Autobiographical: Video Games and/or Real Life.
18 September 2017 [link youtube]
You Choose.
Youtube Automatic Transcription
this is the third video of made about
video games and the meaning of life the question of playing video games and how do we as adults lead a meaningful life I got my girlfriend eating vegan noodles on camera in some ways this is a more casual video than the first two and in some ways a more serious one because this is going to be more autobiographical I'm going to talk about my own experience playing video games video games in my own life maybe especially in the last 10 years and I think it's natural for people to have a sort of defensive reaction if you don't present that autobiographical material I think there's a really natural human tendency when people ask well who the hell are you what do you do with your life that's so great or who are you what video games did you play growing up I think there's a kind of natural tendency react that way it doesn't mean it's good intelligent or at faithful you know and I think it's worth questioning for people who've had a really defensive reaction people will used to ask me back when I was a scholar of Buddhism people would ask me well what the hell's the point why are you doing this stuff about Buddhist philosophy and I didn't you know respond defensive the way I thought those were questions that are worth asking and worth answering seriously for someone with me if you're spending many many hours studying an ancient language studying a dead language studying ancient history I think you should be able to reflect on answer those questions if you're studying ancient Greek or ancient Latin you know philosophy murad something that's better known than studying at you Buddhism I think you should be able to give a meaningful answer those questions and sit down and discuss them without becoming too defensive or what have you and say well these are mattress and life these are my reasons these they'll come looking for mmm I think everyone knows there's a real difference in terms of who you are as a person and the person you become even if you waste 10 years of your life studying ancient Greek philosophy even if you literally look back on that after 10 years as a waste of your life there's a difference between studying ancient Greek philosophy and say playing guitar and a band it's different why would we pretend these things the same you can say oh well it's a hobby it's a passion therefore it's an and there's a difference between playing a guitar in a band and sitting in your room alone playing video games these things are different and we as adults whether face-to-face in a coffee shop you know someone you know in real life rent or here on the Internet we need to be able to talk in a reasonable way about those differences about those choices because they shape the world around us and they shape who we become as people you know no I'm not actually gonna talk about those examples you know I I have many many brothers my father had a lot of kids with a lot of different ones get pregnant and you know one of my brothers devoted a large part of his life to playing the guitar and you know he basically never read a book as an adult he and I share a lot of the same DNA but we you know the result of that after decades he's a totally different human being for me whatever we had in comment at age ten is now unrecognizable and you know it's not inevitable with playing the guitar but of course he didn't play the guitar in a vacuum he played the guitar mostly in small smoky bars you know with cigarette smoke and alcohol and he drank heavily his entire life too and that changes who you are and where you're spending your time who you're spending your time with and also does mentioning playing the guitar is very different from studying ancient Greek philosophy in that you're probably playing the same song again and again hundreds of times playing the same song and with humanitarian work or politics or philosophy you may be doing something really new and different and challenging every night even if you are literally sitting at your desk alone even if you look back on it after ten years and think oh my god I Spy lost so much time studying this language or studying this philosophy or Senator so yes there are meaningful differences and yes there's a sense in which they're comparable cuz we're talking we've talked about you know just how many hours goes into this but you can say so we're not gonna get it any real embarrassing details but my girlfriend her ex-boyfriends or her boyfriend before me he used to play video games for about three hours a night if he was studying ancient Greek for three hours a night that would be different if he was working on philosophy or politics or humanitarian work or some as I know cancer research whatever I'm you know anything any any passion it's different I mean is it the same it's the same in that it's three hours every other way there are really deep meaningful differences in the process and in the product of who you are after doing that for six months or six years or ten years whenever you look back and do an evaluation so we don't I mean don't pretend there's no point in coming at me on the internet as people will I mean inevitably and saying well who are you to judge playing video games is the same as watching movies or playing video games that the same as doing cancer research or closely yeah it's different yeah yeah I will just say that was a reduction when I first met I mentioned in the second video though but I am NOT addressing this just a video game addiction I don't think your ex-boyfriend was an addict he had you know he had a normal job he drove a car he had a girlfriend you know he he was a normal productive member of society and three hours a night in our society is not considered an addiction I can say it's what some of my brothers do none of my brothers are considered alcoholics in Canadian Canadian Society none of them are considered alcoholics in in British society you know but the the level of drinking you know can be you can be spending three hours a night drinking alcohol and in our society you're not considered now for me subjectively I look at those brothers of mine and I might do you wasted all your intellectual potential you wasted all your potential period sitting around drinking alcohol that's my perspective but they're not alcoholics and likewise I mean your your ex-boyfriend he's not an addict he's not one of the we was looking at the other day one example of guy who who for many years was playing ten hours a day and then he went up to 15 hours a day he had just one year at that level of 15 hours a day playing video games and he kept he was in he was in formal competitions right so I mean that that is when you're talking about video game addiction and video game obsession but those three hours a night that's exactly the time when you could be working on anything - so this is a really broad topic it's a deep topic and to some extent I think it's inevitable if I if I just present myself with no autobiographical I should not talk about my own history playing video games there is the sense of well who are you to speak and that's I'm used to that I had that kind of reaction when I'm starting with video games on tumblr you know on a written blog before YouTube so you kick the I've got this comment on patreon this is from a patreon supporter someone who in some sense as a fan of my channel you know pays a dollar a month to support we do this channel so Richard wrote the following Richard writes to me quote you seem to be under the misapprehension that people are supposed to be doing something that you judge to be meaningful and that anybody not meeting that standard is wasting their lives okay I'll read the next sentence is it but let's let's just know that so he is saying that I am under the misapprehension that people are supposed to be doing something that you judged me for and in part of my reply I gave him a very short reply and I also offered to have email with him further if he wants to get in touch to me and know no more about me no it's not a misapprehension it's an ethical claim and that's the kind of claim we make in knowing people face to face whether it's your brother or your coworker or a friend or a colleague all the time we say to people look this is what I consider a meaningful life this is what I consider a standard of adequacy or excellence or this is something I think this is something I think you should be aspiring to and if you fall short of it I'm gonna tell you I'm disappointed in you that's what we do with people we love people we care about in real life all the time and I think we talked about this in veganism and so on in veganism you know there's a lot of kind of agony within the movement about do you or do you not walk up to complete strangers and like testify you're walking to somebody you don't know it all would be like hey have I told you about our Lord and Savior or veganism you know and I don't I don't do that I've really said you know whether or not you you come out of the closet and tell somebody how much meaning does it means to you has a lot to do with how much you respect them how much you care about them you know so at my university in Canada I did talk about veganism with some professors not all of them sit down at every professor ad it'd be like look man you got you got a gonna know about these pigs in the slaughterhouse they're like look man you got to know what these rates of heart attacks you know it really was kind of a litmus test for how much I care about you if I tell you about this thing that so many from my life and it's also reciprocally when they asked me about it was kind of a litmus test for how much they cared about me because I did have professors who were they raised it they wanted to know about me and my life in that way ethically and politically and also even nutritionally in terms of fitness I wasn't I wasn't in that great shape but I was in better shape my professors a lot more si me so there's a question about caring but yeah it's not uh it's not an indication of my contempt for you that I'm willing to say hey I care about you you can be doing better and you ought to be doing better I claim not about what is but a claim about what ought to be it shows that I that I care about you and again I can even say that within my own mother my own brothers I have so many brothers my father had so many kids you know if I just regard one of their brothers as a worthless alcoholic worthless drug addicts I'm not gonna bother talking any of that stuff but in some cases I'm my brother's you sit there and look at them and be like look man you're capable I know I know you can do better than this and I really think I really think you should so I look again I'm not pushing come but I know I know you have circle of friends you don't have so many brothers and sisters but you know I know that's that's how you look around and you know sometimes you sometimes you make that bet assumes you don't and in some ways the Internet is strange because I come here and talk on YouTube as the if I'm sitting down with you in a cafe as if we're meeting in a Starbucks or something and you the audience are to some extent complete strangers and you may feel offended that way you may say who are you to impose on me your idea of what's a meaningful life that's exactly what I'm