Is it really pissing time away if you're enjoying your time spent playing video games? While it's great that you found an opportunity to go RVing with your wife. Because such a feat is not really possible for everyone to do, less people do it so less congestion and you can make it enjoyable. Imagine if 100 million people in the US decided to all at once go RVing around the country. All the areas would be full of RVs and I bet it would not be as enjoyable anymore.
It is. Or at least it is for a lot of us. In working through some things a few years back I realized that when I’m worn out I do certain activities to recharge myself, and some of them aren’t actually recharging, they’re just running down the clock and Time is doing the recharging.
Gaming was very much a pastime rather than a recharging time.
Worse, with games it’s too easy to get sucked into a thread that keeps me up well past bedtime, in which case I’m more tired then next day, not less.
Other hobbies accumulate progress, and are sometimes more open to participation by friends and family. Now I spend a lot of time gardening or doing other hobbies, and more of my screen time comes when I’m resting or trying to limit my skin cancer risks (1 pm instead of 7 pm).
The quote that resonated the most with me here went something like:
Life is a series of bricks, placed day by day, to build the foundation of life.
I’d take it one step further and say life also has compounding returns. What you invest today yields returns tomorrow. Not all hobbies yield the same returns.
Gaming as a hobby offers a flat return. The time you put in is the time you get out. There is no progress outside the bounds of the game (except for some fuzzier returns about societal commentaries and personal growth on par with the returns on a fantasy novel - or the future returns of making a game yourself).
The returns of a hobby like glass blowing is the improved ability to create on the other side of engaging in the hobby. Every piece you make sets the stage for the next piece. It’s a compounding return where the investment you make today is part of the return you get out of tomorrow’s investment.
I still play games, watch TV, and read fiction. But I no longer engage with them the way I used to. Now I engage with hobbies that yield compounding returns because tomorrow’s happiness is just as important as today’s.
The productivity of most so-called 'productive' hobbies is an illusion. What does it mean to 'produce'? To transform something that doesn't have value into something that does have value? Value to whom? The output of the majority of hobbyists' work has no value to anyone but themselves, and if it has no value to anyone but the creator, it's just consumption with extra steps. And if it has financial value to other people, that's not hobby, that's a second job.
There's a reason why most artistic pursuits are either completely nonviable as a profession or are a lottery where the top 0.01% become superstars and the rest barely break even or lose money. When the thing one 'produces' is something people will do for fun, supply massively outstrips demand, and more entries into the hobby doesn't produce more valuable items, it produces more tat that nobody wants.
I don't think they're talking about a physical 'product'. They're talking about building character, making themself a better person, learning a skill etc
If it's all about perceived self-improvement with no consideration for real-world applications or end products, there's no difference between practical skills and virtual ones. All that matters is that the person in question believes the experience to be valuable.
EDIT: I guess it's worth mentioning a minor exception for basic life skills that some people do as hobbies, like sewing, gardening, DIY or cooking, but those have diminishing returns. You can probably learn everything you need to know to not be reliant on tradesmen or vendors for those sorts of things in a year, and beyond that you get stuck in the same place as the hobby craftsman or hobby artist, where the chance of real financial success is basically nil so you're just doing it because it's an activity you personally enjoy.
But where I’m getting tripped up: today I smoked out of a glass pipe I made. I can’t smoke out of my level 80 night elf druid.
Nor can I combine my level 80 night elf druid with my Diamond IV rank in Halo to get a compounded return. Those two games and skills are isolated. But I can combine what I read in John Dalton’s A New System of Chemical Philosophy with glass blowing to make interesting things that bring me joy (I.e. replicating experiments of John’s at home with purpose built glassware)
It’s not just production for productions sake, or production for the sake of society. It’s increasing my capacity to produce for myself. I feel like I’ve grown in a way that I can build on tomorrow after a session of practicing this class of hobby.
Maybe the distinction truly is arbitrary - but something about this path feels significantly more fulfilling the further down it I go vs. the literal years I spent in virtual worlds. In the virtual worlds the potential felt roughly constant while these hobbies feel like they have an ever expanding horizon of potential.
MMOs and competitive online shooters aren't time-efficient games. They're live service games that are essentially built to be time-sinks. People who regret playing them do so because the regret is real. There's a lot of advanced psychology that's gone into ensuring that people play them for as long as possible. This leads to people playing the games long after they've stopped having fun, and only quitting when they realise they've not been having fun for months, possibly years.
But this isn't a problem specific to games; this is a problem with predatory marketing. If you'd instead spent that time playing a wide variety of shorter experiences without grindy filler, I wonder if you'd feel the same way. Maybe niche hobbies don't have the attention of same predatory actors because there's not the incentive for them to do so, but that's not an argument for productivity, that's just an argument for obscurity.
That's as may be, and especially true if you're playing them solo, but playing coop games online with friends, even "inefficient" ones are enjoyable social experiences that can be done even without being co-located, which isn't something that's easy to substitute with other activities.
I play games with friends and coworkers online that I wouldn't otherwise interact with much, and it helps us stay in touch with each other and foster a relationship that would likely otherwise burn out.
If I was playing the games alone, I'd maybe regret it over playing a different and "better" game, but I'd rather do inefficient things with friends than efficient things alone a lot of the time.
There are some of us who give advice to prospective college grads that they should do some volunteer work if they can't find any professional experience prior to graduation.
Lots of hobbies still tackle basic human problems like communication and organization, and getting any exposure to these is not only good, but it might take some of the pressure off by not mixing multiple things you struggle with at the same time.
Not all games, and not for all definitions of playing them.
Some games are tests and potentially builders of skill of various kinds, and the investments made are compounding: self control in the face of stress, economic decision-making, system design, tactical thinking in 3D space, and so on. Some games allow us to go Elsewhere and we change profoundly as a result.
