶, it's the activity I've spent the third most time in outside of sleep and work¹.

1. ~14,000 hours of schooling⁴
2. ~6,528 hours swimming competitively²
3. ~5,000 hours of Dota 2³

It's an understatement to say I've wasted a lot of time playing Dota 2, but I've built up a new mentality along the way. I've often likened this mentality to a Zen state due to detaching joy from winning and letting go of anger in a toxic environment.

The Zen of Solo Queue

The Root of Suffering is Attachment -- Gautama Buddha

Solo queuing is when you play with four random teammates and it's like joining a new team at work. Everyone on the team usually has different goals for their lives but what ties us together is the need for money to survive. Players in Dota 2 are supposed to be joined by the shared incentive to win the game, but losing in a video game doesn't affect you much. It's as if every teammate at work was a trust fund baby loudly expressing quitting the project at any roadblock. It's a recipe for building resentment and regularly happens in competitive video games. I cared about winning every game and many tables were smashed.

The gaming community calls bad play induced by anger "tilting". Trying to win while tilting taught me life problems have an emotional core and how I should address the emotions is based on how much control I have. Nowadays, I no longer depend on four strangers to have fun in Dota and I'm generally less irritable.

Examples of utilizing these lessons outside of Dota 2 are starting a new hobby, or handling success at work. I've tried to pick up writing many times before. The emotion which stopped me was feelings of inadequacy about my writing. Targeting those emotions by writing a list of reasons why it's okay for my writing to be trash helped my writing more time trying to write. At work, I'm satisfied with my output based on my own criteria even if I don't get the promotion or rewarded for it. I know I have an impact on the end result but a large portion of it is out of my control since it relies on how people represent and interpret my work. The distinction between these are when I'm writing, I have full control of the my emotions and behavior. In the work scenario, I lack full control and need to detach from the outcome. I do what I can to effect the outcome but live happily with the results.

I specifically learned these concepts while playing Dota. I definitely could have learned these lessons earlier in life from schooling or swimming. What was stopping me from learning in the past?

Schooling, Swimming, and the Protestant Work Ethic

Traditional schooling and swimming are both individual efforts with a clear success or failure binary with a focus on effort. Put time into studying or practicing and succeed. Rarely are you put into a position to fail due to a decision made by someone else. Just thinking about it for 5 minutes, it became obvious to me I was unlikely to learn the lesson earlier. Perhaps it's not generalizable to other people and if I participated in a team based sport instead, I would have learned how to be process focused. But I've taken a trodden traditional path indicating to me, engaging with any activity can have productive value.

There is always more to learn

Through Dota 2 I found a repetitive environment which helped me internalize a lesson not conducive to being learned with my background. Generalizing the idea, any activity can teach a lesson which may have been difficult to learn given your history. There is still a danger with these fun activities as mindlessly spend 5000 hours not actively engaged is easy. I definitely autopiloted and wasted time. But I believe the lesson is not to pull away from "wasted" time you love, but to dive deeper.