Saving My 20s

Introduction

I just turned 24 last week. On one side, I'm very happy, but on the other I felt like I have wasted my 21-23. The closer I was to 19, the better my information processing ability was. But I didn't take any advantage of it. Too tardy, I'd say.

Anyway, I love playing Dota 2. On steam per September 2nd 2026, I have 2035 hours playing Dota 2. One thing I don't like about Dota 2 is that once a game starts, you can't do any other things as the game takes away all of your focus, and time.

That's like:

• Work Comparison: Working a standard full-time job for 40 hours a week for one year equals about 2,000 hours.

So in my life time, I've basically spent gaming about a standard full-time job for about 3-4 years ?!

I thought to myself about it, and started to think about it differently. In Dota, there aren't much return of investment that I got from playing the game. Maybe:

• Social
• Brain coordination

That's all lol. My favorite hero is Oracle, Venomancer, and Invoker. I am good at Ogre Magi too, but I don't really like playing that hero. It's so easy to win with that hero. So it's part of my signature hero.

If someone asks me to quit dota, that's probably the time I know that quitting Dota is as hard as quitting smoking.

On June 10, 2026. I managed to book a two tickets of The International, of which I watched it with an old friend of mine.

There are some amazing moments like:

• Knowing Chinese is really useful in China (you dont say)
• Watching tournament is really tiring, you literally sit there and just watch. For me, it's kinda braindead. To be honest, I don't really like doing it. If you ask me to do it again? I'll probably skip.
• There were so many Russians lol. They are also just like human. Some of them are really cool and funny!
• The tournaments was so hyper!