Same here. It's a very sad realization, and I'm envious of people who don't feel this way sometimes. Nice to have company in misery at least though.

I used to believe this about myself as well, but later realized it was a rationalization. The reality is it's because leaving hacker news for extended periods (more than a minute or two) results in dopamine withdrawal. I feel a powerful urge to return to browsing links and my brain makes up a reason along the lines of "you're wasting time by staying on this site instead of going back to hacker news." It's a similar thing that drives me to "skip ahead to the good part" in youtube videos rather than watching the whole thing, evidenced by my doing it even on videos that are very short.

That doesn’t sound healthy man. Unless that other thing you should’ve been doing is giving CPR or something then stop feeling guilty.

“Productivity” is not the end goal, you are allowed to play games in life. In fact, shouldn’t work be about enabling you to enjoy life?

Weirdly, playing games is typically something I the feel least guilty doing, precisely because it's a distraction from the other stuff I'd otherwise not be doing. There's just a lot of stuff I want to do, that I struggle to do, and so I feel guilty about not making progress on that stuff. Then, whenever I try to do something else, I feel too guilty to do that something else.

It's a real self-reinforcing negative feedback loop. I agree that it's not healthy. It's just hard to break out of.

I deal with the exact same mental model. I think for me, while actively gaming I do have fun. It’s only after the fact I look back on the time wasted gaming and think “wow, I really should have worked on that project I want to build instead of playing a game”. It’s also hard to rationalize time spent gaming when you have nothing to show for it afterwards.

If you ever figure out the solution to this negative thought-loop, let me know please!

Ditto. its a bit sad. I miss not knowing about all the things i could be doing.