I find it weird that your gold standard of a good hobby is the ability to produce. I personally think those "fuzzier returns" you sort of disregarded are far more important.
Also, particularly in video games, each time you engage in it you get better. I've been recently trying to get back into video games after over a decade of off time. The gap I feel is tremendous. Gamers have advanced so far ahead that a good gamer from 2000s will have incredible amount of trouble playing newer games.
And yet, you are only "getting better" at the game. Your in-game skills don't translate to the real world. Games have psychological and social benefits, but I don't think getting better at a game skillwise has really any transferrable value outside of the game itself. In fact, if you put more effort into improving your in-game skill, your real-world life usually suffers. (In my experience.)
But to serious gamers, those interactions in and around those games are their real world. Say someone dedicates themselves to learning the piano, a Real World activity, and they enjoy it, and they can entertain others with their skill, why is that any more real than getting deep into a game? In the end we all die and take nothing with us, nor do we leave anything behind which will last all that long. If everything is ultimately futile, why make a distinction between one pursuit and another?
> In the end we all die and take nothing with us, nor do we leave anything behind which will last all that long. If everything is ultimately futile, why make a distinction between one pursuit and another?
This viewpoint is destructive. Your actions affect your future and the futures of the people around you. They are not futile. When someone learns to play the piano, it becomes a tool that can be used in countless applications in a person's life. When you learn to wall jump in Metroid, you learn to wall jump in Metroid and maybe in some other games. The variety of application just isn't there. It's just not comparable.
I second your sentiment, I think this articulates my thinking much better. I see people trying to prove that yes games have "transferrable skills" to "real life" and I am sitting here thinking, why does it matter? It's my hobby!
PS: Used those quotes because I don't think people have clear idea about what they mean by those terms.
Actually, a lot of skills used in video games do translate to the real world. Puzzle solving (aka logic), language, map reading, navigation, communication, working with a team, and more. Some games even have a particular bent towards 1 skill, such as programming games and geography games. And that's not even including all the games that are designed to be educational first and fun second.
They are generally soft skills because no games really let you physically do things yet, but that doesn't mean they aren't useful skills.
That the "real world" is actually "real" is a big assumption to make.
If that sounds weird, remember that a number people who were considered wise claimed that the "real world" is not as "real" as you'd assume and life is transient. And they'd probably say that it's not worth spending the effort to learn "real life", "productive" skills since they don't translate to the "meta-real-world" anyway, and the more you put effort into improving your "real world" skills, your "meta-new-world" skills suffers.
It feels like I might be paraphrasing some verses of the Bible at this point...
I played a lot of Rocksmith and it helped me a lot to play the guitar. I know personally some people who went from couch potatoes to mildly active thanks to Ring Fit. I met dozens of now long time friends online because we share this common interest in video games. I think you may have a bias against this media.
Both your examples are games that are built on real physical activities. It's no surprise that they teach you skills that are relevant outside of the gaming context. The majority of games aren't like that, which is what I was talking about.
I don't really have a bias against games and it's puzzling to me that most commenters here completely misread my comment to that extent. I used to be an avid gamer, until real life took over. Just speaking from personal experience having logged thousands of hours on and off Steam. It probably helped keep me sane, but I have a real hard time pinpointing how it has affected/improved/touched my current life now that I don't play games as much.
Love Rocksmith, I own a physical copy! I played a LOT of Guitar Hero as a teenager. Comparing the two: Rocksmith provides compounding returns - my time playing Guitar Hero did not.
I second dota’s take in a sibling comment, it was insightful. Not all games are created equally.
> And yet, you are only "getting better" at the game.
I don't get it, why is that not enough? Why can a hobby not be about only me and my personal growth/goals. Its a hobby, what I am failing to understand is why does it need to be productive? If I stick to playing challenging games, I feel a sense of growth which unfortunately I cannot articulate. That is enough for me, but yeah YMMV.
I don't know man, I downloaded Cup Head because it looked cute and it has been kicking my ass since like a month. I know it is one of those notoriously hard games but I think the point stands.
I think games have moved away from precision challenges to more abstract ideas. Like Doki Doki Literature Club, I have no f'ing clue whatever that is all about but I am experiencing it. Challenge for me comes from the fact that it relies on peoples knowledge of tropes to enable different story progressions. I don't have that because last game I played was in like 2009.
Another game I am having trouble with is watch dogs 2. I know, AAA game, made for less than pro gamers. But again, they are relying on my knowledge of AAA games for conveyance. I regularly have moments where I am thinking, what do I do? where do I go? Now I have played GTA vice city, so open world is not an alien concept. But the scale of it all, its just magnificently complex.
Edit: I occurs to me all this can just be the fact that I suck at video games. But I used to be good at them, that's the point.
> I’d take it one step further and say life also has compounding returns. What you invest today yields returns tomorrow. [...]
> [...] Now I engage with hobbies that yield compounding returns because tomorrow’s happiness is just as important as today’s.
You may not realize it, but this defer-happiness-to-the-future attitude is what the original article is recommending against:
Putting things off for the future is the biggest waste of a life. You deny yourself the present by promising the future. You’re relying on the future, which is outside of your control, and abandoning the present, which is the only thing you can control. The whole future lies in uncertainty – live immediately.
I wouldn't say that building on your skillset as (in this example) a skilled craftsman is deferring happiness. You still enjoy what you create today, even if its not as good as what you will create one year from now. I do woodworking and metalworking as hobbies - I've always enjoyed the process and the improvement I see in my work. Its about the journey not so much the end result.
Absolutely! But that's not what I was replying to. That was, roughly, about depriving you of certain joys today in order to increase potential for future joy. Which is what the "Life is not short" article is arguing against.
> tomorrow’s happiness is just as important as today’s.
