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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm skeptical that "it's simply the case that real life offers superior enjoyment", full stop. What real-life team sport offers the complexity, action and fast paced strategy of a RTS like Supreme Commander? What real-life pursuit offers a visually stunning, persistent imaginary world for thousands of players to live in and form communities like FFXIV? What real-life performance or play matches the worldbuilding and narrative depth of something like Disco Elysium?
For some people, sure. Winning that game of ultimate frisbee, climbing that mountain, seeing that play, might be more fulfilling than vidya. For others, I doubt it.
I’d argue that the human mind does not like “complexity, action and fast paced strategy”, instead it likes learning, risk-taking and figuring things out. Learning to play music is going to be more satisfying in the long run than a video game, because while you’re learning and figuring things out you’re also expressing the best emotions communicable (plus cognitive enhancement, plus a social dimension if you want). And if you want fast-paced action, there are sports for that, which again promote other benefits.
Similarly, we aren’t drawn to “immersive world building”, we are drawn to beauty, and I don’t think a lifetime of final fantasy could compete with an hour under a waterfall or in an Italian city. It lacks so much of the sensory. Walking in a pixelated world does not compare with walking through Reykjavik half-drunk with friends or family.
Now there’s also a second-order analysis. You should consider what the activities you do afford in the future by way of implicit practice. After a few months of final fantasy, you’re going to find it difficult to shlep to the bars to meet chicks and friends, or to decide to enroll in a course that requires boredom and travel. But after a few months of arduous but rewarding trekking in the wilderness, you’re going to find you have the energy to pursue all manners of outside enjoyment. If you can have fun while increasing your physical health and mind (and walking is excellent for the mind) this will pay off invisibly in the future.
Then there’s a third-order analysis: what memories will we remember? We remember the most sensory memories. In fact, we often forget the arduous parts of life and selectively remember the greatest parts (eg nostalgia). So if we want to collect enjoyable experiences, then we should be looking at collecting the most memorable and optimal experiences, which would involve sensory novelty and other people interspersed with long periods of waiting / wakeful rest to devote to memory. I actually wrote a post on here a bit ago about how the optimal life certainly consists of optimal memories; if all we wanted was pure pleasure then we would simply inject heroin and then die, because time/memory wouldn’t matter, but we don’t do this.
A fourth order analysis would be, like, what will produce less guilt? Society judges people by experiences and creations. You can play zero games and never have a wince of guilt, because society will likely not judge video games as a facet of a fulfilling life.
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