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 play a lot of video games. Its probably most of my free time. Though I try not to let video game time intrude into my time on other activities like family, social, work, and sleep. So it is actually my free time, and not an expanding black hole of time.
I can sort of claim that balance right now, but I haven't always been able to claim it. I'd say when video games start being more than the sum of my free time I have been uncomfortable with them as a negative presence in my life.
There is a privileging of the "real world" in your thinking and most people's thinking. But I think this privileging is incorrect, or at least badly applied. Much of the "real world" is actually just taking place in people's heads. Consider an election. Imagine you spend dozens of hours reading about the various candidates and researching political philosophy. You spend time discussing politics with people on the street. On election day you go and vote. The only thing you've really done "in the real world" is take a few trips outside, and make some motions on a piece of paper, everything else happened in your head and other people's heads.
For the people saying "the imaginary stuff in our head doesn't matter" my claim is that none of them ever actually go down the rabbit hole of all that implies. Most of what just about everyone does is just a thought inside their head and other people's heads.
And you can take that realization and be a nihilist and say nothing matters. Or you can go the opposite direction and say meaning is what we make of it. If your imagined participation in "politics" makes you happy, then do that. If your imagined participation in a video game world makes you happy, then do that.
Video games, if anything, are one of the more positive hobbies to engage in. Most of them are designed to leave you entertained and coming back for more (some are just designed to milk people of money that have gambling addictions). Other hobbies like engaging in politics, watching the news, or watching sports do not have any specific design for positive sum human enjoyment. They are much closer to zero sum games, where one person's happiness is offset by another person's disappointment.
But this phrase is not true of video games, specifically the thoughts in "other people's heads". Politics and sports and news are shared human experiences, and while many people have the shared experience of playing a game, they do not have the same experience of the game itself - that is the whole appeal of player-led video games. Even an unhealthy fixation on any of your three examples will still produce opinions and actions based on shared human experiences. They incentivize interaction with other human beings, whether positive (people who agree with you) or negative (people who can argue with you). Ultimately, the many adventures, lessons, trials, and triumphs of video games are solitary experiences curated for the player in a controlled environment in which even one's greatest accomplishments will always carry the tinge of having occurred on artificially fixed terms.
I think this is a far more important point than that of 'shared experiences'. In one sense I would define 'being in contact with the world' as being exposed to the possibility of genuine novelty and discovery - a war game has a meta that teenagers can figure out - real war will regularly surprise even the best minds.
We do our best to pierce the real world and bring it into the realm of intelligibility. Learning what others have made intelligible before us is an important part of that, but you have to venture into the difficult and unintelligible to make real conquests.
The virtual world isn't necessarily distinct from the real world on this definition, and solitary pursuits can still produce genuine insight - but in a standard game as in a grammar textbook you're never going to learn more than the author has set out for you to learn.
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I played a bunch of Diablo IV with my wife yesterday. This is a shared experience and not an uncommon one. Talking about what Aspects she should use to increase Twisting Blades damage doesn't strike me as all that different from discussing what our plans are for a given marathon training cycle.
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I suppose that is an argument against single player games. But it also seems like an argument against reading fiction books, watching movies, and consuming stories in general. Are you suggesting people should give up all of those things as well?
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