My internal dialogue might look like, “Hey, I notice I want to play video games. I wonder that this is a symptom of? I recall that I often feel like this when I need to take some time to just cool off…”
This sounds like another way of lying to yourself. It seems a lot more likely that you actually want to play video games. Consider someone with a sweet tooth. If they say to themselves, “I guess my body needs energy which it can get from all sorts of other nutritious food,” they might be aiming for something good (healthy food), but this is not a true description of what is happening. Their body really does want sugar, even if this is because in the ancestral environment this would also have promoted health. In a similar way, animals seem to have a desire for play, something which is both intellectually stimulating but also very safe. Video games are very optimized for this just as sweet things are very optimized for the body’s desire for sugar. So it seems much more likely that you really want to play video games, and even if you manage to jam some other shape into that hole, you are in fact jamming something else into it.
This sounds like another way of lying to yourself. It seems a lot more likely that you actually want to play video games. Consider someone with a sweet tooth. If they say to themselves, “I guess my body needs energy which it can get from all sorts of other nutritious food,” they might be aiming for something good (healthy food), but this is not a true description of what is happening. Their body really does want sugar, even if this is because in the ancestral environment this would also have promoted health. In a similar way, animals seem to have a desire for play, something which is both intellectually stimulating but also very safe. Video games are very optimized for this just as sweet things are very optimized for the body’s desire for sugar. So it seems much more likely that you really want to play video games, and even if you manage to jam some other shape into that hole, you are in fact jamming something else into it.
So… It is still masturbation no matter how you put it, huh?