Aye - I agree with you. The point I was trying to articulate: hobbies with linear returns traded tomorrow’s increased happiness for today’s happiness.
Hobbies with compounding returns still get me today’s happiness! But, after investing in that type of hobby, tomorrow I’ll be capable of more “hobbies” than I am today. Especially when hobbies begin to cross-over (I.e. chemistry and glass blowing)!
Games and TV may mostly give a flat return, but I don't think that's the case with reading fiction. That hones your linguistic skills, your imagination and storytelling skills, can sometimes give you critical insights (e.g., the classic dystopias), and last but not least, can enhance your attention span in an age where many of us are used to jumping from short piece to short piece online and it seems difficult to gather enough time or attention to read a book.
Of course you will learn even more if you read essays, but I think if reading books in general is widely regarded as a good thing to do, it's for good reason.
This seems like you're comparing the likes of 1984 to the likes of Genshin Impact. If we instead choose Opus Magnum as our example of a game, and 50 Shades of Grey for as our example of a book, one would conclude the opposite. Someone with a taste for timewasting games isn't going to suddenly become an intellectual because they picked up a piece of dead tree if the words written on said dead tree are as empty as the game they just put down, and there's more than enough bland genre fiction out there for them to be attracted to.
I like your phrasing here a lot. I have come to a pretty similar realization recently. For me a small about of gaming does recharge me, but as you say it’s really easy to get sucked into spending too much time and ending up tired or sacrificing other recharging activities like exercise and socialization.
I think it’s possible to weave socialization and accumulated progress into the gaming experience and have it be a fully enriching hobby. But many (most?) single player experiences are just a pastime for me, as you say.
I think Seneca would roll his eyes at most of these responses TBH. Who cares if you're just gaming to "pass the time"? When you're gaming, you're having fun and enjoying your life in the moment. It's only afterward when you start the cycle of criticizing yourself for not doing something "productive" with that time that the negative feelings enter. In fact, the whole exercise of feeling bad about yourself for playing a fun game and relaxing is exactly PART of the problem Seneca talks about - unless your gaming habits cause you to destroy your links to other important sources of joy and health, you shouldn't feel bad about having a fun "pastime" activity, that is just as valid as keeping a garden or reading a good book of fiction.
Specifically, commenter you responded to cares. Because, as he puts it "it’s really easy to get sucked into spending too much time and ending up tired or sacrificing other recharging activities like exercise and socialization." He literally describes negative overall impact he perceives. He is not feeling bad for gaming for irrational reasons, he says it makes him tired and makes him sacrifice exercise and socialization.
He even admits it is theoretically possible to do it differently, but also observed people not doing it differently in practice.
The problem is that the things you think you enjoy and that recharge you may not actually be what you empirically enjoy and what empirically recharges you.
For example, playing a game, or browsing youtube, or scrolling through social media, or reading the news, or even browsing HN for that matter you may think of as something you do to relax. It could be, however, that actually, doing some woodwork, or practicing a musical instrument, or learning a language, or going for a walk in nature, empirically recharges you a lot better, and you actually enjoy the days when you get to do these activities a lot more - and it makes your time outside those activities more enjoyable too.
These are just examples, it may not work for you in the same way, and all of these activities can be done in 'recharging' and 'non-recharging' ways perhaps. The important thing here is that what you think recharges you and what empirically actually recharges you may be very different things.
It's been a while since I read Letters from a Stoic, but I have a feeling Seneca would scoff at frivolous pursuits - leave such things to the Epicureans. He comes off as a bit of a (humorously) grumpy old man in that book though.
If you're not having fun with the game and you're extinguishing your social and physical health, then you have a gaming problem. If you're admonishing yourself for playing a single player game to recharge and relax, as in the cases I responded to, you have a self-admonishment problem.
When I was young I realized I was escaping into games and damaging my life and relationships (one of the tests for addiction) and so I’m always going to hold them at arm’s length.
When I realized I needed a change I latched onto the fact that most people wouldn’t understand my excitement for an accomplishment in a video game, it wasn’t something I could bond with people over. But if I stopped fucking around and put that energy into programming, I could have accomplishments people understood (that turned out to only be only partly true. I still have programming accomplishments that my peers and communities don’t understand).
Bonding over games has shifted a bit since then. I know a hard of hearing kid who socializes online because conference calls make everyone have the same problem: differentiating two speakers is difficult. Everything sounds like hearing aids sound.
But it’s still easier for people to comment on my garden than whether I have finished the Thieves guild or stormcloak quest line in Skyrim, as an elf.
"Is it really pissing time away if you're enjoying your time spent playing video games?"
It depends on if you ever think you will regret it or not. I thought the same thing 10 years ago when I was spending years playing games and having fun. Now it feels like I wasted a colossal amount of time no matter how much fun it was at the time. I'd never made that choice knowing what I know now.
Interesting. I was very into PC gaming in my teens and look back on that time quite fondly. Certainly not with any regret or a feeling that I wasted my time.
Same here. If you're saying "that time I spend gaming was wasted time", you'd better have a really good story about what you would have done instead, excluding any kind of hindsight magic.
There are a ton of low-effort forms of entertainment available today. It's easy for them to dominate choice. If you take those away, other things will emerge and grab your interest. If you are even a remotely interested person you'll find stuff. A few months ago I was at the beach without as much technology access and enjoyed it so much that I put myself on a media diet after. I suddenly felt more excitement about programming projects I had started but not finished, reading books, cello practice, little projects around my house and garden. One thing all these things had in common is that they left be feeling better when I was done with them. That just doesn't happen for me with most video games and movies. But it's just so much easier to fall into the couch and watch Netflix or grab the controller.
