Twentysomething Virgins & Video Games: Addiction is Not the Problem.

in a lot of ways this is the kind of
story I came on YouTube in the first place to tell and I'm somewhat surprised that the story I haven't told before at least not on camera on the other hand I'm hesitant because there were probably like four really great stories here all bundled up into one in this video I'm gonna talk a little bit philosophically about the problem of video game addiction and I'm also gonna tell a story of me just straight up picking up a woman of me meeting a complete stranger one of the only times in my life where I walked up on somebody with no other context and was just like hey you're beautiful eat lunch with me and lunch date turned into a dinner date we spent the whole day together I had a big whole romantic thing and to some extent it was a success and the stomach stent it was a dramatic failure because MainTop with this video video game addiction it turned out that she was a video game addict and that bundles this up into one story there came a point when I realized maybe they spend a bit too much time playing video games I thought why don't I have any idea what I want to do with my life and then I realized no that's completely wrong I do have an idea of what I want to do you I thought lots of ideas why have I not done any of these things it's because they're hard they take time to get good at what I want to give up video games for I like video games video games are fun they're relaxing they make me happy and alas I once again returned to playing taking half a step back before I made this video I made a quick survey of other videos on YouTube from within the last one year dealing with quitting video games I wasn't looking for the word addiction looking videos talking about the importance of quitting video games earlier today in the last few days I've been listening to an audio book about the history of slavery I'm gonna say very little about it now because it's completely inevitable we're gonna do some kind of book review video on this book it's a really interesting really compelling book about the history slavery but what really struck me today was the absence of any positive plan for the future the absence of any kind of positive utopian vision with the particulars of the history of slavery I was listening you today or you know you could kind of see the colonial government had the short-term coping strategies with creating a slave Society but it was like did these guys ever stop and think just looking next 50 years how was this gonna work out what we what hoover linx out trying to do here in the same way what really struck me as lacking in the videos I saw about quitting video games today was any kind of positive vision any kind of positive motivation for quitting video games and to some extent I sympathize we can all sympathize I think the word addiction is a little bit overused or misplaced here but there's a lot of self-loathing a lot of the guys making these games they don't feel a sense of pride and positive motivation what they feel is a sense of worthlessness I noticed a lot of the online games now they actually give you a display counter for how many hours you've played the game in total so one guy actually had a screenshot of the game telling him you've played this game for 2,700 hours when you have put tons of hours playing video games there's usually a tipping point where you start to feel guilty for some people it can be 2,000 hours 5,000 hours 10,000 hours even it's a moment where you basically realize you have an addiction and it interferes with the important things you need to be doing in your life it's that state where you know you aren't doing anything else with your life and you want to do better things with your time playing video games is a way to escape and it surprises the real you and the real talents you have inside you that would have emerged if you weren't playing video games all day there's a sense of self-loathing and then they kind of struggle with that self-loathing and they think oh I could have learned to play guitar I could have learned to be a great painter I could have worked on my career or I could have had a girl friend and there's this cycle of self-hatred and self-recrimination and you know no no no I shouldn't play video games I mustn't even though it's enjoyable even though they like it but what's lacking there is this really positive vision of the future and with with human lifespans let's say it's five years instead of 50 years hey where do I want to be positively five-person what's my positive motivation for what I'm not playing video games for why I'm doing something you know way better with mother I to me that's a funny pattern that's really lacking here I got off an airplane at Vancouver Airport and this is I think the only time in my life I've walked up on a female a complete stranger where there wasn't some kind of context that would either introduce her to me or me to her so you know what do I mean by that I don't know like all the time women tried to spark up with me like a German woman in Thailand were both on vacation in Thailand where there's that in common where the woman comes up to me and says oh hey I'm gonna go visit this Buddhist temple what do you know about Buddhism and then we start talking about Buddhism I'm not saying there's a lot income there but there's some kind of context for why you started talking obviously I've spent a lot of my life on University campuses and doing research so if I'm doing research on a given topic and there's some other woman and she says oh hey you're doing research on this topic I also have this interest so there's some guy or maybe I start up with her the vast majority of situations where either a woman is sparking it with me or I'm sparking it with her there is no conclusion I get to know them enough to figure out that I'm not really interested the vast majority of times it goes nowhere but I meet I might be forgetting something I'm now 40 years old but this is the only time I can really remember distinctly where I was at an airport you know what is it airports you got time to kill it's nothing else to do I was like well there's this beautiful woman standing here she also has nothing else to do you know just as the rap songs to have it I am just gonna walk up on her and say hey Oh let's go eat lunch together let's you know let's do sleep positive you're standing around this airport you're beautiful I want to know you but where there was nothing else there was just me walking up to her and saying hey you know you're beautiful eat lunch with me and it was a really long day where we ate lunch together we spent the whole day together we dinner together the day ended up wrapping up around midnight so remember a lot of couples if you kind of meet and you do it's like more than three dates in one day the amount of quality time you'd have getting to know somebody under regular circumstances you take someone to a movie or you meet someone for coffee you might go on three dates to the person and not get to know them that well as it happened in these circumstances this is here in Western Canada um you know I really got to know work to a significant extent now she lied to me about her age she told me she was in her mid-20s and that time I was either 36 at 37 and for me mid-20s is fine like when I'm on University campus I'm avoiding women who are way down at the regular university age or like 19 or something but if you told me you're 25 okay I don't see that as an unbridgeable gap my current girlfriend is 26 we met when she was 24 mid-20s from me is okay but she told me she was in her mid-20s and there were a bunch of really weird topics she was ignorant of there was an airplane with pontoons not everyone knows the word pontoons it was an airplane capable of takeoff and landing on the water and she was just baffled by this she I didn't know anything like that existed you know I've never seen her heard in that it's like you've been living under a rock I mean there was sort