doing so in a sense he's right I am sitting here and telling you this is what I think is a meaningful life this is what I think is the meaning of life and if you're falling short of it I want to sit here and ever have a meaningful conversation but I want to I want to you know reflect on your sure but I mean it's a big question like you know in America there's the ambition to make money I mean I know your parents did said that tells you well make sure you pick a career path that pays more than how to but you know what it means to have other ambitions ambitions that fill your life with meaning and purpose and that really motivates you motivate you in a profound sense that's not just money I think that's something in our culture I mean where we grew up southern Ontario and the adjacent part of the northern United States when we did actually grow up in in the same area that's certainly not something that was talked about you know around me yeah and again you know maybe it is where you come from you know but I mean if anything you know I only found that when I started reading ancient philosophy when I was reading ancient philosophy I saw men they're all men and there's basically no basically no female voices in these texts but these were men sitting down about life and death and what are you gonna do with the next 10 years it might be the last 10 years you got you know people were dying of you know dying of diseases we can cure today all the time apart from dying of war on the starvation and all these things and and you know these really kind of Bronze Age values about having an ambition to be to be a good man nobody talked about that when I was when I was growing up you know neither within I mean I was raised in an anti-religious household but I was also exposed to both Christianity and Judaism I mean both both Christianity of Judaism of those growing up seemed to be mostly about forgiveness and acceptance for people's mediocrity and even like their their evil you know anyway oh you know like you know you just gotta do anyway and I grew up for example I grew up in the era of the the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa and then again it was all about me do mediocrity and forgiveness wasn't about justice didn't have a justice you know what I mean so it was really when I saw though that ancient philosophy there was it go like here are here are people who are really willing to say openly hey that's not good enough you know like try for greatness try for excellence and maybe if you fail maybe you're gonna learn more out of that failing out of trying for something impossible an excellent you know and maybe failing repeatedly setting goals maybe that's maybe that's worth philosophizing about maybe that's really worth thinking about as opposed to a life of ease and comfort and mediocrity whether whether you're earning $100,000 a year or not because you can learn a lot of money that way yeah yeah I totally understand this comment you know people don't want to be challenged what is meaningful to them and I just recently I told you I think that was what you were referencing but I had a best friend and in high school she stopped talking to me and I didn't really know why until years later she said that she felt that I was too judgmental and then I would judge her for having gotten into drugs alcohol and sex I guess so I did not know that but apparently I gave off that vibe that she just didn't want to be judged by me or she didn't want somebody to tell her that what she was doing was not a good path for her but you know I I I don't feel the same way like I want somebody like I want people in my life that do care enough to really challenge me and I think I mean again I don't make you look sometimes people are just jerks and there's nothing more to say about it but I think even if you are spending your time doing humanitarian work or doing working on philosophy or politics one of these many examples the things that get through worthwhile people are gonna challenge you because of other things when I was younger and I was doing that stuff people would basically say why aren't you just trying to earn as much money as possible why aren't you playing the stock market yeah and sometimes in a really friendly way I mean if sometimes that people will take me aside and say cuz they talk to me but economics haven't very good education economics fundamentals of economics you know and sometimes I'd be talking about what was going on economically people say to me look you could make a fortune you know you're you're smart you're Jewish you understand that the stock market works you understand that the property market works you know within the conversation said what you know why you wasting your time with humanitarian and political and philosophical stuff why and again it's maybe sometimes somebody's pitch be mature but even if you're doing something you really do believe in as meaningful I think you still have these conversations but yes it's different it's not the same as making excuses for playing video games or even making excuses for playing the guitar in a smoky bar you know music or something I think I think we all have to answer those questions again and again and you know it's different as life goes on maybe playing the guitar meant one thing in your life when you're 15 and then it's different when you're 25 and then it's different when you're 35 right you've got to think about that as as life goes on it's like you said playing in a smoky bar versus trying to learn new music and actually challenge yourself or writing new instruments you know like that can be a valuable use of your time but if you're mostly trying to you know sure meet meet hot chicks at the bar I think I I'm including the example Muse because I think it's it's a it's an intermediate example and I don't think playing music is the it's not the same as playing video games but it still raises these questions whereas you know I've said I think that playing billiards playing snooker which for many people to come as there are people who play snooker eight hours a day you know play it played these kinds of table games or playing card games it can be really the same as video games yeah we have to cause when you look back at that time anyway so the end of the the comment from from Richard he says where did you get such a silly idea where did I get the idea that people should be doing something meaningful with 5s and then I get to judge what's meaningful we all get to judge with meaningful we're all on the internet right now and we're all sitting around in coffee shops we're all engaging in this judgment and reflection and the question what is meaningful in life what is a meaningful life and that's a question worth ask yourself again and again so he asks where did he get such a silly idea and is that idea at the core of what's driving your permanent student lifestyle so that that's kind of a topic for another video my experience with university education which is almost entirely negative and why I've spent as many years in and out of universities that have I have talked about in the past but we'll definitely talk about it again but I don't you know I don't particularly endorse a permanent student lifestyle no no don't worry about your life you know but um and also you're not doing it to find a meaningful career like you you said you've expressly told me that like at this point you're not looking for something that is you know something that brings me I'm certainly not university looking for some of that isn't there I know what the university system is and what it isn't yeah like I think what he's referencing is how some students you know they continue getting a masters or a PhD and something that's right look here here here on YouTube I talked a lot about research and the majority of my research was not in any university it was outside of University but it's true that may make it seem like my whole life is about university based education study and it's not I don't spend very much time you aren't YouTube talking about my formal career you know we can like right now we can talk I teach classes at a university I don't talk about that much in the past I have experience you know presenting formal lectures to boardrooms of people in a corporate setting like multi-millionaire multi millionaires in a corporation in Hong Kong on the top floor of this sky script unthe at you know which it's interesting in its way I could talk about that I've presented to boardroom where everyone was a representative of the United States government European Union governments plural and the said to EU itself international humanitarian agencies no when I was a kid I gave presentations in that kind of context it's like my work life you know in that sense and you know my earning money life I don't talk about on YouTube that much why this comes back to the meaning of life because the research I've done the more scholarly stuff have done is more meaningful to me and even the stuff I've been raising my daughter you know like my situation with my divorce and my daughter and going to Cuba that's more maybe I guess it gets talked about more here but sure I do also have a professional side to my life which I'm not no see though it's not like I'm a fuse to talk about it on YouTube but sure I think it's also reflects this underlying question of what's meaningful what's important in your life that that's that's not the bulk of what we what we talk about here on here on YouTube okay so look video games in my life and your life neither of us were ever video game addicts but I can say you know video games meant different things at different points in my life and some would have regrets about it some of it I don't uh let's start with just talking about the last couple of years like the last five years yeah I have played almost zero video games unless I'm gonna include our romance cuz video games are a small component of we have played four games a little bit so I'll get to that but you know before I move to China so it's living in in Victoria that's several years ago I bought a new Mac it's actually the other Mac it's not the but I bought a new computer and you guys may not know this but now with Mac the first time you open any program it gives you this stupid security warning it's like warning this computer could contain this this this program could contain a virus the damages your computer level so the first time you open any program you get this in so when you buy a new Mac you get that message like 20 times so for about two years I didn't play any video game on my hard drive at all I know on that Mac because then I did start to play for a couple of minutes and when I opened those video games I got that warning I was like how can I be getting this warning I bought this computer like two years ago so I hadn't I had him over them so actually I started playing video games really briefly I'll describe what I played after about to use with my absolutely zero because I had some really annoying loading pauses and file processing pauses so I'd be in the situation where my computer was like a two-minute delay or five minute delay and I didn't want to open a textbook and get involved with something else so I started playing the original space invaders which believe me you can play for about two minutes I mean it's a really simple game with two minutes is a long time to play space invaders