I really think this thread has to specify the types of video games it speaks about. Because games range from CoD-like X-to-Win shooters with endless changing backgrounds to something more elaborate and harder than real life activities, while being relatively short.
You are right that this makes a difference. I think the difference might be relatively small though. At best the experience can be comparable to having read a great fiction book (Disco Elysium, Life is Strange) or a good social experience like playing with your friends online while using voice chat. Online games with total strangers can be challenging and fun, but also a blur. I've spent way too much time playing Rocket League for example and my experience in hindsight would have been the same off I had only played for like 5-10 hours. And then there are pretend-work games like Factorio, Kerbal Space Program or even more obvious Zachtronic games like Shenzhen IO. The latter might be great exercise for non-programmers, but you don't actually accomplish anything and still exhausted the same parts of your brain.
I like this post. It rings a bell with me when you wrote: <<But it's just so much easier to fall into the couch and watch Netflix or grab the controller.>>
I cannot put a finger on it, but what is the difference between (a) reading a newspaper, magazine, book (fiction or non-fiction) and (b) playing video games or streaming films / TV shows? I cannot put a finger on it, but (a) reading activates some part of my brain that (b) streaming does not. Why? I'm not sure. I never read any research about it. One thing I can say: Watching documentaries is different than other stuff. Again: Not sure why. It might only be me and my brain that feels this way.
Also, this part: <<I suddenly felt more excitement about programming projects I had started but not finished, reading books, cello practice, little projects around my house and garden.>> Again, I cannot put a finger on it, but what really is the difference between these activities and playing video games or streaming films / TV shows? On the surface, not much, but the emotional satisfaction is so different when finishing a cello piece or novel versus a streamed season of a TV show.
Imo most games are simply dopamine-sinks or reflex-based, which is fine, but you are not going to get the same brain activity as doing something which requires deep focus and that can actually be constructive. Games tend to be passive, in that once you understand how to win, you don't need to put in as much active thinking. You just need to know how to respond.
I think some of it might not be about reading activating part of my brain as much as it is about most video games and modern movies and tv shows creating some kind of dopamine feedback loop and dependence that makes other tasks less interesting and even reduces my ability to perform them as well.
Playing a game means mastering skills in a purely fictional world with purely fictional sets of rules and challenges. It doesn't translate into your life, expect in the most abstract way [1]. Whereas reading a newspaper, magazine or a book deepens your understanding of the world you live in.
[1] The flipside is that it can teach you bad habits as well. If the result of the game does not matter in any way, you have no incentive to try hard at it, and can just coast, turn the game off when you're frustrated etc. This is not how real-life is (coasting and difficulty avoidance don't work as well), so games can teach damaging habits. It's better in team multiplayer games, because in-game peer pressure can make you get out of your comfort zone.
If you really think that games cannot teach you the same things as purely written words then perhaps you have a very limited view of what kind of games are out there.
Games convey very simplistic ideas compared to the full extent of human thought, expressed in spoken or written form. It's usually way more washed down than cinema, which is already incredibly washed down.
Not to mention the benefit of say reading about your country's history, as opposed to the history of some ficitonal world in a video game - with history books, you're learning about the things which actually happened and have had a direct, large impact on your life and the world around you.
Novels, while being ficitonal, allow you to explore inner worlds of other people and complex interactions between them (and there's nothing more complex in the universe and at the same important to us than humans and interactions between them), something that games are severely lacking (cue in people telling me about Nier Automata and one or two other story-based games which are approaching the level of a bad novel).
Most video games are spatially-oriented and are basically more sophisticated version of children playing tag, football or similar simple games focused around interactions in 3d space. And the ones that are not that, i.e. that try to be about humans and not simple spatial and temporal relationships, basically suck for the most part. It's clear that the medium is not meant for them.
The thing is, Nier Automata doesn't try to be a novel. I mean, it's not even that subtle, game all but tells you that it tries to experiment with storytelling in the medium in the first 30 minutes.
Also, you sound extremely prejudiced and close minded:
> Novels, while being ficitonal, allow you to explore inner worlds of other people and complex interactions between them (and there's nothing more complex in the universe and at the same important to us than humans and interactions between them)
How do you even argue with that? Can you somehow support this claim?
Though from reasoning like this i can deduce that you must hate House of Leaves, and kinda understand why you dislike Nier Automata.
Nier Automata is an interesting example! It touched on a lot of interesting topics and did so in a very creative way. At the same time I also feel that the game wasn't mindful of my time at all. The stretches between the interesting story elements were frequently separated by long, often-repeating stretches of fairly simple hack'n slack gameplay. I'd hold up something like Outer Wilds or Disco Elysium though. But Disco Elysium is pretty close to an amazing book and doesn't do as creative work with the game medium as Nier does.
I don't think there's anything bad with gaming in your free time - at any age. In the end, why shouldn't one just enjoy whatever life's possibilities are? It's obviously important to keep all other areas of life under control, but what's bad about enjoying doing something - even if it's not productive - especially when you're young. This is quite philosphical, but I've found the idea of optimistic nihilism very helpful for having an overall more relaxed view on life https://you.com/search?q=optimistic+nihilism
Arguably, any consumption activities are better done when old, and investment activities when young. Effort when young pays off with tons of compounding over your lifespan. Effort when old is not as important, and so pure consumption non-productive activities are probably better enjoyed when old, are they not? Especially if it is something like videogames that doesn't exactly require some great physical abilities.
> you'd better have a really good story about what you would have done instead, excluding any kind of hindsight magic.
Nah, that is not how it works. Effectively, you want people to tell you about some grand plan they would executed it, if they did not played.
The way it works when you stop gaming/reading too much facebook etc is that you start being more active in other areas. You get more fit, you suddenly read more about history without planning to, you do crafts here and there, learn to draw or play music instrument on and off. And overall you feel calmer, more creative, sleep better. And after after months/years it accumulate and you look back happy. It does not feel wasted, cause you have that picture on the wall, your dad has your the thing you created, you are really proud about that song you can play.
