The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Is there any reason to not forgo video games completely? Are they in a category with gummy candy, smoking, and lottery tickets - no benefit of any kind beyond a dopamine release - or more like classic movies, dime novels, and social media - escapism with some degree of social and intellectual benefit?
I’ve enjoyed my two-week trial run of Lex Fridman’s maximally productive daily schedule but do find myself missing my offline career-based sports games. How sturdy is the argument that “not everything has to be productive”? Are books and television and film so far above video games in the usefulness ranking (after all, they can confer knowledge and social benefits, if not maximally condensed) that it’s a no-brainer to stop gaming completely? Or should sedentary leisure as a whole be relegated to “break in case of emergency” status, never part of a daily routine but “around” when more productive options are not available, or only to be used in the company of others?
I’ve wrestled with this for every day of these two weeks and still see benefits of escapism, while simultaneously seeing the futility of time spent achieving nothing in the real world - even if only for an hour or two.
EDIT: I coincidentally just discovered the "End Poem" of Minecraft; a poignant take on this discussion:
I'll start with the caveat that I know some very successful people (career, romantic, fitness etc) who are heavy gamers (and a caveat to that caveat that I know some very successful people with a cocaine habit) and the confession that I've found life just as difficult in the times I've chosen to abstain from gaming as the times I've gone overboard with it.
I hope it will be uncontroversial to say that the escapist and the addictive nature of gaming can seriously stifle the development of some people. A lot of people probably know someone like this, as for myself I've got friends approaching their 30s who have yet to form a romantic relationship or move out of their parents house and who aren't otherwise hampered by autism, ugliness, stupidity or anything else that would have made life hard regardless. They're intelligent and likeable enough that they could have already done a lot in life but gaming specifically seems to have been what stopped them. Like the dangers of a drug habit, this isn't a convincing argument as long as you conceive yourself as not being in that minority (hopefully it's a minority) who can't game with moderation.
The best argument I can think of for the moderates is in terms of opportunity cost, and this is one which has convinced me to make attempts to abstain in my personal life: "Tallying up the hours displayed on your (my) steam account what kind of person would you be if you had spent that on solving practical problems in your life or pursuing meaningful intellectual inquiries? Let's grant that it's implausible that you could have been doing something better for all of those hours since you only game when you're too tired for anything but escapism, what portion of those hours could have been put to real use? Are you being honest with yourself if you say that each of those 50 hours playthroughs were time that would have been wasted anyway? Are there not other forms of escapism that could satisfy your desire which don't have a tendency to eat into your productive hours and might have even brought some incidental benefits?"
This is an argument that convinced me. I doubt I'm half as productive as most of the people here so I'm not claiming a position of authority on how to live life well, though like my successful friends who drink too much or indulge in cocaine I do wonder how much more of an impressive person you could be if you chose something else.
'Not everything has to be productive' can be an argument against video games also. Instead of letting yourself be bored for a while you're choosing to simulate productivity in the times you're too lacking in motivation for real productivity. Boredom might be a negative stimulus that prompts motivation for more substantial actions which you're choosing to block out with something that makes you contented with your present state.
I actually agree that the theoretical value of boredom is the primary argument against the massive availability of sedentary leisure activities. Still, I’m unsure of how much boredom drives motivation. Prisoners are (they often report) extremely bored, and yet they only rarely decide to be highly productive (although some do). They’re a heavily selected population, but I’m still skeptical. I think back to the endless boredoms of my childhood, my brother occupying our shared Game Boy Advance, my books finished, nothing on TV, sitting in a hotel room on vacation bored out of my mind. What did I do? Fucking nothing lmao.
I absolutely hate being bored (could anyone tell that I have ADHD?) and there's no way in hell I'd take a time machine back more than 10 years in the past.
I like having a phone, as a kid I killed boredom by exhausting every library I could, watching TV or playing games.
My phone makes both dead tree books and the TV obsolete, and I actually have a good pc I paid for myself instead of the old junker I had in the past.
Call me a big fan of modernity, but boredom just tells me that I'm burning the limited negentropy of the universe and not even having fun in the process.
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I don't know what options prisoners have but it seems what they have in common with kids is a genuine lack of options and both may lack enough of an introduction to books to make them seem interesting (which I see wasn't true in your case). As an adult I can't really count all the other things I could be doing with my time, exploring the woods nearby will take a bit of effort but will probably be something I look back on as more rewarding than the same time spent gaming.
Hotels can be very boring places for kids to be fair, you're pretty dependent on your parents' schedule to leave and do something.
I had similar experiences arguing with my brother about who got to play the Xbox this time. Even having a strong stimulus like a Game Boy nearby can be disruptive as instead of finding something new to do you can just wait or argue for your turn, your sibling isn't going to put his mind to the same problem because he's occupied. Things were much more relaxed when we visited my grandparents' house and there was genuinely nothing to do but go out in the garden and look at bugs.
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What a brilliant response. Your takedowns of the common "cop-outs" are of such an undeniable verity that, I think, you sufficiently lance any notion of video games as worthy of inclusion at all in a life not be wasted. Even cocaine seems to confer greater benefits - real productivity in the real world - albeit with much greater costs. Your hours-spent thesis is a fatal blow to simulated productivity, as even one minute of real productivity in those 50 hours is infinitely greater than the faux-accomplishments of a simulated world. Your last paragraph is a very clever retort to a common excuse that I'd neither heard nor considered before.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. If so I'll have to be more careful not to sound sanctimonious (a hard thing when expressing strong opinions on how one should live), if not then thanks for the praise.
Hah well I wasn't thinking about replacing gaming with cocaine when I wondered about better forms of escapism. I know a few friends who have wasted years gaming and a few friends of friends who have died from the other thing.
It's not just you. That felt a bit too glowing.
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Not sarcasm; I really do think your response was fantastic. I tend to overenthusiastically react to good points that I hadn't considered before.
That thought was not to say that cocaine is a viable, more productive alternative to gaming, but simply that, if even one of the most dangerously addictive substances on Earth has the potential to leave more of a positive impact on the progress of one's work, that's a pretty good indicator of where video games should sit on the hierarchy.
Oh then thanks for the praise.
I still want to stress that cocaine is lower on the heirachy of the best uses of one's time and my argument would risk falling into absurdity if I said otherwise. The similarities I wanted to highlight were just that people can be very successful despite their vices and that the excuses made for something obviously bad can be seen regarding the thing I wanted to argue was bad.
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