and some other really simple really classic games so within the last couple of years that was all I played and even then not really there was this big gap or I didn't play video games at all so you know and that was literally while waiting for my computer to load or export something or convert something just a couple of minutes here and there when Melissa I began our romance one of the surprises was that she really grew up playing a lot of the same video games I did and she's much younger than me so she a she grew up with a lot of classic video games Sega Genesis and Nintendo 64 and idea so when we first met yeah but Jenna basically from a generation before yeah you didn't grow up with yeah so when we first got together that was just kind of a surprise and a funny thing and we played a couple of Sega Genesis Classic so I played toejam in a role for the first time in 20 years you know game I played as a child we played maybe for two hours I mean it's not the total it may be less than she did it felt like a long time with any of these things like most of these video games amazingly boring and it's like you know like five minutes feels like a long time for me so now as an adult that's basically the only role few games play in my life but I want to mention a couple of other things in the last ten years one I have a daughter of a four-year-old daughter and I did a lot of research on video games for her and because I was concerned about buying video games for her in her future with video games and I'm sure it's something I'm gonna discuss with her or not once not 10 times about a hundred times I'm sure as she grows up video games are really gonna be an issue so I wanted to be Oklahoma and I have bought her video games and I have played video games with her and I played video games in a sense for her where I was figuring out what to buy for her what what was appropriate you know for a four-year-old that kind of thing so that's another roll of idioms month that's not going away I think that's that's gonna be with me um you know for the next 20 years whatever you know of raising my daughter so you know in that sense I think people might say I'm a Margaret on video games so that I'm not trying to raise my kid with no no awareness of video games or or not knowing what they are know so I you can you can jump in anytime III as a child so I was never a video game addict but I have seen compulsive video game playing up close and I emphasized in my earlier video that you know that your own professors the people you look up to police officers all kinds of grown adults either still play video games compulsively or it's something they struggle with or if not if you're talking to grown adults who don't play video so it's a choice what they've chosen to quit video games they've reached a breaking point so you know with each item people 40 years old 50 years old this is a mass phenomenon and it's much much more common than dealing with cocaine or alcohol basically everyone who has access to electricity in the Western world has made a decision even if they didn't struggle to quit even if they were never an addict they've thought am I gonna play video games or not even if the question is or not yeah yeah well I guess I can just say why I grew up playing older video games because my brothers were seven and five years older than me and also my parents were pretty cheap they didn't want to buy like the newest systems so and I have a lot of fond memories of playing video games with my brothers as a kid so you know that's that's positive in one way and also I can see it being kind of sad in another way because you know I could have been marie's of playing outside with more and more memories of actually being outside and doing something fun with them like active rather than playing video games and I remember my grandma one time was watching us and she got really upset that we were playing video games for so much of the day yeah you know as a kid is a kid you just have so much time and it is easy to pass the time with video games but um so yeah as a teenager I played like again it was really just older stuff it was like once my brothers went off to college I inherited their gaming systems so it was like the original Xbox some of those games but yeah not as much as I did when I was a kid and then in college even less so I would say in college I you know there were times when I would play a phone game a phone video game with my ex-boyfriend because he played it I know you don't I know you just got a phone recently I didn't own a mobile phone at all till age 36 or 37 but actually the one game that I started playing with him was The Simpsons game where you like yeah really it's really bad it's a waste of your time but like it's kind of that same situation you can play it for like two minutes well something's loading like while you while you're waiting for food takeout or something like you know it's it's not something that I spent a lot of time on but yeah I think it's just the wind old throughout my life the past couple years I haven't been playing much at all so I just say you know why it is I mean it is emotionally significant for me I really had a turning point in my show where I started to to bitterly regret playing video games you know I still was a child but where I realized the significance of the situation I was in my parents were both businesspeople they had very little time to spend with us and when they were at home you know they were often working at home so you know they'd have their portable computers there when I was a little kid the portable computer like it was as big as the whole table we had huge portable computers and as a little kid and they got smaller and smaller but they'd have their portable computer on the dining room table so even if they were at home they were actively you know typing and working and during dinner they'd both be incredibly stressed out and talking about work and my parents were also violent I was beaten throughout my childhood most time freezes that nothing to do with me like just like my mother would literally hang up the phone after having an angry business call with a cold disputing business she would beat me just to take out her frustrations in that phone call so nothing to do with my behavior like it's not I spilled something you know I mean so I was in this kind of violent taciturn in some ways uncommunicative home where my parents you know preoccupation with their business which is understandable really meant that for most the hours of the day it was just a question of warehousing me it was just a question of wasting my time in a way that didn't require parental supervision so I mean almost anything else we lived in downtown Toronto you know he requires some level of parental supervision including often just driving the kid there like you know even some activity the parent is to drive the kid there and then pick them up afterwards my parents basically never did that like I remember my childhood really briefly I enrolled in karate lessons like I think I'm worth like for karate lessons but my parents couldn't do it they couldn't drive me to karate man which I sympathize with like you know I can imagine as a parent like you know in the future I may be so busy was look I can't do this we got you no no I would respond by trying to find some other way to be a concurrent you know what I mean but that was actually a really awful realization which was you know people are just waiting for me to physically get older and between now and then this is just about wasting my time and in a series of really crushing realizations in terms of my own wasted potential and you know the fact that I had really squandered years of when I could have been learning something like even if it's literally like learning how to climb a rope you know I mean like you know it's literally like you know they are like play activities where you learn something and instead I was learning nothing but I memorized every level in zillion for the Sega Master System I memorized the map and then I remember years later so I could and I didn't play the game for several years but I was still a child but I remember five years later putting it in and discovering to my horror I still had the whole game memorized right yeah yeah yeah that's that's really kind of scary you know I'll remember how to do the Super Mario games and it's like man I could have been right reading like language like learning Japanese or something I could have been learning how to shoot a bow and arrow there's a part of my brain that is taken up with you so I just mentioned also you know as an intellectual I didn't I didn't develop early a lot of people thought I was brilliant as a kid but I grew up ignorant and I grew up and again this connects to videogames believe me that's coming to Venice but I grew up with the absolute assumption that World War three was coming and give that's the era I grew up in that there was a war whose gonna be more brutal and enormous than World War two between Russia and the United States of America coming and that I was gonna be on the Russian side because my parents were communists and in video games and in a couple of cartoons not many couple versions I watched because you know I did see a lot of video games were about that imaginary world war three or they were about the future after a nuclear war very common science that fiction things done so I saw this in videogames I saw this on the news I saw this in newspapers this wasn't just some crazy idea of my parents put in my head this was like I saw in the real world all around me when I was growing up so there was also a sense of my own education being worthless because my education was based on a bourgeois delusion that the society was gonna last and World War three was coming and that was that was my future and I really sat there and imagined as a kid to what extent world three was gonna resemble World War two like you know men in in cloth uniforms and to what extent it was gonna resemble what I saw in video games and cartoons like a men in spacesuits you know I mean I really thought about that stuff and you know was there gonna have to have a gas mask on the whole time you know because of the use of gas and you know chemical weapons and nuclear weapons but that was also part of the part conics it was I was growing up in and then you know eventually really in the 1990s you know having the realization that my whole attitude towards education and video games now aspera my time as Heath was was in some ways weirdly at a touching reality but some ways were really connected to the hysteria that that that defined the mainstream culture all around me I mean I I didn't grow up in a cult they really you know what what I saw on the front page of the newspaper as a child you don't really read the newspapers yup but you see the newspaper and you see the news on the nightly news all the time seen in the newscaster only has a picture above his shoulder on old-fashioned news there's a picture of an atom bomb exploding you know and the news would be you know today the latest nuclear disarmament talks you know but all the time you just saw the picture of of world war three coming and as a kid you know you're not understanding the nuances of what the Tigers mean you get the message World War three is coming and that was what my video games often in some in some sense even if it's