Because there isn't that much else to do as a teen. The opportunity cost of spending time on gaming is low. You could get a job and start saving or investing, or study harder and advance your education more quickly, but it's not the expectation that teens will do this in a significant way.
An adult who is free to do anything and chooses to spend a lot of time gaming has a higher opportunity cost and a higher likelyhood of regret later.
Learning responsibility? Learning how an organization functions? Perhaps learning a skill at the job (customer service, mental math, cooking, etc)? A waste?
> Learning responsibility? Learning how an organization functions? Perhaps learning a skill at the job (customer service, mental math, cooking, etc)? A waste?
I see people argue for the real-world skills gaming affords— but when the biggest risk is embarrassment among people you’ll never meet, and the primary real world reward is inadvertently exercising a few organizational muscles in a vastly different context from the real world, I just don’t see it. Not saying there’s no benefit, but it’s not even in the same ballpark as actual work experience.
Not all jobs are boring. I worked as a life guard and taught swim lessons as a teen. I made great friends, we had pool parties, and I enjoyed teaching and it felt good to buy/save for things myself rather than always ask my parents for money
if that's what you like, yeah. I prefer to have sat with my friends playing bomberman or fighting games, laughing at each other when they died, eating popcorn and chilling.
Working as a life guard taught you about skill building (life guards are usually well-trained / licensed) and responsibility (show up to work on-time and consistently; care for swimmers). Even if you found life guarding boring, you would still gain both of those experiences. If you stayed home and played video games instead, the result would be different. (I hesitate to use the term "less" here... else I would get a HN pile-on!)
What about people who read a lot in their childhood / teen years. Their minds seem to be wired differently than those who play video games. (Probably mistaken cause and effect on my part...)
There is a ton of stuff to do as a teen. I spent a lot of my time getting into graphics. Other things to do could be sports of various kinds, music, making stuff, etc.
I look back on that stuff fondly, and I feel like doing that stuff helped me a ton today.
I think the key here is the regret. Is playing games alone, or with friends really that much different from some other activity, such as traveling, alone, or with friends? Sure you learn while traveling, but also get good at gaming the more you do it. You can even substitute traveling with some other hobby (playing the guitar, building legos, etc). Some may argue that the guitar is a "useful" skill but I'd argue that gaming can be a useful skill in the same sense.
Regret isn't an problem with your past, it is a problem with your current self's opinion of the past. You are judging your past self based on your current self but that is unfair and you might want to think how that impacts your life going forward. Making decisions based on what you think your future self will approve of doesn't seem like it'd have the best results.
I think I agree with this; the usual clichés about regret place a sort of bias towards how one feels at the end of one's life, but just because it's the last opinion doesn't necessarily mean it should win.
I vehemently disagree. Making decisions based on your future self would like is most generally the best thing you can do. Maybe you should really go out for a run even though you don't want to. Your future self will thank you. Maybe you should start working on that thing that is due soon. Your future self will thank you. And there are countless more examples. The practically write themselves.
The examples you've given here are both extremely short term and are presumably things that help you achieve goals now-you wants.
I know what I want for myself in five years. I don't and to large degree can't know what me-in-five-years will wish I had wanted.
My approach is to go for the things I want for myself now, while always being cognizant of providing options and opportunities for the future. It's not perfect, and it never will be because I don't have perfect foresight. But it works well enough.
None of those are future in a planning sense. They are immediate goals with immediate impacts. Getting exercise regularly pays off almost immediately and continues to pay of day to day. Finishing a project today has the immediate reward of finishing it and not having to worry about it anymore. The example was your 10 year from now self. And while you might come up with some 10-year span anecdotes, I don't see it being a good heuristic for living your life in general.
They are definitely future planning things. IF you don't go for a run now you won't notice tomorrow, you won't notice in a week. You won't even notice in a month. But compare a person who is 50 who was active for his entire life and one who isn't and the differences can be stark.
I've been thinking about this and IMO really it is more about the focus on regret as a motivator for action. Regret is a negative emotion, so this is basically a strategy of pain avoidance. I think it is this aspect that is the problem, not the future forecasting. That you are optimizing for pain avoidance and not your happiness.
Can’t we say that an inactive person just lived through their life quicker because they didn’t spend time on these activities? Absolute years of life isn’t a meaningful metric here, imo.
I love this take on regret, and it really resonates with how I reason about it.
I wrote a short blog post on the idea of judging your past self based on your current values: https://www.samvitjain.com/blog/regret/. Curious what you think!
I think I am correct in my judgement that playing World of Warcraft for 300+ days of playtime was not a good use of my time. It is a failure of my past self for thinking that was a good idea. People make mistakes all the time. I don't believe anyone who says they have no regrets at all. You live with them though.
In my thirties i regret not working more in my twenties, and in my forties i regret not working more in my thirties.
However upon introspection, i realize that this regret is always based on not wanting to work more now.
edit; to quote "The Idler" from the RT-11 operation system kernel source code (and my new favorite quote).."To be idle is the ultimate purpose of the busy"
There is also that aspect where doing the same thing everyday makes time seem short. Versus doing something new, which yeah do you have the money to take a vacation.
Everytime I finish a project I ask myself was it worth it. It's like buying a new device, you want it until you have it.
> I thought the same thing 10 years ago when I was spending years playing games and having fun. Now it feels like I wasted a colossal amount of time no matter how much fun it was at the time.
I don’t think you should blame yourself for ‘wasting’ that time. I’m sure past you would have considered it a waste to do what you do now.
There’s many things I may wanted to do differently, but I’d never actually do so since they brought me where I am now.
