There's a motivational saying that when you die you get to meet the person you could have become, and that's your individual heaven/hell. I've got a nagging fear that maybe if I learn to speak French or sell a business or whatever, raise a family, grow old and die, I'll come face to face with the guy who played 10,000 hours of Civ.
Wait, I should stop playing these games.
pours some Monster energy drink on the floor
Video games are an easy target, but you can make the same argument about any lesiure activity. Something doesn't have to have an output to be worth spending time on.
Well, to be brutally honest with you, it's one thing for you to be proud of yourself for playing video games, but why would anyone else see that as something pride-worthy?
Typically, one takes justifiable pride for accomplishments that stand up to external scrutiny. That usually comes in the form of the accomplishment having an element of sacrifice, of pain and difficulty, of opportunity costs paid, and of a result that stands on its own as something not everyone can do. I am proud of some of my adventures; proud of some of my work; proud of some of the artistic things I have created. None of them are extremely amazing in the grand scheme of things, and I don't let any of it get to my head, but they do give me stories to tell at the bar that aren't dismissed with a wave of the hand as being frittered-away time.
Video games, on the other hand, are not exactly grand sacrificial effort. I can't imagine telling someone I was proud of myself for spending a few hours killing orcs on a screen while eating processed snack food alone in my underwear.
> as well as the purpose of how we spend our spare time.
It's only "spare" if you've really satisfied yourself in your best judgement of what you could otherwise be doing.
I like to put Slack and Laziness on a continuum. Laziness is putting things off, avoiding important tasks, pawning them off on others, rationalizing why you shouldn't bother, finding easier ways out even if the end result isn't as good, cutting corners. From the article:
> I was supposed to renew my car registration today. I haven’t opened the Web site.
That's classic laziness. Sure, the consequences can be dealt with later, a day or two without driving won't be the end of the world, but it also took about as much effort to write this self-effacing article as it would have to just renew the insurance and move on.
Slack, on the opposite side of the spectrum (and before the word was co-opted by a program that ironically takes up all possible Slack), is free time that you carve out of the world with your actions. Slack is arranging things so that you have time to relax, time to "surf down the luck plane" that you have created for yourself, so that you can allow things to proceed knowing that at the end of the slope, you're not actually in a worse off position than when you started. Slack is paid vacation time, where laziness is unemployment. Slack is a glass of wine at the end of the day, laziness is beer for breakfast. Slack is sitting in the hot tub after you work out, laziness is sitting in the bathtub after you eat a microwaved dinner. Slack is posting on HN on a cloudy Saturday morning while the kids (with breakfast in their tummies) watch a bit of TV, laziness is posting on HN when you're supposed to be writing a program at 3:00 on a Thursday afternoon.
Video games are something you can do in your slack time, or they're something you can do because you're lazy. That's the difference between a healthy hobby and a damaging addiction.
Putting aside the fact that many people have made highly successful careers out of playing video games, why should I care at all what other people think about it? Life is too short to only do the things that other people think are "pride-worthy". Do the things that make you happy.
My oldest, who is math challenged, was livid when I finally successfully explained to him what Algebra was and he went "I've been doing that for years while playing video games!!!" He's still mad about it and it's probably at least two decades later.
Well, to be brutally honest with you
I read somewhere that "people who value brutal honesty value brutality more than honesty." As someone fond of the saying "I'm too truthful to be good," I took that to heart.
For exactly the same reasons anyone thinks that reading novels is pride-worthy. People who plays some of the more complicated niche games have some respect from me at least.
Similarly getting good at a game requires dedication and work, so people with good ranks in games also has some respect from me.
Yes, I completely agree video games can be an unhealthy pursuit to the detriment of one’s life. If I’d put some of those hours I spent playing video games at uni into my course work I would’ve got better grades. I actually stopped playing games for the better part of my twenties to pursue more valid hobbies, such as photography, which I’m glad of. It made me a more interesting person. I came back to playing games a few years ago and realised I had given up something in my life that gave me so much joy. I think it’s hard to develop that deep connection to anything that we don’t do when we’re adolescents.