just symbolically just in that science fiction sense that's that's what they were about but sure it was it was a crushing realization both about video games and even about transport to and from school I mentioned this to you recently when I realized one patreon supporter said the pie chart of how many hours of the day where I realized my time was precious and I had to I had to take responsibility for my own education because nobody in the school was gonna teach me my parents weren't going to teach me I figured my parents are basically insane like ideological extremists that my parents were not normal politically not at all and you know I had to teach myself about politics and economics or I was never gonna understand of the world worked you know I had to take this burden on myself and then obviously rejecting videogames and also rejecting stuff like comic books now it wasn't a huge comic but you know like most oh I did read some home but in rejecting that and saying oh my god I don't take it on my own show to become some kind of well-informed person I'm never gonna know nothing because my teachers are full of my parents are I have no other access to information and I started going to the library so obviously that could be the start of a whole longer video but how I started how I started educating myself but the fundamental thing I had to realize was nobody's responsible to me and I wish someone was it's not like nobody can be responsible but me but the situation I was in nobody else was gonna be responsible if I didn't take on that burden nobody else would and that did lead to me reading Aristotle and Socrates and Thucydides and you know ancient Greek and Latin sources as well as you know as said mentioned you don't try and get education in modern economics because I was surrounded by left-wing people who kind of worshiped economics but had but I had no real understanding of it okay so obviously told whole different topic there but we're sticking on on video games the autobiographical you know all right so I [Music] for me this is not about video game addiction we mentioned that Melissa's ex-boyfriend would play video games for three hours a day and that shaped his whole life and what he did do and what he didn't do I wanted to include that my ex-wife she also have many points during a relationship played video games compulsively and my ex-wife's a very respectable person in many ways she has a PhD she does research as meaningful things that are left but I remember what a weird position that put me in because I like I'd have to stand there and say look do you want me to force you to stop playing video games like you want me to like take the computer away from you no I mean like look what what do you want me to do like you know this is a problem and I mentions four people in no vidiians watching this the video games she was playing compulsively were really simple one of them was nethack nethack which is a classic game I introduced her to just in conversations about where she and I talked about what video games did I play as a as a child then I showed her this really primitive game nethack nethack has no graphics it just has letters and boxes on the screen but it is it is a game that people play for hours and hours if you google it right now there are people who've written about how they like for 200 hours only it is one of those games people get engrossed in and another one was spelunky spelunky like if you just look at it on the surface it's similar to Super Mario Brothers like you know you jump around you know from thing to thing and spelunky was one of those teams that had a clock in it where every time you started up and quit it told you how many hours in total you've been playing and you know they were I think different times in her life you know where she was whether it was due to escapism or to ever be like look you know and you know I'd be doing other things but you know like whatever I'd do some work where I'd go do food shopping and come back and I'd have to say to her look like it's it's been three hours like you know you said you were gonna do this this in this today so that's also and again this is not remotely addiction my ex-wife was never a videogame addict but I can just say it was a problem and how it was really hard for me to address that with you and your ex-boyfriend did you ever address it or was it just built into the relationship where was an assumption that he was going to play video games for like three hours a day in a neighborhood you know we liked it like it wasn't negotiable you know he may look a lot of things to Rosie but like that like if someone's already a cigarette smoker when you start the relationship they sometimes are in positions they look I smoke cigarettes and you met me I'm gonna you know first when we first were dating I was in college and he was about an hour drive away like he lived an hour drive away so we would see each other only on the weekends and during the week he could just you know play a video games as much as he wanted so in the last few years that we were together that we lived together um he worked a job where he got off work at like 11:00 and that's when I had to go to sleep so after that like he would just stay up until like 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning playing video games and like you know I was asleep so it really wasn't that big of a deal right um I guess on the weekends you know like I would rather be like studying or just you know I'd be doing something else while he was playing video games so yeah it was it was just it wasn't something that I ever I didn't you know I didn't really criticize him for doing one of the late motifs in my life you know I say you know worrying is underrated you and I you know we go for a long walks together last couple days and a number of Louis and very often what we're talking about during those long walks you know we're worrying about the future you know thinking about should we do this in the future should have what's what's gonna be like and you know people think worrying is a bad thing that people think worrying means you're unhappy but worrying is a productive thing to do with your mind and I would not trade that worrying time for video games you know I mean if if worrying is misery I don't want to trade that for a kind of you know shallow happiness I think that's really worth well no obvious that's not you know we also just do fun things in the relationship but you know if I think about the number of hours we spend worrying about the future and talking through different options and scenarios that is a significant amount of time and it's not again I think it's a false optic to think that life is about enjoyment and happiness you know that's one aspect of life but there's a lot of worrying and research and aspiration and ambition and even just within this relationship I think the time we spend worrying and you know going on those walks together is is meaningful and we wouldn't have that time if either one of us was was playing video games for three hours a day or or maybe even one hour a day you know sometimes you know as soon as we asked if we're gonna go take a walk there's a there's a mountain we go up here if we're gonna go on a hike up the mountain it's like well that's gonna be over an hour you know can we can we fit in or not so those are those are the questions on that you don't on that basic level that everyone has to ask there's a legal principle I'm not gonna try to say it in Latin but it normally is quoted in Latin the abuse of a thing has no implications for the proper use of a thing and even if you've never heard that legal points before maybe you can guess why we have that so you know the fact that some people are drunk drivers doesn't mean that you should take away the right to drive from everyone or something you know the fact that there's a problem with abusing a principle or right of freedom or even a Power has no implication for the proper use of things so obviously one of the most extreme debates but this is something like gun control the way the fact that even if ninety percent of people are using guns improperly or illegally well what about the ten percent who owned them and use for in some strictly legal sense what have you what's the implication for for the proper use of a thing and the focus on video game addiction I think this is the problem is that's very easy to look at that say okay there's a small number of people who are video game addicts in the same way this small number of people or gambling addicts but that doesn't have any implication for people who are responsible gamblers or people who are who are moderate video game players and I think what I'm trying to emphasize here is that my overall approach to this it's not about addiction it's not about the abuse of video games you know it's about the use period now you can say that was something like steroids like are you just criticizing steroid abuse you know excessive use of steroids as opposed to no being opposed in principle to any use whatsoever you could say the same about cocaine or alcohol I I don't just oppose alcoholism I oppose even moderate how Gleason I'm completely I drink absolutely zero alcohol so I'm you know these are differences that can slip away in language and the way these these things are phrased so I was I was tempted in this video tell a story of one young woman I knew to destroyed her life with with video game addiction and it's you know it's kind of a long story but long story short I got because I met had this long serious conversation when I got to kind of see the world from her eyes and how you know her youth you know the critical years of her life when she should have been in high school and in university that would have determined her direction in life one sec baby let's we'll wrap it up now you know were squandered through video game addiction but I'm not gonna cover that this video for this reason that I mean again this is a little bit more of an envoy graphical approach but this is not about video game addiction or excessive video game use it's about any video game use as an adult and as I think I've already said at length the question is you know what is the meaningful life how are we gonna live meaningful lives what is the meaning of life and I don't even think it's debated whenever we're talking about a game a game of cards a game of billiards game video games anything that a game I think actually none of the people engaged in the debate would even take the position that this is the meaning of life I think whatever the meaning of life is for you to a very large extent subjective you know it's not this you know it's not a game you know that the meaning of life is about something real or the relentless pursuit of something real even if you're a surrealist painter you know that's what you're wrestling with as long as painting is not a game you know that's I mean that's the difference some people do just paint as a pastime or hobby but as soon as it's not a game that's what it gets real that's when it becomes part of you mean flip that's when it comes to struggle which may indeed involve agony and disappointment and tragedy and what have you but that's interest that's I think that's even built into our notion of what a game is people can defend it as a self-indulgence as a pleasure as something that makes them happy but I don't see them defending it as something meaningful as something aspirational or as something ambitious
