Quitting Video Games; Quitting Smoking.

anything that you think you don't have
enough time for just realize how much time you're wasting playing video games i should actually really add it up i know i edited up for just rocket league the other day i have 500 hours on the xbox version and 800 hours on the pc version so all together i have 1300 hours in just rocket league and that's kind of a hard number to fathom because the way that it puts it is in hours it doesn't really break it up into how many days that would be so if you account for sleep and let's say okay so let's say that it's a nine to five job thirteen hundred hours turns out to be about over over a half a year i think it's like seven months is what 1300 hours turns into if you're working nine to five monday through friday it turns out to be almost seven months so that's insane i worked basically worked a full-time job for rocket league for seven months that's just that's just insane and that's just rocket league arguably that is one of the games that i was the least well i was not the least addicted to it i was very addicted to that game but i was addicted to it for the least amount of time maybe two to three years there's call of duty which has been there my whole entire life i don't even want to know how much time has been put into that game and then arguably i think overwatch i definitely have maybe twice the amount of hours i do in rocket league and i feel like the same thing is true with cigarettes and things like that where in the beginning they aren't seen as bad until the side effects start popping up years later is video games as bad as smoking cigarettes probably not because it doesn't actually kill you but it does take away your time in a similar way smoking will end your life at a certain point and you lose the time after that video games take away your time everywhere in between it's a different kind of death you die from the inside out i guess i guess you really have to realize the underlying problem something that really helped me overcome video game addiction was actually journaling because once i started reading them and i read through all of my past journals and then i started reading a couple a day you really realize the patterns that occur in your day to day thoughts and i realized how many days there were where i had to write i wasted so much time today playing video games or this video game got me so angry and i played it all night and i have something really important to do and this same message kept popping up week after week day after day and i feel like it happened so so often that it just made me realize that wow this is something i really want to change in my life and that's when it clicked i just knew that i could overcome it there because reading these entries really just helped i don't know how to explain it but just seeing my past self struggle the same way that my current self is struggling made me realize like wow i really have a problem and i'm gonna take the steps to overcome it honestly who would even know where i'd be at right now if i didn't play video games i could be a totally different person probably for the better so if you're addicted to video games the best time to stop is now responsibility seems to have a unique significance in adult life in that we can understand very easily what it is when the concept is applied to another person even if it's just a hypothetical other person and we have a great deal of difficulty recognizing the significance of it when it's applied to ourselves you've been drinking you've had three or four bottles of beer are you sure you're okay with driving this car are you sure you're responsible to drive this car yeah yeah yeah yeah i'm completely confident okay well what if hypothetically it's not you who's driving the car what if you have your choice between two different drivers and one of them had just drank the same amount of alcohol you drank and the other one is his identical twin brother but he's been sober all night long who would you prefer to have in the car if you were a passenger suddenly somehow that's very different for us you know uh one and all i've spoken to people who've justified legalization of drugs legalization drugs like marijuana but they're also people who think we should legalize drugs like cocaine and heroin and so on and these people feel that they personally could could live in the society just fine they would be able to handle it with no difficulty at all being in a society where they're surrounded by the temptation of buying cocaine and heroin as easily as today you can buy a bag of potato chips or a cup of coffee that these drugs would just be available legally and commercially everywhere and that they personally would have no problem with that what if you're dealing with a police officer and the police officer is acting a little funny and you start to wonder if this police officer has been using cocaine today you start to wonder if this police officer is high on heroin or some other opiate and you're not even in a position to ask because you live in a society where there's no drug test there's no requirement for the policemen to have sobriety you live in a society where it's a civil right to use cocaine or heroin the same way that today it's a civil right to drink as much coffee as he wants to or smoke as many cigarettes as he might like there's a provocative interesting but misleading comparison in this video i've been quoting between cigarettes and video games he says with the best of intentions i completely understand why he's saying this he says that the time you lose smoking cigarettes can be compared to the time you lose playing video games that um in smoking cigarettes up to a certain point as the decades go by you seem to be having no negative side effects but then your life is cut short maybe you die at 60 years old instead of dying at 100 years old so you've lost 40 years of your life and he's saying you know in a similar way by playing video games you're losing eight hours here eight hours there and it adds up to a huge percentage of the time when you otherwise would be awake and alive and doing something with your brain doing something with your body it's not going well it may also be cutting into the time when you should have been asleep let's be honest it's not just the hours when you would be awake it may also be cutting into the number of hours when you would be asleep but he's saying that in the same way you may be losing in the end decades of your life but you're not losing that time to death right you're just losing it video games but we all know the contrast we're making here is not the contrast between life and death it's in part the contrast between a meaningful life and a meaningless life and it's also the contrast between a responsible life and an irresponsible one right being a person who both cultivates responsibility and who is capable of responsibility how would you feel knowing that you're dealing with a police officer and he's acting a little strange and he was up last night playing video games until four o'clock in the morning i think every single person in this audience knows what it's like to stay up playing video games till four o'clock in the morning even if that memory is from when you were 11 years old or 13 years old but for some of you it's a memory when you were 23 years old like for some of you it was last weekend all right and uh you know like in your own life you may feel like oh oh dude are you are you still okay to drive you were up all night playing that video game yeah yeah yeah