I still remember the drive home. It was late March 2020, I was heading back from college, and I was scrolling through the news when I saw that a lockdown was coming. I never really expected something like that could happen, so it caught me off guard. I will be honest. For about five minutes, I was thrilled. My first thought was that I would get a week off from college, a short and unexpected holiday. I called my friends, we talked it through, and once it sank in that COVID was actually here, I did what a lot of nineteen year olds would do. I picked up my PlayStation controller.

The video game months

For the next month and a half, I played. FIFA and GTA V, day in and day out. College had moved online, attendance no longer counted, and finishing the semester meant sitting through a few virtual lectures. It was the most relaxed stretch of school I had ever had, and I leaned into it fully. Maybe too fully. Looking back, I went overboard, especially with GTA Online. The problem with that kind of fun is that it runs out. It was cheap dopamine, and after a while the hit stopped landing. I got bored in a way I had never felt before, the kind of boredom that sits with you all day.

A project, and learning to code

Around then, my brother pulled me into something he was building. It was a small product called Dodo Cards, and alongside it we were experimenting with an idea around books. We wanted to recommend titles through affiliate links, with a metric that estimated your reading speed and told you how long a given book would take you to finish. Here is the thing. I did not know how to code at the time. I learned because I had to. I taught myself JavaScript from the ground up, figured out how you go from plain HTML to JavaScript that builds HTML, and eventually picked up React. It was the first time building something felt genuinely fun, and it is not an exaggeration to say that project is where my engineering started.

The dopamine detox

After about two months of gaming, I stopped. I decided to go on a full dopamine detox. No electronics for a month. It was brutal. I was cranky the whole time, I complained about everything, and honestly I was not a pleasant person to be around. But with the screens gone, the one thing that still made me happy was reading. So I read, a lot. I taught myself to read faster and to get through far more than I used to. That reading did not stay in one lane. Beyond coding, I started studying economics. My dad is a chartered accountant, so I began learning what he does. Reading company sheets, balance sheets, profit and loss statements. Then I took that knowledge to the stock market.

Winning, losing, and what the market actually teaches

I traded, and for a while it went well. I made a good amount of money. Then I lost a good amount of it. That swing taught me the most important lesson of the year. The market is not really about making money. It is about managing risk. Once you understand that, everything about how you play changes.

Looking back

That whole stretch, from March through the end of 2021, was a lot. Games, boredom, code, books, economics, wins and losses. If I could go back, the one thing I would keep and even extend is the dopamine detox. It did more for me than anything else that year. I would love to do it again, but with the pace life runs at now, carving out that kind of quiet is genuinely hard. Still, it was worth every uncomfortable day. By 2022 the world had mostly returned to normal, but I had not, at least not in the ways that mattered. That year changed me as a person and handed me tools I still use. How to teach myself something hard, how to sit with boredom instead of running from it, and how to live the way I actually want to live. This is just a glimpse into those months. If any of it resonates, I hope it nudges you to try your own version of stepping back.