We present a new time discretization scheme adapted to the structure of GENERIC systems. The scheme is based on incremental minimization and is therefore variational in nature. The GENERIC structure of the scheme provides stability and conditional convergence. We show that the scheme can be rigorously implemented in the classical case of the damped harmonic oscillator. Numerical evidence is collected, illustrating the performance of the method and, in particular, the conservation of the energy at the discrete level.