Nothing that brings you enjoyment and happiness is a waste of time, as that is ultimately the only reasonable goal of life (be happy, who would've guessed).
If this were the case, everyone should just masturbate and inject themselves with heroine all the time. You misunderstand what happiness means. Happiness =/= Enjoyment. Things that bring momentary pleasure often make you miserable in the long run. Gaming, I would argue, makes most people feel miserable in the long run. It's escapism at it's finest, a mere substitution of or distraction from the truly meaningful activities of life.
Obviously, happiness and enjoyment are not exactly the same thing, but they are very much related.
Just look at the definitions:
enjoying - "to take pleasure or satisfaction in something"
happiness - "a state of well-being and contentment "
Without enjoyment, there can be no happiness. If you have no joy, you are, by definition, miserable - if you are misarble, you cannot be well or content.
If you spend your time enjoying yourself (how to do that is up to everyone to find out for themselves), and spend your life mostly in a state of such joy, then of course you are happy and will be until the day you kick the bucket.
That something bringing you momentary pleasure often makes you miserable in the long run is pure nonsense.
There are things (like drugs) that have an obvious long (or even mid-)term negative effects, but by far not everything a person enjoys doing does that.
It's true that adulthood is largely an exercise in time management. It's a zero sum game - if you invest time into playing games, it unavoidably means you spent less time with your spouse and kids or less time at the gym. When you realize that your every action is a value judgment, you start to feel guilty for choosing to spent hours upon hours in front of the computer screen instead of trying to improve yourself and the lives of those important to you. I could go on and on about why being productive and the process of continuous self-improvement are so important, but I don't think it's necessary here.
Your problem is that you see games as something that cannot lead to self-improvement, an activity that isn't worth doing.
Via gaming (directly or indirectly), I have learned languages, geography, programming, trained strategical, logical and tactical thinking, improved various other areas of knowledge (including gaming itself, which to me is a topic of passion), improved reflexes, and so on and so on...
If you just sit in front of the screen and click some candy away, then yeah, that's not worth doing other than for the sake of occasional stress relief.
But for some people, gaming can absolutely be "truly meaningful". Not for you, it seems. Which makes me wonder why you are even here.
There's also the fact that you can be productive and enjoy yourself at the same time, that's kind of the optimal state, but very hard to reach for most - as you must find something you enjoy (or at least not hate
) doing while at the same time derive some kind of "product" out of it.
Your kids and gym remark is quite funny to me.
I hate sports with every fiber of my being, the exhaustion, the sweating, all of it disgusts. I do what I must to keep my body in an acceptable state (which thankfully isn't more than about half an hour per day), but believe me when I say that I hate every second of it.
Having children would be a similar nightmare to me, for many reasons. News at 11, not everyone wants to have them. Thankfully, there are 7-8 billion of us (way too many, if we're honest), so mankind will do just fine without my offspring.
So, this stereotypical "happy family and sports" shtick - it might work for you. But people are different and thus there exists no one "correct" path to happiness.
God forbid, you might even come to the conclusion that you don't live your life just for your own enjoyment.
I pity everyone who doesn't live their life for their own enjoyment.
The only result of that can be a state of being miserable and an ending with "I wish I had done X, Y, Z, ....." - full of regrets of not having lived a life they enjoyed. Those people might spend their lives lying to themselves that being "productive" was worth it, but