> Typically, one takes justifiable pride for accomplishments that stand up to external scrutiny. That usually comes in the form of the accomplishment having an element of sacrifice, of pain and difficulty
I think this is where a lot of people might lose themselves, and I might be misinterpreting you here, but: I think an important distinction is that people should take pride in providing value for their community, not having it be approved by them. Otherwise we might end up acting contrary to our beliefs, and feeling a hollow sense of achievement in the end.
Also, by your definition of hard work being pride-worthy, many gamers might meet that criteria, especially the professionals (?). Games can often be more competitive and demanding than anything I've experienced in real life. I've only teetered on the edge of competitive levels, so in a sense I wasted a lot of my time, since it all wasn't deliberate, but parts of it were definitely hard work, filled with passion.
When you have hours and hours available for the rest of the week, why fret about it? You have so many other opportunities ahead.
Someone with hours and hours to do nothing likely isn't getting laid, isn't making much money, isn't intellectually gratified, etc. So you play games to occupy yourself to keep from going bonkers.
I still play plenty of videogames. It's something I can drop at will as I get my act together, make the connections I need to make, etc. I like games and my kids always joked "Video games are our only education."
But the reality is I would rather have a life and if I had more of a life, that fact would drive a lot of my activities and there simply wouldn't be time -- or need -- to play games for hours.
I've spent many hours with the family playing MineCraft, and it's an amazing way to teach things like not being selfish, being cooperative, etc. to children because they experience the effects or lack of in compacted real time without permanent real-world impact.
Their joke grew out if conversations that went something like this:
Son blurts obscure historical factoid.
Me: "Where the hell did you learn that?!"
Son names video game he learned it from. Punchline: "Video games are our only education." (Vin Diesel movie line, so another excellent reason to say it to me.)
They now have a blog where that's the descriptor, basically.
--
My son was already a gamer. He hated his typing program. I told him he could quit doing practice typing as one of his assignments if he exceeded 35wpm -- which is my typical typing speed and I had a typing class in high school and can type about 60wpm when I am focused and yadda.
I also told him online gaming was a known way to hit a better speed and that's likely a factor in him going that route. He was gleefully happy to give up typing practice as one of his formal lessons.
> He hated his typing program.
I remember those typing practice programs. I always hated them. Super boring, couldn't stand them for more than 2 minutes.
Much later on (and well after I've achieved high typing speeds) I've discovered The Typing of The Dead - a House of The Dead clone where you shoot zombies by correctly typing words. For me, that was the ultimate typing program: it gave the same exercises, but in the context where I could spend hours in front of it. I suppose that was an early form of what we know today as "gamification".
I was very goal oriented. If they could meet the standard, they could move on to do something else instead. Where they exceeded grade level expectations across the board for some subject, I let them do whatever they felt like doing as "gifted enrichment."
For science, I got my oldest anything he was interested in -- books to read, magazine subscriptions, whatever he wanted -- because at age 13 he was talking slow and repeating himself a lot to explain the Theory of Relativity to me. This was enormously helpful in getting me through some of my later upper class college classes.
What gets labeled laziness all too often seems to be exhaustion, invisible disability or other hidden problems.
Agreed.
A good, old essay on this and related questions wrt. character and mental diseases, by Scott Alexander back before he had his own blog: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/895quRDaK6gR2rM82/diseased-t....
In my experience, if you want to cure "laziness," the best thing to do is identify the underlying cause of the failure to get anything done and address that.
I homeschooled two special-needs sons who had a lot of issues that did not resolve for being lectured or something. They resolved by figuring why X was happening and addressing that.
Sometimes other people find it empowering to get that point of view put out there. It's an epiphany for some people that they aren't actually lazy like everyone has always told them. They just don't have the energy for some reason and addressing that can help make their life finally work after decades of frustration.
When you are young, you trade time for money.
When you are middle aged, you trade money for convenience.
When you are old, you trade money for time.
nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.
For me it just pushes the point that every situation is a negotiation.
Now, as soon as the kids are in bed, virtually every scrap of time is used for something productive. Except, obviously, for lazy Saturday mornings posting on HN ;-)
Now that I have multiple kids and my time is extremely constrained, I am very efficient with my time usage. I listen to audiobooks while doing the dishes. I plan in my mind exactly which programming tasks I want to accomplish as soon as the kids are in bed so that I can do them quickly and still have time to spend with my wife.