of this series of odd things that you kind of think everyone knows you know I mean one of them was you know there was a the where we ended up eating lunch there one of these stupid ice-cream machines so I'm vegan she was not vegan you know where you know you pull a lever like this and the ice cream kind of yummy - she's never seen this before and you know like I understand she's late freaked out but I can when I was a child like this is really weird like you pull this lever and the Machine kind of poos out the ice cream you know a little weird like you know you got 25 or something and you ain't ever you know what you know what do you been so other things that weren't really red flags right there wasn't anything wrong but um you know she told me that you know she was becoming a dentist and she didn't really want to become a dentist but her grades were so bad that dentistry was really the best option she had and there were kind of other things she regretted about her life she told me what some of the personal tragedy she's come through there were all these funny bits and pieces and then at one point she started asking me about video games so if you guys are real watch this channel you know I do have a history of video games from my childhood and from this brief weird period where I was paid to be a video games journalist and one tell stories about that I wasn't like a big successful video games journalist but back in those days the industry was really generous so you just got a lot of free stuff from even being a really minor trivial of no significance video games journalist I was treated really well by the industry there were a lot of rewards the short period my life for this video so you know I do know some stuff about video games she starts talking about video games and there's also word she knows nothing she literally didn't know the word Sega I think she didn't know the word Nintendo like you know I'm making conversation she asked me something about my own history playing video games growing up and like you know I start tongue her it's like her story is you know she got addicted to one of these PC based personal computer based video games one video game and she never even tried any other videogame her addiction to this one game was so absolutely it was a massively multiplayer online games game involving other people and she played this game all day every day she did just enough schoolwork that she never dropped out of school or anything like that she would talk to other human beings while she was at school but she said the minute school ended or the minute she was done her homework she just did the minimum that absolutely all of her waking hours went into playing this video game and she just made the resolution like a couple weeks before she happened to me me me that she was never gonna play any video use again and I mean I know like maybe that's trivial but it's like wow not to be addicted to video games plural but to be so addicted to just one video game that you never even tried other video games you know like this this obsessive one I mean you've never heard of Sega or Nintendo you just got dug into this one video game for years and years and years I get tired and mentally fatigued and then I play a video game because it's low effort and easy and relaxing and then I don't stop and then I start to hate myself because I want to do all of these things but I've been playing Minecraft for 10 hours and instead of stopping and doing something productive I just carry on playing Minecraft and feeling sorry for myself and you might think is makes absolutely no sense and you'd be right it doesn't however at some point through all the self-loathing and time-wasting I decide that's it very more games from this point on I'm gonna be productive guilt motivates certain kinds of human behavior feeling awful feeling like you could have done something better with your life feeling that you could have been a great painter or a great musician you know feeling though the loss of your own potential the loss of your youth maybe that you've never had a boyfriend every girlfriend you know I think the challenge is precisely on a human level one the one level not to just use negative motivation with people not to just be punitive but to have some kind of positive motivation to talk about whatever it is and it's got to be it's got to be unique so that person not everyone can be a painter not everyone can be a musician I mean none of this you know it doesn't make sense in general it has to make sense reaching out to that one person and specific and talk about positively what it is that they can be for me that was such an unexpected inversion that whole situation because this woman she wasn't fat she wasn't you know she didn't look in any way like she'd spent all our time indoors you know the stereotype about video game addicts that they were pale and unhealthy and over obese and so on no she was beautiful she was friendly she was self-confident she didn't seem shy or awkward at all from the first moment I walked up and sparked up conversation with her she told me she was in her mid-20s she was in fact in her early 20s she was 20 years old flat she later revealed to me that she lied because she liked me she wanted to encourage me and you have the surreal realization like this is someone who's never used an ice cream machine it's ridiculous this is someone who spent so little time outside of her own house like oh I'm one of a tiny number of people she's ever had any kind of face to face conversation with except for her own teachers and her own her own family members and you know obviously what was also revealed in the end that's how the date ended was that she was a virgin she'd never been in love and when she revealed that to me which she revealed in bed with me at my apartment I said to her look let's get a hotel room for you I'm gonna put you in a hotel room and I'm gonna sleep in this bed alone and you know I think that was the responsible if anti-climatic end of that evening what is being lost on planet earth as our range of instincts are evermore funneled into dissimulated forms of gratification I mean you see what our instincts are just looking at video games people want to kill each other it's sad people want to act out the pantomime of shooting another person in the head again and again and again for 2,700 hours for hundreds of hours you know the lust for revenge and violence and competition and these things you know but I mean another instinct we all have is the desire to learn is curiosity the desire for novelty for new challenges just even the feeling of being impatient and frustrated this huge part of my feeling going through school I couldn't believe what a waste of time school was and you know those instincts can be funneled into making your own life better or whatever if I'm being wildly optimistic here sure making the world a better place and what I hear again and again just now in looking over videos in the last year is people saying oh if you do games are fun if you do games in your Joya Bowl enjoy yourself but don't take it too far don't become an addict and I really feel like the message in the moral of the story we have to take out of that it's the opposite don't have fun don't if this is something you believe is bad in principle don't take poison and dilute it don't take the poison at all if you're unhappy with your life sit there and really feel that unhappiness and start thinking about constructively how are you gonna change it how you gonna change your life your circumstance the world around you don't take recreational drugs that'll distract you from that misery don't play video games let's drag you from that misery don't you know maybe fun itself maybe enjoyment itself is kind of the last you know the last sacred cow the last unquestioned value here the last thing that nobody wants to nobody wants to question the positive or negative value of nobody wants to look in the mirror and say as an adult why am i playing games at all Tanna tan tan tan [Music]