video games and the meaning of life the question of playing video games and how do we as adults lead a meaningful life I got my girlfriend eating vegan noodles on camera in some ways this is a more casual video than the first two and in some ways a more serious one because this is going to be more autobiographical I'm going to talk about my own experience playing video games video games in my own life maybe especially in the last 10 years and I think it's natural for people to have a sort of defensive reaction if you don't present that autobiographical material I think there's a really natural human tendency when people ask well who the hell are you what do you do with your life that's so great or who are you what video games did you play growing up I think there's a kind of natural tendency react that way it doesn't mean it's good intelligent or at faithful you know and I think it's worth questioning for people who've had a really defensive reaction people will used to ask me back when I was a scholar of Buddhism people would ask me well what the hell's the point why are you doing this stuff about Buddhist philosophy and I didn't you know respond defensive the way I thought those were questions that are worth asking and worth answering seriously for someone with me if you're spending many many hours studying an ancient language studying a dead language studying ancient history I think you should be able to reflect on answer those questions if you're studying ancient Greek or ancient Latin you know philosophy murad something that's better known than studying at you Buddhism I think you should be able to give a meaningful answer those questions and sit down and discuss them without becoming too defensive or what have you and say well these are mattress and life these are my reasons these they'll come looking for mmm I think everyone knows there's a real difference in terms of who you are as a person and the person you become even if you waste 10 years of your life studying ancient Greek philosophy even if you literally look back on that after 10 years as a waste of your life there's a difference between studying ancient Greek philosophy and say playing guitar and a band it's different why would we pretend these things the same you can say oh well it's a hobby it's a passion therefore it's an and there's a difference between playing a guitar in a band and sitting in your room alone playing video games these things are different and we as adults whether face-to-face in a coffee shop you know someone you know in real life rent or here on the Internet we need to be able to talk in a reasonable way about those differences about those choices because they shape the world around us and they shape who we become as people you know no I'm not actually gonna talk about those examples you know I I have many many brothers my father had a lot of kids with a lot of different ones get pregnant and you know one of my brothers devoted a large part of his life to playing the guitar and you know he basically never read a book as an adult he and I share a lot of the same DNA but we you know the result of that after decades he's a totally different human being for me whatever we had in comment at age ten is now unrecognizable and you know it's not inevitable with playing the guitar but of course he didn't play the guitar in a vacuum he played the guitar mostly in small smoky bars you know with cigarette smoke and alcohol and he drank heavily his entire life too and that changes who you are and where you're spending your time who you're spending your time with and also does mentioning playing the guitar is very different from studying ancient Greek philosophy in that you're probably playing the same song again and again hundreds of times playing the same song and with humanitarian work or politics or philosophy you may be doing something really new and different and challenging every night even if you are literally sitting at your desk alone even if you look back on it after ten years and think oh my god I Spy lost so much time studying this language or studying this philosophy or Senator so yes there are meaningful differences and yes there's a sense in which they're comparable cuz we're talking we've talked about you know just how many hours goes into this but you can say so we're not gonna get it any real embarrassing details but my girlfriend her ex-boyfriends or her boyfriend before me he used to play video games for about three hours a night if he was studying ancient Greek for three hours a night that would be different if he was working on philosophy or politics or humanitarian work or some as I know cancer research whatever I'm you know anything any any passion it's different I mean is it the same it's the same in that it's three hours every other way there are really deep meaningful differences in the process and in the product of who you are after doing that for six months or six years or ten years whenever you look back and do an evaluation so we don't I mean don't pretend there's no point in coming at me on the internet as people will I mean inevitably and saying well who are you to judge playing video games is the same as watching movies or playing video games that the same as doing cancer research or closely yeah it's different yeah yeah I will just say that was a reduction when I first met I mentioned in the second video though but I am NOT addressing this just a video game addiction I don't think your ex-boyfriend was an addict he had you know he had a normal job he drove a car he had a girlfriend you know he he was a normal productive member of society and three hours a night in our society is not considered an addiction I can say it's what some of my brothers do none of my brothers are considered alcoholics in Canadian Canadian Society none of them are considered alcoholics in in British society you know but the the level of drinking you know can be you can be spending three hours a night drinking alcohol and in our society you're not considered now for me subjectively I look at those brothers of mine and I might do you wasted all your intellectual potential you wasted all your potential period sitting around drinking alcohol that's my perspective but they're not alcoholics and likewise I mean your your ex-boyfriend he's not an addict he's not one of the we was looking at the other day one example of guy who who for many years was playing ten hours a day and then he went up to 15 hours a day he had just one year at that level of 15 hours a day playing video games and he kept he was in he was in formal competitions right so I mean that that is when you're talking about video game addiction and video game obsession but those three hours a night that's exactly the time when you could be working on anything - so this is a really broad topic it's a deep topic and to some extent I think it's inevitable if I if I just present myself with no autobiographical I should not talk about my own history playing video games there is the sense of well who are you to speak and that's I'm used to that I had that kind of reaction when I'm starting with video games on tumblr you know on a written blog before YouTube so you kick the I've got this comment on patreon this is from a patreon supporter someone who in some sense as a fan of my channel you know pays a dollar a month to support we do this channel so Richard wrote the following Richard writes to me quote you seem to be under the misapprehension that people are supposed to be doing something that you judge to be meaningful and that anybody not meeting that standard is wasting their lives okay I'll read the next sentence is it but let's let's just know that so he is saying that I am under the misapprehension that people are supposed to be doing something that you judged me for and in part of my reply I gave him a very short reply and I also offered to have email with him further if he wants to get in touch to me and know no more about me no it's not a misapprehension it's an ethical claim and that's the kind of claim we make in knowing people face to face whether it's your brother or your coworker or a friend or a colleague all the time we say to people look this is what I consider a meaningful life this is what I consider a standard of adequacy or excellence or this is something I think this is something I think you should be aspiring to and if you fall short of it I'm gonna tell you I'm disappointed in you that's what we do with people we love people we care about in real life all the time and I think we talked about this in veganism and so on in veganism you know there's a lot of kind of agony within the movement about do you or do you not walk up to complete strangers and like testify you're walking to somebody you don't know it all would be like hey have I told you about our Lord and Savior or veganism you know and I don't I don't do that I've really said you know whether or not you you come out of the closet and tell somebody how much meaning does it means to you has a lot to do with how much you respect them how much you care about them you know so at my university in Canada I did talk about veganism with some professors not all of them sit down at every professor ad it'd be like look man you got you got a gonna know about these pigs in the slaughterhouse they're like look man you got to know what these rates of heart attacks you know it really was kind of a litmus test for how much I care about you if I tell you about this thing that so many from my life and it's also reciprocally when they asked me about it was kind of a litmus test for how much they cared about me because I did have professors who were they raised it they wanted to know about me and my life in that way ethically and politically and also even nutritionally in terms of fitness I wasn't I wasn't in that great shape but I was in better shape my professors a lot more si me so there's a question about caring but yeah it's not uh it's not an indication of my contempt for you that I'm willing to say hey I care about you you can be doing better and you ought to be doing better I claim not about what is but a claim about what ought to be it shows that I that I care about you and again I can even say that within my own mother my own brothers I have so many brothers my father had so many kids you know if I just regard one of their brothers as a worthless alcoholic worthless drug addicts I'm not gonna bother talking any of that stuff but in some cases I'm my brother's you sit there and look at them and be like look man you're capable I know I know you can do better than this and I really think I really think you should so I look again I'm not pushing come but I know I know you have circle of friends you don't have so many brothers and sisters but you know I know that's that's how you look around and you know sometimes you sometimes you make that bet assumes you don't and in some ways the Internet is strange because I come here and talk on YouTube as the if I'm sitting down with you in a cafe as if we're meeting in a Starbucks or something and you the audience are to some extent complete strangers and you may feel offended that way you may say who are you to impose on me your idea of what's a meaningful life that's exactly what I'm doing so in a sense he's right I am sitting here and telling you this is what I