Context matters. I regret time I spent when younger playing alone, but some of my happiest memories involve endless games of Doom II, DN3D, and Quake on the network my friends and I built in our dorms. A bunch of us around each computer, chatting, cheering, jeering, and just plain waiting for a go.

Context is everything.

Same here, regarding StarCraft with friends vs Diablo 2/Ultima Online alone.

Oh yes! I remember how my friends and I were blown away by Warcraft, and then just feel into SC with abandon. Good times.

It's easy for each of us to look down our noses at how others spend their leisure time, but there's an important point to be made here: leisure time and wasted time are NOT THE SAME THING. Leisure is actually quite important. Grinding away constantly can lead to burnout, poor health, frayed relationships, etc. The trick is to find balance, to fill each part of your life in the most satisfying way but not to let one part overwhelm the others.

Between paid work, house/family work, exercise, etc. I work as hard as anybody else I know, and I still enjoy a good video game session. I'll be playing Horizon: Zero Dawn in a few minutes. It's a better hobby than sneering at others.

> Leisure is actually quite important. Grinding away constantly can lead to burnout, poor health, frayed relationships, etc.

It's a shame that leisure time itself has to be framed around work.

As we move forward we need to move past this concept of "work" and "productivity" as the main drivers of what it means to be human.

Work doesn't define humanity, but the fruits of work are what enable humans to exist.

Also, work is the only means by which we do things that can benefit others. It's all very good to be concerned with your own experience, but if you want to be helpful to a partner, a family, or a community, you have to work.

This is why work has such meaning. It makes benefits that are not purely selfish. Benefiting other people strikes me as more meaningful than simply attending to one's self, trying to make the days until death more pleasant. This selfishness is what has always troubled me about the popular hedonistic conception of meaning that's taken hold in recent decades.

> It's a better hobby than sneering at others.

GP wasn’t sneering. GP was communicating something they experienced.

If that is something you enjoy doing I would call it time well spent. What’s the point of life if you can’t find the time to enjoy it in the moment?

Meh. Last year I spent ~500 hours playing JRPGs. Enjoyed all of that. It's only a waste of time if it's getting in the way of your ogoals. For me, I had nothing else I wanted to do with that free time.

I spent what seemed like way too much time playing video games from my youth to my early 20s. It seems like those are the days I always want to nostalgically recapture, so perhaps I was having a great time and it was well spent. I can hardly get immersed in anything that deeply these days.

Right up there with reading large amounts of fiction. I mean, one should experience life instead of sitting on a couch or wherever for hours on end, staring at printed words and immersing yourself in some other person's imagination! At the end of it, so many hours every year and you have nothing to show for it.

I think reasonable doses of fiction -- say a couple of books a month -- are useful, so long as you choose your fiction carefully. To me the best fiction is like hanging out with the coolest, smartest, and most articulate person you've never met, and letting them show you things they believe to be important.

This is not a substitute for experiencing things firsthand, but I can certainly point to many novels that shocked me into thinking about stuff differently.

Good fiction reaches you in a strongly empathic way, in a place where you're uniquely receptive to it. This is valuable for teaching things about your own life and the lives of others, which seems valuable.

> At the end of it, so many hours every year and you have nothing to show for it.

This one is tough for me.

Must all of life come down to having something to show for it?

What about those pockets of our existence where we can just _be_ and enjoy something for the sake of that enjoyment?

And if people stopped enjoying fiction, what motivation would there be for others to write if they had no readership to show for their work?

Productivity is a good goal but we're slightly more complicated as people than simple, single-purpose machines

The alternative is to work 80 hours every week with nothing to show for it.