A little over a month ago, I began selling some things on Ebay, the online auction site. The process is simple: set up an account at www.ebay.com, take a picture of the item you wish to sell, write up a little description, pay a small fee and then allow people from all over the world to bid on your product. When the dust settles, whoever placed the highest bid wins. They pay, you ship and, in theory, everybody's happy. Free market capitalism at its best.

For me, and I suspect many others, what it is and what it feels like are two very different notions. Instead of "selling some things" on Ebay, I feel as if I've plundered my childhood, ripping the juiciest bits and pieces of it screaming from my soul and throwing it to the wolves to devour. All for a few measly bucks.

Perhaps it's a bit overdramatic to think this way, but at times I can't stifle the sensation that what I am doing is inherently wrong, like eating candy that just fell on the floor. Delicious, but oh so dirty and wrong.

The bits of my childhood I've been selling are actually just video games for the Sony Playstation (ask your kids if you don't know what this is). While this may seem a trivial toy to be attached to, there's a bit of history there.

Since I was but a wee lad, video games have been a huge part of my life. To an unhealthy extent, most likely. We got our first game system when I was four or five, the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES for short. My brother and I spent countless hours commanding Mario to hop and bop around and watching my inept parents plunge the littler plumber into the first hole they could find, resulting in near-instant death.

Years later, we upgraded, picking up the sequel to the NES, the Super Nintendo. Usually my brother and I would get only three or four games a year, one each for Christmas and, by pooling our allowance money, one or two during the summer.

By the time the Playstation had come out, my brother - who is four years my senior - had moved on to bigger and "better" things, like girls and college. Still in high school and not exactly Casanova's child prodigy, I continued to bear the video gaming torch, spending many days locked in battle with evil overlords and disposing of cruel despots. And with a much larger income at my disposal by this age, I was buying three or four games a month, instead of a three or four a year.

Over the years, as my income grew and my free time dwindled - taken up by sports, homework and, yes, eventually even slimy girls - the pace at which I was buying games began to outstrip my ability to play them. I simply didn't have time to get through them all.

I continued to buy, however, mostly the highest-rated role-playing games - RPGs for short - which feature lengthy quests (a 40-hour RPG would be considered puny) and detailed stories. I told myself that at some nebulous point in the future, I would get around to playing through these titles.

Except now, seven or eight years after I began buying these games, I have finally acknowledged that this time will never come. Between work, a modest social life and the other distractions that come with getting older, this theoretical nirvana spent lost in virtual worlds is simply not realistic.

Or, surprisingly, even desired, anymore.

It's not that I've outgrown my love — or perhaps "obsession" is the word — for this hobby. I can still sit down for a session of Halo and compete with the best the online world has to offer until it's 3 a.m. and my eyes are burning.

Rather, I'm starting to embark on ventures in the "real world" that are ultimately more satisfying than the bits and bytes of a computer-generated universe ever could be.

With acceptance of this reality growing steadily each passing day, I've come to a profoundly simple conclusion at odds with the message advertisers inundate us with every waking hour: I don't need to buy stuff I'm not going to use.

And I don't need to keep the stuff I've already used or will never get around to using either.

So really, it's not that I'm selling my childhood for profit and pleasure, but sloughing off the future I once thought I would have - a solitary experience spent huddled in front of the television with lifeless gizmos and gadgets.

Bathed in the light of a future much brighter than one lit by a TV, I can't say I'm sad at all anymore to see that one shipped away box by box to the highest bidder.