think is a meaningful life this is what I think is the meaning of life and if you're falling short of it I want to sit here and ever have a meaningful conversation but I want to I want to you know reflect on your sure but I mean it's a big question like you know in America there's the ambition to make money I mean I know your parents did said that tells you well make sure you pick a career path that pays more than how to but you know what it means to have other ambitions ambitions that fill your life with meaning and purpose and that really motivates you motivate you in a profound sense that's not just money I think that's something in our culture I mean where we grew up southern Ontario and the adjacent part of the northern United States when we did actually grow up in in the same area that's certainly not something that was talked about you know around me yeah and again you know maybe it is where you come from you know but I mean if anything you know I only found that when I started reading ancient philosophy when I was reading ancient philosophy I saw men they're all men and there's basically no basically no female voices in these texts but these were men sitting down about life and death and what are you gonna do with the next 10 years it might be the last 10 years you got you know people were dying of you know dying of diseases we can cure today all the time apart from dying of war on the starvation and all these things and and you know these really kind of Bronze Age values about having an ambition to be to be a good man nobody talked about that when I was when I was growing up you know neither within I mean I was raised in an anti-religious household but I was also exposed to both Christianity and Judaism I mean both both Christianity of Judaism of those growing up seemed to be mostly about forgiveness and acceptance for people's mediocrity and even like their their evil you know anyway oh you know like you know you just gotta do anyway and I grew up for example I grew up in the era of the the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa and then again it was all about me do mediocrity and forgiveness wasn't about justice didn't have a justice you know what I mean so it was really when I saw though that ancient philosophy there was it go like here are here are people who are really willing to say openly hey that's not good enough you know like try for greatness try for excellence and maybe if you fail maybe you're gonna learn more out of that failing out of trying for something impossible an excellent you know and maybe failing repeatedly setting goals maybe that's maybe that's worth philosophizing about maybe that's really worth thinking about as opposed to a life of ease and comfort and mediocrity whether whether you're earning $100,000 a year or not because you can learn a lot of money that way yeah yeah I totally understand this comment you know people don't want to be challenged what is meaningful to them and I just recently I told you I think that was what you were referencing but I had a best friend and in high school she stopped talking to me and I didn't really know why until years later she said that she felt that I was too judgmental and then I would judge her for having gotten into drugs alcohol and sex I guess so I did not know that but apparently I gave off that vibe that she just didn't want to be judged by me or she didn't want somebody to tell her that what she was doing was not a good path for her but you know I I I don't feel the same way like I want somebody like I want people in my life that do care enough to really challenge me and I think I mean again I don't make you look sometimes people are just jerks and there's nothing more to say about it but I think even if you are spending your time doing humanitarian work or doing working on philosophy or politics one of these many examples the things that get through worthwhile people are gonna challenge you because of other things when I was younger and I was doing that stuff people would basically say why aren't you just trying to earn as much money as possible why aren't you playing the stock market yeah and sometimes in a really friendly way I mean if sometimes that people will take me aside and say cuz they talk to me but economics haven't very good education economics fundamentals of economics you know and sometimes I'd be talking about what was going on economically people say to me look you could make a fortune you know you're you're smart you're Jewish you understand that the stock market works you understand that the property market works you know within the conversation said what you know why you wasting your time with humanitarian and political and philosophical stuff why and again it's maybe sometimes somebody's pitch be mature but even if you're doing something you really do believe in as meaningful I think you still have these conversations but yes it's different it's not the same as making excuses for playing video games or even making excuses for playing the guitar in a smoky bar you know music or something I think I think we all have to answer those questions again and again and you know it's different as life goes on maybe playing the guitar meant one thing in your life when you're 15 and then it's different when you're 25 and then it's different when you're 35 right you've got to think about that as as life goes on it's like you said playing in a smoky bar versus trying to learn new music and actually challenge yourself or writing new instruments you know like that can be a valuable use of your time but if you're mostly trying to you know sure meet meet hot chicks at the bar I think I I'm including the example Muse because I think it's it's a it's an intermediate example and I don't think playing music is the it's not the same as playing video games but it still raises these questions whereas you know I've said I think that playing billiards playing snooker which for many people to come as there are people who play snooker eight hours a day you know play it played these kinds of table games or playing card games it can be really the same as video games yeah we have to cause when you look back at that time anyway so the end of the the comment from from Richard he says where did you get such a silly idea where did I get the idea that people should be doing something meaningful with 5s and then I get to judge what's meaningful we all get to judge with meaningful we're all on the internet right now and we're all sitting around in coffee shops we're all engaging in this judgment and reflection and the question what is meaningful in life what is a meaningful life and that's a question worth ask yourself again and again so he asks where did he get such a silly idea and is that idea at the core of what's driving your permanent student lifestyle so that that's kind of a topic for another video my experience with university education which is almost entirely negative and why I've spent as many years in and out of universities that have I have talked about in the past but we'll definitely talk about it again but I don't you know I don't particularly endorse a permanent student lifestyle no no don't worry about your life you know but um and also you're not doing it to find a meaningful career like you you said you've expressly told me that like at this point you're not looking for something that is you know something that brings me I'm certainly not university looking for some of that isn't there I know what the university system is and what it isn't yeah like I think what he's referencing is how some students you know they continue getting a masters or a PhD and something that's right look here here here on YouTube I talked a lot about research and the majority of my research was not in any university it was outside of University but it's true that may make it seem like my whole life is about university based education study and it's not I don't spend very much time you aren't YouTube talking about my formal career you know we can like right now we can talk I teach classes at a university I don't talk about that much in the past I have experience you know presenting formal lectures to boardrooms of people in a corporate setting like multi-millionaire multi millionaires in a corporation in Hong Kong on the top floor of this sky script unthe at you know which it's interesting in its way I could talk about that I've presented to boardroom where everyone was a representative of the United States government European Union governments plural and the said to EU itself international humanitarian agencies no when I was a kid I gave presentations in that kind of context it's like my work life you know in that sense and you know my earning money life I don't talk about on YouTube that much why this comes back to the meaning of life because the research I've done the more scholarly stuff have done is more meaningful to me and even the stuff I've been raising my daughter you know like my situation with my divorce and my daughter and going to Cuba that's more maybe I guess it gets talked about more here but sure I do also have a professional side to my life which I'm not no see though it's not like I'm a fuse to talk about it on YouTube but sure I think it's also reflects this underlying question of what's meaningful what's important in your life that that's that's not the bulk of what we what we talk about here on here on YouTube okay so look video games in my life and your life neither of us were ever video game addicts but I can say you know video games meant different things at different points in my life and some would have regrets about it some of it I don't uh let's start with just talking about the last couple of years like the last five years yeah I have played almost zero video games unless I'm gonna include our romance cuz video games are a small component of we have played four games a little bit so I'll get to that but you know before I move to China so it's living in in Victoria that's several years ago I bought a new Mac it's actually the other Mac it's not the but I bought a new computer and you guys may not know this but now with Mac the first time you open any program it gives you this stupid security warning it's like warning this computer could contain this this this program could contain a virus the damages your computer level so the first time you open any program you get this in so when you buy a new Mac you get that message like 20 times so for about two years I didn't play any video game on my hard drive at all I know on that Mac because then I did start to play for a couple of minutes and when I opened those video games I got that warning I was like how can I be getting this warning I bought this computer like two years ago so I hadn't I had him over them so actually I started playing video games really briefly I'll describe what I played after about to use with my absolutely zero because I had some really annoying loading pauses and file processing pauses so I'd be in the situation where my computer was like a two-minute delay or five minute delay and I didn't want to open a textbook and get involved with something else so I started playing the original space invaders which believe me you can play for about two minutes I mean it's a really simple game with two minutes is a long time to play space invaders and some other really simple really classic games so within the last couple of