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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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'd put them in the same category as sex: not to the detriment of your health or other activities, not instead of self-fulfillment, ideally social and not masturbatory, etc.
I was going to push the artistic analogy but found the sexual one more compelling: artistic endeavors have too much of a positive connotation, gambling and smoking too much of a negative connotation, whereas sex straddles the boundary between puritanism and appropriate hedonism.
Video games can make you gasp and shake your head in wonder, can bring friends together to laugh and share, they can be a portal into a universe of creation, where the only limits are of the mind and the machine.
They can also be addictive and predatory, think of the people found dead at their computers, or with 6 figure debts from Candy Crush addictions. Is that any different than heroin or slot machines, or prostitution and camgirls?
My biggest issue with videogames is that they don't contribute to real world development. It's just dopamine. Dopamine in a way that doesn't (directly) destroy the body or mind, but can be engaged in for longer than sex.
After a while you need to avoid the dopamine trap and engage in things which give real meaning.
Does protected sex/whoring contribute to real world development? What about pickup artists who go to bars every night to try to find women? Does that provide real meaning?
What I'm trying to get at here is that real meaning is ill-defined and most philosophers do include some form of pleasure and hedonism as an intrinsic value.
The worst fallacy, however, would be to try to argue meaningless work is more virtuous or valuable than meaningless pleasure. To argue that a substitutable office drone that shuffles emails around and does his 40 hours a week somehow is doing something intrinsically important than someone who plays MMORPGs all day. You can assign more value/respect to either of these activities, but I don't see how it's intuitively or aesthetically obvious that either is fundamentally superior.
Your examples at least don't show that it's ill defined. I think most people would say those pursuits are meaningless or even harmful without hesitation.
Perhaps you can't objectively determine the meaningful ahead of time but it becomes quite clear when things are compared.
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Yes, the concept of 'meaning' is nebulous. There is nothing wrong with gaming or whoring except when it gets in the way of bringing meaning. Meaning is a bit like pornography in the 'I know it when I see it' sense. You're also correct that work for work's sake is a false path.
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They engage your mind, which is in the real world. Why this strong distinction between the virtual world and the 'real' world?
If your body and social skills atrophy while you are playing games it is an issue. If you are just gaming as a hobby with moderation, there is no problem.
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