Before I started with my daily sports routine, at least one hour of biking outside every day (unless it's impossible due to health or schedule, but laziness, tiredness or season/temperature is not an excuse), I noticed that I have wasted the possibly best years of my life in front of a screen. Now I get to pick up what's left over and make the best out of it.
I really wish I had started with it when I was in my 20s, ideally as an early teenager or even kid, when breaking some bones is not something which keeps you concerned for many weeks.
I wish I could drive into the alps and ride the trails, but I'm currently "recovering" from a crash which ripped a tendon. In quotes because it can't really be fixed and I have to see if the system is still usable enough. But it is enough for having a lot of fun outside.
Today at 17:00 I was completely tired laying in my bed after watching hours of a TV series, half asleep and feeling badly rested, was struggling to motivate me to ride. But at 18:00 I pulled myself up and went, and I had a blast during those 1:30 hours, was even making screams of joy (I ride alone, so it's no show, but a feedback expression to myself). I was congratulating me for making the decision to go and ride, had super beautiful views of the nature at wonderful 27°C (80°F). Dry but planted fields, juicy green forests, sounds of birds and insects, breathable, clean air, warm wind being felt by the hairs on the legs and arms, what an experience.
I have a lavalier mic attached to my backpack's breast strap and an app where I can press record, to record notes of 1 minute length. I will quote you one of the recordings from today:
rec60s--1656265743723--19-49-03.q128.mp3: "Well, thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you that you overcame yourself to then get up, go out and ride the bike, because it was really, really nice! Thank you very much! It was good, it was worth it, you have to do this, always, always. Always force you to do this. Regardless of how weary, how tired, how uninspired, you rode extra. Extra, because it was so nice. Other ways, new ways, new trails"
With "extra" I meant that I had initially decided to ride my minimum of 23 km in a relatively dull track which I know I will be able to complete under any circumstances (except when I have migraine), but then decided to leave the asphalt, ride up a hill through a forest into some fields, where I then took this photo.
Maybe I'm a psycho for talking to me like that, but I know that I switch contexts very hard so that I'm a different person when I do different things and tend to forget the experiences. So this was a "thank you" and reminder from the biking me to the baseline me. Usually I only record new ideas or things I get reminded of which I forgot.
I wasn't really sure if I was going to ride today, I didn't yesterday, because I rode so hard and long distances last week that by butt was really hurting, and no amount deer tallow cream (Xenofit Second Skin) seemed to be helping. But it turned out that I had zero issues with it today.
Most of the riding time is a relatively hard exercise with heavy breathing and lots of sweating. No video game will ever be a replacement for such a thing.
But I know that I very likely already have my best years behind me (and lost them to a screen).
It seems silly to me to regret the past, as it cannot be changed. It can be used to inform decisions you make today or in the future, but regretting it is pointless.
I already tried to get it transcribed in Google Cloud so that I could get a summary email with a map, stats and the recorded notes in text form, but it didn't work. That was around two years ago, so maybe nowadays it could work. Also the notes are spoken in German which was bad back then and have some degree of noise in it (gravel, wind).
Edit: I just tested it with the recorder app on my Pixel 3 (played back via headphones pressed against the phone's mic) and it was able to transcribe it with almost no errors, so there is hope.
Though to be fair the economy would adapt to 100 million people RVing. Services would pop up, new taxes would be created I'm sure for driving x number of kilometres per year, etc, etc.
I agree with your first point though. Perhaps the OP doesn't think playing COD is a great way to pass the time -- but video games are certainly not a waste of your life if you really enjoy them. This applies to any hobby.
Ultimately we have a short time here and it's up to us personally to decide what is a waste of our time and then act accordingly. Judgement on these efforts is hardly effective. RVing with my wife sounds like an incredibly suffocating experience -- trapped with another person in such a small space -- akin to buying a boat and spending 3 years "sailing", without seeing land for many days on end -- just figuring out what to do with the day when you wake up. But some people yearn for it, and that's great.
Yes those times are called "Winter" and they aren't fun to camp during. Summer is the best time always, and summer in any of the popular national parks is miserable.
National parks in Spring and Fall can be great and aren't that crowded during the week. E.g. anything between Easter and Memorial Day tends to be nice weather, most roads are open and visitor numbers are low.
Recreational Vechile occupants do pay direct, and indirect taxes.
1. It's not cheap to park a RV anywhere. Pretty much every road is off limits to overnight parking. Those fines are very pricy too. (Watch Something about Schmidt.)
2. Living out of an RV is a pain. Stuff breaks down, and I don't know of one public street, or parking lot, that allows the owner to repair their disabled vechicle.
3. They get horrid gas mileage, and their are state/federal taxes on gas. Registration, Insurance. Plus because they are on the road, they are more likely to get one of those ever increasing traffic tickets. A parking ticket in SF is 80.00. Crazy! (Neusome has a bill on his desk that would do away with late fees on parking tickets. I hope he signs it.)
4. RV-ing is fine, but they pay in indirect ways.
5. I worked with a guy who tried to live cheap in a small camper truck. Every other night he would get a knock, and flashlight shined into his eyes. It was always, "move along, or I will ticket you!". He tried the shower thing at 24 hour Whatever gym. Once the manager figured he was just using the showers, he was told he needed to workout. (Yea--I can't believe how petty some people are.). We worked construction, and the last thing he needed was a workout before 7:00 am.
Another guy I knew tried the RV lifestyle. He too was harrsssed by cops. Cops would tell him straight up he was not breaking any laws, but if he didn't move along he would get another ticket. Oh yea, the next sentance I'm about to write still gets my blood pressure up. One night my friend was sound asleep on a rural county road. He tried to hide. He knew the drill. He did have a 25 lb dog. This cop pounded on the side of his camper. He opened the door, and the dog growled. The officer took out his side arm and shot the dog. I have so little respect for some of these cops.
