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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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’m pretty sure videos games are objectively inferior to their real life equivalences always. So, permitting you can do the real life alternative activity, you shouldn’t play video games. The competitive fun is best found in team sports. The adventure is best found in nature and one’s own life. The memories are best made with friends. The novelty is best spent on wisdom.
Productivity doesn’t factor into this at all. If your object of life is Superior Enjoyment, then it’s simply the case that real life offers superior enjoyment. Because when you’re done playing team sports, you have had fun plus some. You had a fun experience you don’t regret, and you’ve also had necessary socializing, sun light, nature exposure, and exercise. An hour spent on team sports is always going to be better than an hour (or even three hours) of gaming, in your unhealthy room, staring at pixels, not moving your body, alone, unchallenged, etc. The memorable adventures in reality are always better than in video games or books. The exploration of wisdom is always of greater benefit than anything in Oblivion.
Note that Abrahamic religions are against gambling and other vices, but don’t have a word to say on productivity. Christ doesn’t care whether you work hard at your job, and in one parable even seems to commend a man who wastes his boss’s money to make friends. The argument against video games is all about the fact that its enjoyments are base, lowering, and fleeting. They are inherently inferior than real life alternatives, and the base pleasure lowers your sum total enjoyment. In a year’s time you will be measuring your real experiences, not your dumb video game exp.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link