False Hope: Quitting Video Games for All the Wrong Reasons.

this guy dave dow started up a youtube
channel advocating for people to quit video games take life more seriously lead a more meaningful rich and rewarding life so right away you'd think that he and i have a lot in common but if you've watched my channel for a few years part of what makes this so interesting talk about is that no i feel profoundly alienated from the message that he's delivering it's common knowledge that most people don't even enjoy their careers so if working in the real world is as miserable as it seems why would you ever be excited to leave your video game life behind you get to meet new people one of the things that i enjoy most about my life is that i get to meet new people the world is full of fascinating people who are actually living amazing lives and when you meet someone that you find interesting it then can make your life more interesting as well i think that my personal commitment to honesty and integrity has serious implications for this kind of advice it might be encouraging for me to lie to you but i neither think that's going to be effective in terms of the outcomes like if you go around giving people encouragement that's fundamentally dishonest what are the outcomes going to be what are the outcomes going to be for them in practice and what's going to happen as a next step when they come back and regard you as someone who's been been lying let's start with a really tangible example back when i was living in vien chen the capital city of laos i applied to work as a school teacher at a particular esl school and i remember i met with and chatted with a blonde canadian attractive female employee of the school and sadly that's probably relevant to why she was employed by the school and she said nothing but the most encouraging things about the school itself and about the guy who was in charge of the school the guy who ran the school he was a memorable character he was maybe a 400 pound effusive effeminate homosexual who sort of fluttered around the room and said everything in very over-the-top terms of everything was fabulous everything was wonderful like every it was hard to get a read on the guy when what you're trying to do is figure out like okay so i'm hired like what exact situation here that same blonde female i talked to her many months later maybe was six months later where i said to her look you know here's my situation this guy said i was fabulous and wonderful when he hired me he did all this paperwork he got me a legal visa to be here as a teacher he got the work visa paper and then he never offered me a day's work he never got in touch like it it's very paradoxical to me like he he put in even some money as well as effort to hire me and then he never followed through and she kind of looked down at the floor and was a little bit ashamed of herself and she said oh yeah that happens all the time and immediately with me sharing this experience she then started dishing out all these other examples of employees whose lives were ruined and left brokenhearted it was like wait wait a minute when i met you six months ago at the start of this job why did you tell me all this encouraging stuff that now turns out really not to be true right why would you come on youtube and tell people that if they adopt a vegan diet they can lose 10 pounds effortlessly losing 10 pounds isn't easy and on the other hand if you're the kind of person who thinks it is easy it's going to seem easy to you whether you're on a vegan diet or a high protein diet you know for some people some people have the knack some people have the right attitude or they're highly athletic or they have you know for whatever reason for some people it's easy to lose weight but if so it's not really going to be easier for you if you can diet than there's a meat diet if you struggle on a meat diet you're going to struggle on a vegan diet right like you may think you're helping someone when you meet them they're new on the job you say hey welcome to the team this is a great school we have a great boss and everything's great but you're not helping them you're deceiving them you're lying to them right you may think you're helping the other person and you may think you're helping yourself as a league leader in the vegan movement and you may think you're helping the vegan movement as a whole if you lie to someone and say hey if you become vegan these are the outcomes you're going to get and you're not you're discrediting yourself you're discrediting the vegan movement and you're causing a particular type of harm to the person you're encouraging because just as in the first few steps they take they may feel encouragement when they figure out how false and misleading this advice was inevitably the sequel to that will be discouragement disillusionment that may be quite profound the world is full of fascinating people who are actually living amazing lives and when you meet someone that you find interesting it then can make your life more interesting as well and when you start to develop these new relationships amazing things can happen and your life can go in new directions that you may never have thought even possible most importantly you can build new friendships and if you haven't already possibly meet the love of your life false and misleading but encouraging claims he's making here they partly resemble encouraging claims made by religious cults like buddhist groups they partly resemble false and misleading claims made by political groups within veganism in the last few years that i've encountered you can promise people friendship you can promise people they're going to meet the love of their lives you can promise people all kinds of things if they sign up and join your political movement are you going to deliver in the end don't you just end up discrediting yourself discrediting the movement causing disillusionment for the person you've managed to sucker in with these roses but you know what else this also really really closely resembles the false promises made by universities i have fought very hard to hold universities to promises they made particularly in language education and in internships and here in canada at least universities lie shamelessly as if there's absolutely no possible negative consequences for them in promising you things they they can't deliver they don't even try to deliver you know when i was studying the cree language so cree is nicoen it's a language of indigenous people in canada so most people say american indians we don't use those terms first nations when i was studying kri i met up with the two professors who ran that department most university departments don't have a lot more than two professors in charge of them i met up with them and i asked simply look do you know just one other student who's studying this language because i can't do it alone like i need someone to talk to even if it's just one other student where i can repeat the verbs back and forth and practice the verb endings like i didn't sign up and pay all this money for tuition i didn't enroll here to learn a language in total isolation with my computer there's got to be at least one other student studying the language and uh i remember one of the two professors had