You boot up Skyrim to finally finish the main quest. Three hundred hours later, you're a master fisherman with seventeen adopted children, three houses, and you've never even been to High Hrothgar. The dragons can wait—there's a legendary salmon in that river. Every open-world RPG becomes a side quest simulator. The main storyline is just that annoying notification you keep dismissing while you perfect your virtual fishing empire. Alduin destroying the world? Sure, but first let me check if this pond has any rare catches. The real endgame is always collecting every possible item, maxing out every skill tree, and completely ignoring the urgent apocalyptic threat the game keeps screaming about. Peak gaming efficiency.

The circle of life, but make it depressing. You start out blaming your potato PC and dial-up internet for every loss. Fast forward 20 years, you've got a $3000 RGB monstrosity with liquid cooling, fiber internet, and a Herman Miller chair... but now you're getting absolutely demolished by 12-year-olds who play 8 hours a day while you're stuck in sprint planning meetings. The real kicker? Both excuses are technically valid. Kids genuinely do have more time to git gud, and adults genuinely did have worse hardware back in the day. But deep down, you know the truth: your reaction time peaked at 24, and that kid who just 360-no-scoped you has been grinding since he got home from school while you were debugging production issues and wondering why your sprint velocity keeps dropping. At least you can afford the battle pass now. That's something, right? Right?