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Wellness Wednesday for June 28, 2023

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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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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.

Even cocaine seems to confer greater benefits - real productivity in the real world - albeit with much greater costs.

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.

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.