a very sorrowful expression on his face because the answer was no that i was at that time i was at that time the only student actually trying to learn the language cree i just mentioned i wasn't doing this to like insult or pwn the professors i was offering to switch to other languages so i was saying look well do you have one student who's doing den a seriously den is a totally different language i can switch to den a do you have one student who's doing soto soto is a dialectic ojibwe known as anishinabemuan like i was offering to work with the institution here but i was saying look if i'm literally the only student isn't it easy to promise oh sign up for our program you're going to be surrounded by wonderful inspiring and inspired young intellectuals all kinds of people have so much going on with you you're going to make uh business colleagues you're going to make connections that are going to carry you through your career for the rest of your life you can talk the same way this guy's talking can you deliver what happens if you don't deliver haven't you discredited yourself haven't you discredited your institution haven't you created a kind of disillusionment and real rancor and hatred like whether you're selling an mba like a degree in business or a language program or an internship program why don't you really have some integrity why don't you really have some earnestness about what these people can expect when they're sent out because you know what i spent a lot of time on the campus of cambridge university england oxford university england every single person i met was an idiot i was here at uh university of victoria campus i didn't meet one person interested in politics in the department of political science i didn't meet one person interested in the history of politics of asia in the department of asian studies i could now digress and do a long series of anecdotes about this you can sign up you can pay ten thousand dollars in tuition you can pay fifty thousand dollars in tuition and supposedly elite institutions can utterly fail to deliver on this so you really wanna promise someone you really want to promise someone where all of their friends currently are connected to playing these video games their whole friend group maybe people they talk to while they're playing cs go or whatever right you know via discord by this maybe their whole social circle is connected news you want to promise them that they're going to have more and better friends and meaningful friendships if they quit video games and lose all those connections that's what you want to promise them if so you're making a promise that cambridge university england oxford university of every university i've ever known or anything to do with cannot deliver on so i think you've really got to check yourself and you've really got to wonder what is it you're delivering and what will be the real outcomes when those promises prove to be fraudulent misleading and false no matter how well intentioned from your perspective they may be you can't manipulate somebody into doing the right thing for the wrong reasons the core of everything we're doing here is instead to get people to do the right thing because it really is the right thing to do now if you make the decision to start a new life that involves one of your interests that we talked about earlier then you were gaining experience and believe it or not any experiences that you have had leading up to this new experience actually helps you to build your new skill in a manner that is unique to you when you shift your focus from your digital distractions to your future you have an opportunity to choose how you move forward and regardless of what kind of life that you see everyone around you as living you don't have to model anything that you see these people doing in fact no matter what stage in life you are starting from you have an opportunity right now to jot down five ideas that you have always wanted to learn more about these can be things like working with animals at a zoo or a marina for example and it can be something more adventurous like being a tour guide in a foreign city that you've always wanted to live in if there is something that you have always wanted to do then this is your chance to begin this new adventure i've had quite a few conflicts with diet gurus here on the internet here on youtube and one of many things i've said to them when i'm trying to get them to sympathize with my reason for criticizing their recklessly encouraging and from my perspective misleading and dishonest approach to diet advice is this you know i notice that you sit here on youtube you broadcast your message on the internet then people send you emails saying that your method worked and you select those emails they may send you videos or photographs themselves and then you put those up on youtube to prove that the advice you're giving is effective do you know what experience you're not having you're not having the experience of actually getting to know someone face to face and holding their hand as they struggle to lose this weight you don't have the experience that many physical therapists have for example of meeting someone at the hospital who is 350 pounds and can barely walk and then working with them as they struggle to learn to walk working with them as they try to lose weight hearing from them what they're doing what's working and what's not why they're losing weight or why they're failing to lose weight or for a while they lose weight and they gain it back you don't actually have that experience of sympathizing with people as they try and as they fail and if you did even if you had some success stories even if some of the people you gave this advice to and miraculously it worked for them you'd see it in this context right the the truth is there are some people who find it very easy to lose weight get in shape and maintain an athletic body on a meat-based diet and those same people they're going to have good results on a vegan diet but the reality is if you have this kind of experience it's just not the case that there's some one simple turnkey secret there's there's just this one weird trick to help you transform your life that's going to work out every time or even any significant number of times and just that experience of knowing people face to face and trying to give them this advice and holding their hand and seeing them fail understanding what works and what doesn't for them and what they're capable of and what they find they're incapable of it's a totally different thing isn't it so this guy uh dave dao i i challenge you dave the the encouraging things you've just said now about about having a career have you have you sat down with with a man i'm not even gonna say a young man have you ever sit down with a middle-aged man and looked at his resume looked at his cv and then figuratively held his hand as he went through the process of trying to transition to a new career i'm a middle-aged man i have the experience again and again and again of showing my cv to people showing my resume to people and they say wow this is such an interesting such an inspirational resume you've lived such an interesting life and then the question is okay what what kind of job can i get next what kind of career