The last time I looked at what it would cost to park/sleep in a private RV park it was $79 a night.
This is in the Bay Area though.
Their is a pilot program in the Bay Area for low income RV'ers. I believe it's near the bay? It basically a lot that RV'ers can park for free. It's only available to county residents though.
My point is uless you have money, that whole RV lifestyle can be a nightmare.
Walmart used to let RVers park overnight. I have a feeling that privilege is gone. America the great? Our biggest concern is finding a place to sleep.
Off topic, but the one thing Russia did well under Communism is build apartments. I didn't realize just how many units they built until I saw pictures of Ukraine.
I can't disagree more with many comments on here in response to if it's pissing away time playing video games.
I mean, I guess I don't really play CoD vs more narrative games, so I can't speak to that specifically, but I greatly credit my time in virtual worlds with a lot of my intellectual flexibility.
In my experience there's a palpable benefit to exploring impossible worlds and carrying out a personal story shaped by my actions within them. Making hard decisions that I would never be faced with in reality informs me about myself, and encountering stimuli well beyond what reality has on tap conditions me to look beyond the box in what reality does throw at me.
I can't really say that any other medium or activity offers the same mental exercise as an engrossing game.
To each their own, and people are welcome to decide that they found a greater purpose in a national park vs a spaceship exploring unknown worlds. But people are also welcome to find greater purpose in the other.
As someone who does (though I find variety the spice of life and also do enjoy national parks - just not as much), it's interesting the ways in which people pass judgment on each other, and themselves.
I'd value a gamer spending decades in video games over a monk spending decades mediating and in a vow of silence, and yet I suspect given the general fetishizing of traditionalism and demonizing of modernism many would disagree and see one as pursuit of a higher truth and the other as a pursuit of nihilism.
It's useful to check in with oneself as to if our choices are actually giving us value or are an escape from things that would give us greater value. But if they really do give you value, then value them. And if they do not, don't make the mistake of thinking that equation would hold true for others as well.
> Making hard decisions that I would never be faced with in reality informs me about myself,
This irks me wrong, because it does not distinguishes between reality and fantasy. None of the in-game decisions is hard the way real life decisions are hard. Just like, murder on TV is not the same thing as real life one. Real life combat situations frequently changes people, makes them bitter and forever angry or give them PTSD. People regret their real life decisions till the end of their lives - that is why those decisions are said to be "hard". Video games dont do the same thing.
You are not facing equivalent of real-life decisions. None of the decisions you made in game had any real consequences to the outside world and you know it.
There's a difference between realizing one's self-image vs one's self-actuality.
Most people when asked would say they wouldn't obey authority over their own conscience. And yet if actually put into Milgram's experiment most would likely result in different outcomes than they'd think.
The idea has certainly been put forward that there's a merit to the self-knowledge gained in real tragedy. A Hemingway-esque self-discovery in the trenches.
Arguably we could extend that to conclude that given the relative timeline of humanity, that anyone who doesn't end up slowly devoured by a pride of lions in the savannah or sees several of their children die to the elements hasn't really discovered their 'real' human self.
IMO that's a BS argument.
What games engage isn't the self-discovery of who we are, but the self-discovery of who we would like to be.
And frankly I think that pursuit in fictional worlds is both more worthwhile and of import than the lessons available to be 'learned' in a foxhole.
I can honestly say that some of the hard decisions in games had me reevaluating my personal philosophies much more than my experiences making harrowing medical decisions for family or life altering changes.
Reality is seldom ideologically binary enough as to prompt extrapolated self-reflection on the principles of decisions as opposed to the relatively much greater focus on the complexities of their fallout.
Triviality is a tool for archetypical self-reflection, and it is precisely the low stakes setting that allows for such rich self-discovery.
Not facetious - for me it's all about whether you build memories,and whether you'll regret time later.
Mass effect, deus ex, back in the day Another World or Sierra's space quest and Rama etc - these are important memories and experiences to me.
Overwatch (nearest call of duty analog I played, maybe), let alone all the phone games, are just time killers in the sense I do them to pass the time. They are games I actively regret playing moments, not even years after I'm done.
Precisely this. Mass Effect in particular triggered some deep introspection that measurably improved my life. I suppose it's just like other forms of media. Some books are just time wasters, while others are deeply meaningful to their readers. And there's overlap in those groups.
I don't have much time for gaming these days, and so when I do I want it to be good. So I browse the local buy-and-sell and pick up the classics every now and then.
This winter I picked up all three Mass Effects and played the first two through for the first time. Loved them, and will definitely get to the third when the snows come around again.
I think Deus Ex is one of those games every gamer should play through - it's like reading a classic - so what if the graphics and gameplay are a bit outdated, the philosophical debates with psychotic AI alone are worth it!
I think that really depends on who has access to the AI, and what it will be used for. I've been playing computer games for 40 years, and have seen some highs and lows. But with all the technical advances over those years, the storytelling / character interactivity has generally stagnated or gotten worse.
Sure we've had a few gems here and there, but in general it's much more profitable for a company to cap any novel, exploratory gameplay or story at 10 hours, so that after a day of play it just becomes another online interactive generating subscription and DLC purchases.
Will AI be significant in improving game story quality and play-ability? Provide us with worlds we cannot even imagine, infinite explorations?
Or will AI be used as an excuse to avoid employing expensive and risky human imagination? Instead push everything to a bland middle-ground, lowest common denominator based on the safest and most profitable options determined from the training set...
We're already there, considering most games people play are some kind of optimized hyper-addictive candy crush with guns.
Sure, I can imagine a new Elder Scrolls installment where each npc was actually unique, with meaningful interactivity possible with every contact. Where every side quest is challenging, interesting, and fills out the story universe with depth.
