If CoD really was as boring as you described then nobody would play it. Also about your comment saying something is pointless... Everything is pointless. The least pointless activity is to work but eventually it fuels someone else's pointless activity if the work day is shorter than 16 hours. Gardening is pointless. Playing musical instruments is pointless. Reading fiction is pointless. Building a DIY rubber pad former with a hydraulic press to form sheet metal for your experimental (=non-commecial) aircraft is pointless. All of these are pointless and that's why I'm not doing them.
I wake up at 10 AM to work then go to college from 4PM to 9PM and then spend an hour learning a new language and then watch some movies or play some video games. Sometimes I don't know which of them is the most pointless...
At the end of the day we will all eventually die & at some point the heat death of the universe itself will arrive - surely rendering anything anyone ever did "pointless"...
But that doesn't matter - meaning is subjective & you make your own. If something is meaningful to you it's not pointless.
> If CoD really was as boring as you described then nobody would play it.
Yeah, but 10,000 hours of COD? That's about 5 years of playing from 9-5 every weekday. That's not enjoyment; that's an illness.
I can't even imagine the ennui of playing 10k hours of the same FPS or even the same series. "Soul crushingly boring" wouldn't even begin to describe it.
Gardening creates food, improves your well being, improves your physical fitness, and has been shown to help with dementia. Your definition of "pointless" has no meaning and just sounds like ennui. Language learning opens up new opportunities. CoD at 10K hours is boring. You're skill level is likely to make you better than most people playing, to the point that you might be able to be good enough for esports, which would make the activity not pointless.
It's something where your progress and improvement can actually be tracked and measured, you can actually feel yourself improving by suddenly "outplaying" competition that you couldn't before.
As such it's a way to feel accomplishment and growth for people who don't have many other opportunities for feeling those things.
It's particularly appealing for people who struggle with participating in the usual venues for this, like sports clubs and other socializing that usually requires meat world interaction, which isn't a very easy thing to participate in for people with social anxiety issues.
I suspect you were meant to understand from the line of this person's story that the alternatives are almost equal. Answering is therefore not really what the author was going for (especially if it's a conclusion based on a different perspective than the author's without a very strong underpinning).
The person can rationalize playing 10,000 hours of CoD in their parent’s basement all they want. But I guess we can disagree, too, and suggest they don’t give up on life yet.
Maybe our perspective is that of someone who was in a similar place, and is now looking back on our lives with the benefit of hindsight.
I apologise for not being clearer: I was explaining first why just a single flippant response is not adequate, and also saying that if you want to post a response like that to a post like this maybe you should substantiate your argument a bit more. I can come up with a million reasons for why someone would respond that way and your rationale makes sense, but that doesn't mean that that was the rationale in play here.
It's not obvious to me that people will take a low-effort dismissal of their personal issues and turn that into a valuable learning opportunity.
