she spends evenings chatting with ai companions and calls it a creative outlet that helps her decompress. i spend some evenings playing games and call it exactly the same thing
recently she complained that gaming was childish and distracted me from our relationship. i pointed out that she'd spent the previous night planning a virtual royal wedding with her chatbot
we realized we were both using the language of personal growth to defend activities we enjoyed, while dismissing the other's hobby. the double standard looked ridiculous once we said it aloud
we agreed on shared time and independent hobby time without ranking which screen activity was more sophisticated. her digital kingdom and my dungeon both survived