can i have whether that's moving directly to apply for a job or through the universities getting for okay so what do you think i do and they sit there and realize they don't have a goddamn positive thing to say right that can be very sad for the person giving the advice and very sad for me also okay what you're doing here it's it's really a kind of reckless hype telling people in the audience that they can have a wonderful new career as a zookeeper they only got like two specific he's i know i know an ex zookeeper personally okay we've made youtube videos together he talked to me in detail about what it's really like being a zookeeper right think about how different his advice would be if someone were talking to him about starting a career as a zookeeper in every way not just about how little money you earn but about what it's like to clean up poo every day and it's not just poo there's blood every day like it's a really nasty job okay and you're not just dealing with wild animals you're dealing with a very strange mix of the for-profit sector and the charity sector that's trying to make money out of exploiting those animals in captivity now dave you just talked oh you could be a zookeeper not everyone can be a zookeeper and again if you just had the experience of working with someone face to face what if you knew someone who came to you and showed you their resume and then you held their hand through the process as they tried again and again they applied for a hundred different jobs as a zookeeper and never got anyone do you think you'd see this advice you're giving now differently in that context the reality is most people can never have a job that they find inspirational or even adequate and it's even more tragic to recognize that people who do manage to live their dream just like this zookeeper i know former zookeeper at some point they realize that what they thought was a dream really now has become their nightmare you can discover new passions when you begin doing something that you are getting better at you begin to develop a passion for it when this happens money stops becoming the primary factor for you wanting to get better at something and instead what you do becomes more meaningful to you when you become passionate with your work you get excited to go to bed and you become excited to wake up every morning as well because you're looking forward to starting a new day when you're passionate about what you do you're more likely to work longer hours which may mean more money you begin to enjoy solving problems and nothing will deter you from wanting to achieve success and hey you're living a happier life i have an amazing free mini guide that will teach you what you need to know to help you transition from your digital addictions to creating the life that you were designed to live it's called five simple tips to create an amazing life and you can get your free copy in the description below and number one you can change the world when you find your passions and begin to develop skills in your chosen career people begin to take notice of you and will begin to pay attention to your opinions on matters in which you show proficiency and expertise in it's very peculiar to me that he presents this argument with absolutely no personal anecdotes from his own life or talking about other people he's known he doesn't put any kind of a human face on it i have known so many people with phds who lived their whole lives in bitter mournful isolation because nobody recognizes their proficiency nobody recognizes their expertise and these were people who had a piece of paper from cambridge or oxford or harvard some other high power university that certifies that they're an expert that says they're an important person whose opinion should matter on x y or zed okay and then i've known all kinds of people who don't have that piece of paper but they really are experts they really do know more than anyone in the government united states about for example cambodia but nobody's going to ask them their opinion about the politics of cambodia or what the united states policy should be in cambodia or what have you and to be honest these are quite simple examples when you get into all the professions and areas of research and expertise that people really sink their lives into many of them humble many of them much less glamorous than studying poverty in cambodia in its way you know charity work has its own mystique um this promise he makes that developing expertise developing specialization uh will lead you to this more rewarding social and political life to some extent don't don't we all know that that must inevitably be a lie that it must inevitably discredit the person given the advice and lead to disillusionment now um people advised me my whole life to stop studying small obscure languages like laotian like cree like ojibwe that i should stop doing that and i should instead study chinese for these reasons he's talking about right exactly these reasons like oh make a difference in the world make the world a better place have more colleagues make more of an impact have more opportunities and academia by switching from an obscure language to a mainstream language a language with more than a billion speakers like chinese i will regret that i made that decision for the rest of my life okay you can be an expert in chinese history chinese politics or the chinese language and be totally utterly alone and i'm not just talking about my own experience i'm talking about a lot of people with phds i know talking about a lot of professors i know who are very much embittered and live their lives that way now whether or not it's any better or in what particular ways it's better to study an obscure language like lotion and so on is another story but all my life i've known people in this sense develop expertise whether it was in sanskrit pali burmese cambodian all right the idea that developing expertise of this kind leads to respect renown the opportunity to make the world a better place friends colleagues admiration it's very fundamentally false and maybe we wish it were true but we all know what the issues are that will actually bring you the admiration and attention of the masses right we all know exactly what it is that you could devote your time and energy to if you're doing these things in order to have the approval attention and adulation of other people you see that every day on instagram and you see it in hollywood movies and you see it with politicians in the republican party and the democrat party pandering to the lowest common denominator if you're doing things for the attention and adoration of the masses then you're not doing them just because it is the right thing to do i didn't study cambodian to get famous i didn't go to laos and study lotion and their politics and history and volunteer to do humanitarian work to help the poor in order to get famous or to have 10 000 followers on instagram or to have even one friend or one girlfriend or meet the love of my life no not at all i did it because it was the right thing to do and the reward was that i got to grow up to be to become the man that i am now no more and no less i mean really people like to disrespect my crew but the fact is that you know my name and i don't know you