years that was all I played and even then not really there was this big gap or I didn't play video games at all so you know and that was literally while waiting for my computer to load or export something or convert something just a couple of minutes here and there when Melissa I began our romance one of the surprises was that she really grew up playing a lot of the same video games I did and she's much younger than me so she a she grew up with a lot of classic video games Sega Genesis and Nintendo 64 and idea so when we first met yeah but Jenna basically from a generation before yeah you didn't grow up with yeah so when we first got together that was just kind of a surprise and a funny thing and we played a couple of Sega Genesis Classic so I played toejam in a role for the first time in 20 years you know game I played as a child we played maybe for two hours I mean it's not the total it may be less than she did it felt like a long time with any of these things like most of these video games amazingly boring and it's like you know like five minutes feels like a long time for me so now as an adult that's basically the only role few games play in my life but I want to mention a couple of other things in the last ten years one I have a daughter of a four-year-old daughter and I did a lot of research on video games for her and because I was concerned about buying video games for her in her future with video games and I'm sure it's something I'm gonna discuss with her or not once not 10 times about a hundred times I'm sure as she grows up video games are really gonna be an issue so I wanted to be Oklahoma and I have bought her video games and I have played video games with her and I played video games in a sense for her where I was figuring out what to buy for her what what was appropriate you know for a four-year-old that kind of thing so that's another roll of idioms month that's not going away I think that's that's gonna be with me um you know for the next 20 years whatever you know of raising my daughter so you know in that sense I think people might say I'm a Margaret on video games so that I'm not trying to raise my kid with no no awareness of video games or or not knowing what they are know so I you can you can jump in anytime III as a child so I was never a video game addict but I have seen compulsive video game playing up close and I emphasized in my earlier video that you know that your own professors the people you look up to police officers all kinds of grown adults either still play video games compulsively or it's something they struggle with or if not if you're talking to grown adults who don't play video so it's a choice what they've chosen to quit video games they've reached a breaking point so you know with each item people 40 years old 50 years old this is a mass phenomenon and it's much much more common than dealing with cocaine or alcohol basically everyone who has access to electricity in the Western world has made a decision even if they didn't struggle to quit even if they were never an addict they've thought am I gonna play video games or not even if the question is or not yeah yeah well I guess I can just say why I grew up playing older video games because my brothers were seven and five years older than me and also my parents were pretty cheap they didn't want to buy like the newest systems so and I have a lot of fond memories of playing video games with my brothers as a kid so you know that's that's positive in one way and also I can see it being kind of sad in another way because you know I could have been marie's of playing outside with more and more memories of actually being outside and doing something fun with them like active rather than playing video games and I remember my grandma one time was watching us and she got really upset that we were playing video games for so much of the day yeah you know as a kid is a kid you just have so much time and it is easy to pass the time with video games but um so yeah as a teenager I played like again it was really just older stuff it was like once my brothers went off to college I inherited their gaming systems so it was like the original Xbox some of those games but yeah not as much as I did when I was a kid and then in college even less so I would say in college I you know there were times when I would play a phone game a phone video game with my ex-boyfriend because he played it I know you don't I know you just got a phone recently I didn't own a mobile phone at all till age 36 or 37 but actually the one game that I started playing with him was The Simpsons game where you like yeah really it's really bad it's a waste of your time but like it's kind of that same situation you can play it for like two minutes well something's loading like while you while you're waiting for food takeout or something like you know it's it's not something that I spent a lot of time on but yeah I think it's just the wind old throughout my life the past couple years I haven't been playing much at all so I just say you know why it is I mean it is emotionally significant for me I really had a turning point in my show where I started to to bitterly regret playing video games you know I still was a child but where I realized the significance of the situation I was in my parents were both businesspeople they had very little time to spend with us and when they were at home you know they were often working at home so you know they'd have their portable computers there when I was a little kid the portable computer like it was as big as the whole table we had huge portable computers and as a little kid and they got smaller and smaller but they'd have their portable computer on the dining room table so even if they were at home they were actively you know typing and working and during dinner they'd both be incredibly stressed out and talking about work and my parents were also violent I was beaten throughout my childhood most time freezes that nothing to do with me like just like my mother would literally hang up the phone after having an angry business call with a cold disputing business she would beat me just to take out her frustrations in that phone call so nothing to do with my behavior like it's not I spilled something you know I mean so I was in this kind of violent taciturn in some ways uncommunicative home where my parents you know preoccupation with their business which is understandable really meant that for most the hours of the day it was just a question of warehousing me it was just a question of wasting my time in a way that didn't require parental supervision so I mean almost anything else we lived in downtown Toronto you know he requires some level of parental supervision including often just driving the kid there like you know even some activity the parent is to drive the kid there and then pick them up afterwards my parents basically never did that like I remember my childhood really briefly I enrolled in karate lessons like I think I'm worth like for karate lessons but my parents couldn't do it they couldn't drive me to karate man which I sympathize with like you know I can imagine as a parent like you know in the future I may be so busy was look I can't do this we got you no no I would respond by trying to find some other way to be a concurrent you know what I mean but that was actually a really awful realization which was you know people are just waiting for me to physically get older and between now and then this is just about wasting my time and in a series of really crushing realizations in terms of my own wasted potential and you know the fact that I had really squandered years of when I could have been learning something like even if it's literally like learning how to climb a rope you know I mean like you know it's literally like you know they are like play activities where you learn something and instead I was learning nothing but I memorized every level in zillion for the Sega Master System I memorized the map and then I remember years later so I could and I didn't play the game for several years but I was still a child but I remember five years later putting it in and discovering to my horror I still had the whole game memorized right yeah yeah yeah that's that's really kind of scary you know I'll remember how to do the Super Mario games and it's like man I could have been right reading like language like learning Japanese or something I could have been learning how to shoot a bow and arrow there's a part of my brain that is taken up with you so I just mentioned also you know as an intellectual I didn't I didn't develop early a lot of people thought I was brilliant as a kid but I grew up ignorant and I grew up and again this connects to videogames believe me that's coming to Venice but I grew up with the absolute assumption that World War three was coming and give that's the era I grew up in that there was a war whose gonna be more brutal and enormous than World War two between Russia and the United States of America coming and that I was gonna be on the Russian side because my parents were communists and in video games and in a couple of cartoons not many couple versions I watched because you know I did see a lot of video games were about that imaginary world war three or they were about the future after a nuclear war very common science that fiction things done so I saw this in videogames I saw this on the news I saw this in newspapers this wasn't just some crazy idea of my parents put in my head this was like I saw in the real world all around me when I was growing up so there was also a sense of my own education being worthless because my education was based on a bourgeois delusion that the society was gonna last and World War three was coming and that was that was my future and I really sat there and imagined as a kid to what extent world three was gonna resemble World War two like you know men in in cloth uniforms and to what extent it was gonna resemble what I saw in video games and cartoons like a men in spacesuits you know I mean I really thought about that stuff and you know was there gonna have to have a gas mask on the whole time you know because of the use of gas and you know chemical weapons and nuclear weapons but that was also part of the part conics it was I was growing up in and then you know eventually really in the 1990s you know having the realization that my whole attitude towards education and video games now aspera my time as Heath was was in some ways weirdly at a touching reality but some ways were really connected to the hysteria that that that defined the mainstream culture all around me I mean I I didn't grow up in a cult they really you know what what I saw on the front page of the newspaper as a child you don't really read the newspapers yup but you see the newspaper and you see the news on the nightly news all the time seen in the newscaster only has a picture above his shoulder on old-fashioned news there's a picture of an atom bomb exploding you know and the news would be you know today the latest nuclear disarmament talks you know but all the time you just saw the picture of of world war three coming and as a kid you know you're not understanding the nuances of what the Tigers mean you get the message World War three is coming and that was what my video games often in some in some sense even if it's just symbolically just in that science fiction sense that's that's what they were