i'll be fine and i'll drink a cup of coffee or i'll get i'm i'm sure i'll be fine you know right but if you had your choice between a police officer who'd been up all night playing video games and a police officer who was well rested which one would you choose and even this is misleading is not the same as a police officer who's been doing drugs as opposed to police officers been silver right and it's not just one night because it wouldn't really matter if you were talking about a police officer who had never played video games in his whole entire life but just for this one night had played video games before him the problem is of course that it's cumulative you're talking about someone who lives this way habitually night after night week after week year after year and of course i don't think people do that seven days a week those who do end up dead frankly but there are guys who do it every weekend they're guys who do it several times a month and there are guys for whom the the number of hours they add up they add up in this way now the contrast to smoking cigarettes is instructive i think there were men who are completely competent as an airplane pilot but who smokes cigarettes every day they they put out their cigarette they get in the cockpit they fly the airplane when they get out of the airplane to the side they smoke a cigarette and they're completely alert and completely focused i think it's possible a comparison that's very much discussed in that guy's video is what happens during your years in university i think it's possible during your four years of university to be completely lucid completely sober completely focused learn a lot be very highly productive and smoke cigarettes every day i don't recommend it it's bad and evil and wrong but you know you can go to your lecture you can smoke a cigarette listen to the lecture go outside smoke a cigarette after you can study for your exams and you can also still have the time and focus and energy smoking cigarettes maybe in your spare time you're also you play guitar in a rock and roll band or something i'm not going to suggest that you spend your spare time learning cambodian or flying to cambodia to do humanitarian work or any of the other crazy things i might suggest here all kinds of meaningful things you could be doing with your time you know you could be staging shakespeare for all i care the point is whatever you do whether it's shakespeare or playing music in a band or doing humanitarian work or research or you have business aspirations all of those things are compatible with a few minutes a day here and there being lost to cigarettes and the subtle change in your behavior and mood that's provided by nicotine especially when you've already built up your tolerance when you've already become a nicotine addict there's no perceptible high once you're addicted to nicotine you just you smoke cigarettes and then you feel normal it's the tragedy of it right um [Music] it's completely possible that you have two police officers one of whom smokes cigarettes and one of whom doesn't and the better police officer isn't cigarettes more it's possible you have a pilot or you have two students at university and the one who learns more than one is living a more productive life right is the one who's smoking cigarettes but that's not how i feel about video games you know i'm just gonna be real with you i don't think it's possible to be a good and responsible adult while in this way losing such a percentage of your life such a huge percentage of the hours when you are awake when you are alert to playing video games as this young man described you know in his case playing video games really was like a full-time job he says he doesn't want to do the math and know how many hours it is i think if he does the math his hunch is correct that this is going to add up to something like 40 hours a week that he was spending with all the different video games and all the different uh consoles combined and we're at a turning point in this culture i read an account of the english civil war and you know if you read about war in almost any ancient society you'll come up against this sort of thing from time to time where you know to some extent you're reading this and without being aware of it you're imagining these being modern people with modern attitudes and modern conveniences you can forget when reading something out of ancient history medieval history renaissance history you can forget when reading books of history just how physically difficult it was to read something when they didn't have electrical lights and how difficult was to go to the bathroom and if it was to feed yourself and how very minor medical ailments could could kill you but you forget most of all that these people had beer for breakfast i'm reading with the english civil war and the level of drunkenness seven days a week including drunkenness of men carrying weapons participating in the war like they're not just on military duty they're at the battlefront you know drinking alcohol everything look at that go wow and to what extent to what extent do we understand past historical epochs in terms of the mind-altering drug use that was normalized within them i have a book here i drew attention to it recently this is a book dealing with the extent to which the nazi regime uh world war ii era uh germany you know many distinctive features of political discourse were shaped by drug addiction and the types of drugs people were using that time in their millions like as a mass phenomenon and the types of drugs being used by men who were in the military by men who were members of the nazi who were leaders of the nazi party and who were you know police officers and uh the ss and gestapo and so on people were forcing people who were enforcing the system of morality in that society drug addiction as a mass phenomenon can be a huge issue in modern times not just in ancient ones but the point is in many societies alcohol for example was used to such an extent on such a daily basis that it becomes invisible but we all know for a fact it's not invisible and we're we're turning the corner now i think we're going to start to ask as never before you know if you want to be a police officer are you responsible i mean who really needs to be taking drug tests is it just olympic athletes is it just boxers is it just baseball players like we have a society where we really behave as if sobriety only matters for people earning their living in the nba you know playing playing basketball playing baseball what what a joke for whom could it matter less who really gives a damn if the guys who play basketball for a living are using marijuana or cocaine or what have you this is this is of all the jobs this is a position of like perpetual irresponsibility of continued childhood they continue living like children they continue living like teenagers probably because they earn so much money playing a game right but whether you're talking about police officers or university professors or even just parents if you're a parent raising a child isn't there an important moral argument for all of us to start asking are you responsible are you living a life where you can take these responsibilities take them seriously and right now isn't it interesting that all the emphasis is on people like university students i'm not at all convinced that the sobriety of the university students is a bigger problem than the sobriety of the police the sobriety of their parents or the sobriety of the university professors [Music] my maybe we can we can practice