But will we actually get that? Technology tends to be used to increase breadth rather than depth. Quantity, rather than quality. What we'll get is more of the same, Skyrims with ever bigger and more realistic (but not deeper) worlds, optimized to find the cheapest and easiest way to keep you subscribing.
Agree with this, though it's not necessarily about the game and it's more about what you put in and get out.
If you worked hard to improve at Overwatch and your goal was to make it to top 500 on the ladder, or join an amateur team and play in tournaments, etc - it's no longer the same time waster, you have goals to work towards.
Does any of that matter once you stop playing and do something else? Not really, but you can be proud of yourself, or thankful that you learned something about yourself, etc. I suppose it's about being active vs passive.
I don't think his/her point is that we should all live an RV life. I think the point is that we should all try to live a fullfilling life. For some of us, it's going to be in an RV. For a lot of us, it could be in a very classical apartment building. However, what you do in this apartment building is (almost) entirely up to you.
I'm going to add a second data point of deep regret over time spent gaming and playing sports in high school and college. They contributed negatively to my life and put me so far behind where I could have been socially and intellectually which are things older me cares about immensely and it is unfortunate that I wasn't able to consider the future when I was younger. The idea that all leisure activities are equally valuable is a fallacy in my opinion.
You just described a hindsight bias. They key point here which has already been discussed above is “older you”.
You didnt have that information when you were young and your worldview is fluid.
The idea that you can operate with the same amount of information when you were young with your brain and social circles still in development is a fallacy in itself.
I did think the same way as you only to realize that my caring for intellectual and social stimulation was sparked due to its lack in the past.
You have no guarantee that you would develop it in the first place if you would have taken a different path.
> They contributed negatively to my life and put me so far behind where I could have been socially and intellectually which are things older me cares about immensely
And even older you likely wont care much at all about those things and think you wasted your life away pursuing those goals instead of enjoying it.
Yes! When I worked on FB games the internal running joke was our business was stealing people's life a second at a time and monetizing that stolen time. Our game was 'free' like in bait.
GAMES ARE FOR CHILDREN AND A WASTE OF YOUR LIFE :)
Getting outside is the best thing you can do for your health and the dog park next to a busy city street is not going to cut it.
Thinking like "But what if everyone did that?" or "is it fair that not everyone can do that?" are just ways to get you to 'agree' to take away other people's freedom or yours.
I'd say there's two elements to fun - how you view it in the immediate, and how you view it further down the road. And given that the further down the road part is something that sticks with you on the order of decades, while the immediate part tends to be on the order of hours, it seems clear to me which should be given priority.
For instance that's why I quit social media (excepting intermittent HN). I really enjoyed it in the shortrun, but I wasn't happy with what I was getting out of it in the longrun. We all convince ourselves we're making an "impact" by expressing ourselves, but I think that's something we all know is just a self delusion - we're just one voice ranting alongside a billion others doing the same. By contrast I've also spent tens of thousands of hours dedicated to chess, and it feels extremely good in both the short and longrun.
I suspect a lot of competitive multiplayer games are pyrrhic in retrospect. That is, not necessarily fun to get there but with a promise of fun when you’re at the top, but most people never really get there and so it was just kind of a waste. Especially games where you mostly play strangers and never really see them again.
This sounds like a fallacy to me. If everybody wanted to go see a concert, most people wouldn't get a seat. If everybody wanted to fly tomorrow etc. The good thing in the world is also that bit everyone dreams of the same thing.
Playing video games and surfing the web for fun, living with friends and family instead of having a large family and a consumerist lifestyle, would have a smaller footprint
The video game argument represents some kind of fallacy: A rational actor picks the best form of entertainment which turns out to be video games - how can that be wrong?
However, there are many local minima in entertainment and life and many great things require going through a learning curve and preparation. Even the greatest couch enthusiast can remember, say, a magical moment during a pickup basketball game, and surely those kinds of moments are happening in this city right now...
I would see a pickup basketball game as “pissing my time away”. I don’t like basketball and loathe playing competitive sports.
Further, I really enjoy doing things by myself. I often play video games to challenge myself — it’s me versus a previous version of me.
Just goes to show ya — those “magical moments” are highly personal and defined by the things that give a person joy. And for some folks — like me — that includes video games!
I don’t think the point of the parent comment or the OP is that everyone should RV instead of gaming. It’s that each individual should do what they find fulfilling, now not later because there might not be a later.
I think the reply would be: If you get joy and fulfillment from gaming, do that instead of working really hard to earn money that you don’t need. If you think you’d rather RV than work & play games, go RV now instead of putting it off for later/retirement.
Frankl at least talks about life in terms of the responsibility you take on in your decisions. So in that sense video games are less likely to be meaningful than RVing with your main squeeze.
> Imagine if 100 million people in the US decided to all at once go RVing around the country. All the areas would be full of RVs and I bet it would not be as enjoyable anymore.
Yes, I call this the "Dave Ramsey Syndrome". You know, he wants everyone to save money and not spend it so they can be debt free and have millions of dollars in the bank. But if everyone did that the economy, our consumer economy, would crash.
And you are right. I have been living in my Van since before the pandemic. It is impossible to find camping spaces now in national parks and even the Wal Marts are starting to get pissed at all the RVs again. These people too, these rich people, sit out on BLM lands longer then allowed, because it is free and they could most likely afford an RV park.
> I have been living in my Van since before the pandemic. It is impossible to find camping spaces now in national parks and even the Wal Marts are starting to get pissed at all the RVs again
I've been doing #vanlife on and off since 2012. Camping spaces in most national parks were already hard to find most of the time. Municipalities and Walmarts made overnight parking illegal in their lots in many places years or even decades before the pandemic.