about but sure it was it was a crushing realization both about video games and even about transport to and from school I mentioned this to you recently when I realized one patreon supporter said the pie chart of how many hours of the day where I realized my time was precious and I had to I had to take responsibility for my own education because nobody in the school was gonna teach me my parents weren't going to teach me I figured my parents are basically insane like ideological extremists that my parents were not normal politically not at all and you know I had to teach myself about politics and economics or I was never gonna understand of the world worked you know I had to take this burden on myself and then obviously rejecting videogames and also rejecting stuff like comic books now it wasn't a huge comic but you know like most oh I did read some home but in rejecting that and saying oh my god I don't take it on my own show to become some kind of well-informed person I'm never gonna know nothing because my teachers are full of my parents are I have no other access to information and I started going to the library so obviously that could be the start of a whole longer video but how I started how I started educating myself but the fundamental thing I had to realize was nobody's responsible to me and I wish someone was it's not like nobody can be responsible but me but the situation I was in nobody else was gonna be responsible if I didn't take on that burden nobody else would and that did lead to me reading Aristotle and Socrates and Thucydides and you know ancient Greek and Latin sources as well as you know as said mentioned you don't try and get education in modern economics because I was surrounded by left-wing people who kind of worshiped economics but had but I had no real understanding of it okay so obviously told whole different topic there but we're sticking on on video games the autobiographical you know all right so I [Music] for me this is not about video game addiction we mentioned that Melissa's ex-boyfriend would play video games for three hours a day and that shaped his whole life and what he did do and what he didn't do I wanted to include that my ex-wife she also have many points during a relationship played video games compulsively and my ex-wife's a very respectable person in many ways she has a PhD she does research as meaningful things that are left but I remember what a weird position that put me in because I like I'd have to stand there and say look do you want me to force you to stop playing video games like you want me to like take the computer away from you no I mean like look what what do you want me to do like you know this is a problem and I mentions four people in no vidiians watching this the video games she was playing compulsively were really simple one of them was nethack nethack which is a classic game I introduced her to just in conversations about where she and I talked about what video games did I play as a as a child then I showed her this really primitive game nethack nethack has no graphics it just has letters and boxes on the screen but it is it is a game that people play for hours and hours if you google it right now there are people who've written about how they like for 200 hours only it is one of those games people get engrossed in and another one was spelunky spelunky like if you just look at it on the surface it's similar to Super Mario Brothers like you know you jump around you know from thing to thing and spelunky was one of those teams that had a clock in it where every time you started up and quit it told you how many hours in total you've been playing and you know they were I think different times in her life you know where she was whether it was due to escapism or to ever be like look you know and you know I'd be doing other things but you know like whatever I'd do some work where I'd go do food shopping and come back and I'd have to say to her look like it's it's been three hours like you know you said you were gonna do this this in this today so that's also and again this is not remotely addiction my ex-wife was never a videogame addict but I can just say it was a problem and how it was really hard for me to address that with you and your ex-boyfriend did you ever address it or was it just built into the relationship where was an assumption that he was going to play video games for like three hours a day in a neighborhood you know we liked it like it wasn't negotiable you know he may look a lot of things to Rosie but like that like if someone's already a cigarette smoker when you start the relationship they sometimes are in positions they look I smoke cigarettes and you met me I'm gonna you know first when we first were dating I was in college and he was about an hour drive away like he lived an hour drive away so we would see each other only on the weekends and during the week he could just you know play a video games as much as he wanted so in the last few years that we were together that we lived together um he worked a job where he got off work at like 11:00 and that's when I had to go to sleep so after that like he would just stay up until like 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning playing video games and like you know I was asleep so it really wasn't that big of a deal right um I guess on the weekends you know like I would rather be like studying or just you know I'd be doing something else while he was playing video games so yeah it was it was just it wasn't something that I ever I didn't you know I didn't really criticize him for doing one of the late motifs in my life you know I say you know worrying is underrated you and I you know we go for a long walks together last couple days and a number of Louis and very often what we're talking about during those long walks you know we're worrying about the future you know thinking about should we do this in the future should have what's what's gonna be like and you know people think worrying is a bad thing that people think worrying means you're unhappy but worrying is a productive thing to do with your mind and I would not trade that worrying time for video games you know I mean if if worrying is misery I don't want to trade that for a kind of you know shallow happiness I think that's really worth well no obvious that's not you know we also just do fun things in the relationship but you know if I think about the number of hours we spend worrying about the future and talking through different options and scenarios that is a significant amount of time and it's not again I think it's a false optic to think that life is about enjoyment and happiness you know that's one aspect of life but there's a lot of worrying and research and aspiration and ambition and even just within this relationship I think the time we spend worrying and you know going on those walks together is is meaningful and we wouldn't have that time if either one of us was was playing video games for three hours a day or or maybe even one hour a day you know sometimes you know as soon as we asked if we're gonna go take a walk there's a there's a mountain we go up here if we're gonna go on a hike up the mountain it's like well that's gonna be over an hour you know can we can we fit in or not so those are those are the questions on that you don't on that basic level that everyone has to ask there's a legal principle I'm not gonna try to say it in Latin but it normally is quoted in Latin the abuse of a thing has no implications for the proper use of a thing and even if you've never heard that legal points before maybe you can guess why we have that so you know the fact that some people are drunk drivers doesn't mean that you should take away the right to drive from everyone or something you know the fact that there's a problem with abusing a principle or right of freedom or even a Power has no implication for the proper use of things so obviously one of the most extreme debates but this is something like gun control the way the fact that even if ninety percent of people are using guns improperly or illegally well what about the ten percent who owned them and use for in some strictly legal sense what have you what's the implication for for the proper use of a thing and the focus on video game addiction I think this is the problem is that's very easy to look at that say okay there's a small number of people who are video game addicts in the same way this small number of people or gambling addicts but that doesn't have any implication for people who are responsible gamblers or people who are who are moderate video game players and I think what I'm trying to emphasize here is that my overall approach to this it's not about addiction it's not about the abuse of video games you know it's about the use period now you can say that was something like steroids like are you just criticizing steroid abuse you know excessive use of steroids as opposed to no being opposed in principle to any use whatsoever you could say the same about cocaine or alcohol I I don't just oppose alcoholism I oppose even moderate how Gleason I'm completely I drink absolutely zero alcohol so I'm you know these are differences that can slip away in language and the way these these things are phrased so I was I was tempted in this video tell a story of one young woman I knew to destroyed her life with with video game addiction and it's you know it's kind of a long story but long story short I got because I met had this long serious conversation when I got to kind of see the world from her eyes and how you know her youth you know the critical years of her life when she should have been in high school and in university that would have determined her direction in life one sec baby let's we'll wrap it up now you know were squandered through video game addiction but I'm not gonna cover that this video for this reason that I mean again this is a little bit more of an envoy graphical approach but this is not about video game addiction or excessive video game use it's about any video game use as an adult and as I think I've already said at length the question is you know what is the meaningful life how are we gonna live meaningful lives what is the meaning of life and I don't even think it's debated whenever we're talking about a game a game of cards a game of billiards game video games anything that a game I think actually none of the people engaged in the debate would even take the position that this is the meaning of life I think whatever the meaning of life is for you to a very large extent subjective you know it's not this you know it's not a game you know that the meaning of life is about something real or the relentless pursuit of something real even if you're a surrealist painter you know that's what you're wrestling with as long as painting is not a game you know that's I mean that's the difference some people do just paint as a pastime or hobby but as soon as it's not a game that's what it gets real that's when it becomes part of you mean flip that's when it comes to struggle which may indeed involve agony and disappointment and tragedy and what have you but that's interest that's I think that's even built into our notion of what a game is people can defend it as a self-indulgence as a pleasure as something that makes them happy but I don't see them defending it as something meaningful as something aspirational or as something ambitious