If you quit video games, you'll regret it: living the dream.

listen guys
i lost my way i'm not gonna lie to you i was a quitter i was a loser i was a rat fiend and a fink and i tell you what all the games that we've acquired over the past year and a half they're all gone i sold them i sold every last one of them except for the stuff that you guys sent me as gifts that stuff i just couldn't sell that stuff had sentimental value to me i just couldn't get rid of it and you say well why why why did you do that why'd you do that uh because it got to the point where i would wake up out of bed i'd be stepping on games on the floor i'd have games stacked to the ceiling in here uh not that i don't like that i love that as a matter of fact but one day i had to sit there and i had to evaluate and i looked around and i said you know something jesse what do you got here what is what do you actually have here and you know what it was a bag full of shells that's what i have bag full of shells [Music] foreign you had to say to yourself well i mean you know how many of these video games that you have of video games that you actually like and to be honest with you 85 of them i haven't even played and some other things happened in my life and i decided to to stop doing the channel i guess i needed a break from it even this stripped down show that i do it requires a lot of time and it requires a little bit of effort and uh you know what i i just bailed on it i bailed on the show and you know what i was out of the show for like a month and i was just disgusted with myself and you know what every time i looked around and every time i saw these video games it was another reminder about how i failed and and how i quit and it just broke my heart so during like a week's time i just did a fire sale i just sold everything i mean we're talking about i took every single nintendo game that i had which was about was over 200 and i just boxed them up in an enormous box i put them on ebay 99 cents and and let it ride if you guys are out there please uh uh ask for my uh my friendship again and my subscriptions because i basically deleted a bunch of you guys and not because i wanted to because it was just so painful to see you guys up there and see you guys doing things and i was sitting here just doing nothing just rotten away and uh it was it was just too hard too hard so um one morning i was making my breakfast it was a saturday morning i said what am i going to do this morning and i said you know what you're going to do you're going to walk out the front door and whatever direction your car is facing you're going to get in your car and you're going to drive in that direction until you see something that interests you you're going to let fate guard you whether it be a girl walking down the block with a nice ass or whether it be you know who knows a store having a sale but to be honest with you i wasn't thinking thinking of garage sales and when you know when i walked out my front door there was a garage sale two houses down from me and i said let me go over there and check it out [Music] and i was walking up and down the driveway and i came across this and i saw her inside was video games and i said to the guy i said how much you want for this and he said ten dollars he said ten dollars for everything and i told him you know i i i looked at it and i said do we really want to start this do we really want to start this again is this the direction we want to head and i looked inside and i looked at the guy i said how about five dollars so as you can see the dramatic twist in the tail is that he did return to collecting video games he did return to playing video games and he returned to making the effort week after week to attract an audience to build up a successful youtube channel devoted to this hobby and to some extent also talking about his life as it unfolds but he devoted himself once again to this perpetual childhood of being an adult whose life really revolves around video games part of what i find interesting in this case study is that he does show signs of self-awareness self-criticism and self-loathing evidently in his life every so often again and again he reaches these points where he stops and suddenly feels this can't be what my life is about it must be that there's something meaningful something more important that i should be devoting my time my effort my talent to there must be more to life than this there are times when he evidently feels burdened by the shallowness the childishness the meaninglessness of this hobby that is for him much more than just a hobby of course but as you can see when he has turned his back on video games when he has tried however briefly when he has made however feeble an effort to pursue a more meaningful life he later regrets it and devotes himself once again to this peculiar perpetual childhood of being an adult video game addict it looks like a uh almost like a um a promotional game from bubblicious i don't know uh you know i've never seen it around before that's not to say that it's a rare game or anything like that it might be very common and here we go it's it's a new start it's a new beginning it's a rebirth so i got news for you i'm gonna go i'm going to go to the garage sales and guess what i'm not changing the formula i'm going to haul everything i can haul we're going to take everything we can take because i got news for you as much as i was upset with the amount of inventory we had and stuff that i never played and just any other thing i miss every bit of it every single bit of it and so now tomorrow is saturday and we're gonna get out there and we're to start big time hauling so if you guys are with me here we go about one year ago now my youtube channel told a very different chapter of this guy's story and i think if you listen for another minute you'll see that it is no exaggeration to say that video game addiction has been part of the tragedy of his adult life or that it has been the primary most important tragedy of his life as a whole childhood development education and adulthood every stage and all of them taken together and why do i present this to you in the audience now because i think that each of us has to reflect on the extent to which video games have been part of our own personal tragedy certainly at the least the squandering of our human potential also i used to have a very substantial video game collection and i moved in with a girl and we lived together for about three years and we fought like cats and dogs um what do couples fight about the laundry the who's doing the dishes or you know who's taking out the garbage me and my girlfriend got into a huge argument uh one day and the following day i went to work and when i got home i went downstairs to my to my lair and uh everything was gone uh i i freaked out i mean i know i i know you guys have uh video game collections and i've i've seen them online and and just imagine for a second you know if you came home and all your stuff was gone i mean gone i mean the shelves gone everything was gone so my girlfriend got home and uh i confronted her about it and she said she took all of it and she chucked it in a dumpster and when i asked her where she threw it out she wouldn't tell me and i um i belted her in the face and with the kind of luck i have i wound up breaking a jaw and went to jail for about a year and a half for it and while i was in jail i uh when i wasn't eating uh sleeping or getting i was in the library on a computer and i was watching uh some game i would watch game review uh channels on youtube that's what i would do and i said man i said this is great i said these guys a lot of these guys have impressive stuff and um i said i this is something i feel i can do this is something that i'm passionate about and that was my thing you know i said when i get out i'm gonna do this i'm gonna i'm gonna make this happen stick with me i'm working on my set right now i'm building a set we're gonna have a desk gotta get a microphone for this goddamn camera because the the audio is terrible on it and uh we're gonna go cruising for video games and we're gonna find good stuff i'm really looking forward to this it is no exaggeration to say that this was his dream this was the dream that put him in prison this was the dream that motivated him while he was in prison for a year and a half and it's the dream that has really guided formed and informed his life in the years since he got out of prison he's now married he's raising a child he's obviously a skilled craftsman an artist he has many videos showing himself making things with his hands that are very impressive i think almost all of them are things related to video games that he's making this was his dream but still every so often he has this self-awareness he has this gnawing doubt that the dream may be a nightmare or that the dream can't possibly be real there must be some other life there must be some more meaningful life for him on this earth it's a dream that still sometimes he feels he must rebel against