Quitting video games: the problem is PROFOUND, not just "a waste of time".

many people have misunderstood my
critique of the video game playing mentality many people have misunderstood my critique of the excuse making mentality because they are highly highly motivated to misunderstand it a lot of people are living as adults with a sunk cost fallacy in relation to video games what does that mean it means when you've already spent a lot of money on something you tend to want to justify the purchase you made you tend to want to invent reasons in your own head to explain to yourself to reassure yourself that you spent your money in a worthwhile way that it wasn't just a waste of your money that something wasn't just a waste of your time or waste of your resources many people who spend hundreds of hours playing video games eagerly want to believe excuses that they have somehow cultivated some redeeming qualities of character that they've somehow improved their ability to focus on tasks they've gained some valuable skill and obviously the line of reasoning I've opened up here in this discussion deeply challenges that yearning it makes them reflect on what they've done with video games as just a waste of time however I think we are trivializing the question if we only engage in it in terms of contrasting what's a waste of time - what is a meaningful use of your time I think that is really an inappropriately shallow way to discuss the problem of video games although hey I try to make videos that are shorter than 40 minutes long discussing the issue so sometimes I do have to be a bit shell of myself I have to simplify the issue talk about it in this way um to say that it's a waste of time he's misleading what we really want to reflect on as adults is what kind of person chooses to play video games and then what kind of person do I become by investing my time I'm playing for you how does it change me and I think what these people writing in to me are desperate to ignore are the very negative effects that they're aware of themselves terms of the habits of mind the traits of character that playing video games for long hours inexorably leads to playing video games people say it causes impatience frustration and inability to have equanimity and a caring engaged character when talking other people face-to-face this is partly of course because we experience time so very differently when playing video games on the one hand video games involve us in a moment-to-moment gratification pressing a button at just the right split-second at just the right instant is crucial to doing well in games but on the other hand it brings us into a very different perception of time where for hours can disappear as if it were nothing right people who play video games have no time for cooking or cleaning they start to eat the simplest instant food imaginable to devote that time of the video games yes but then the way they perceive time when they deal with the frustrations of work colleagues and friends and lovers their impatience for their frustration with reading a book studying sitting still dealing with the stupidity of others in a caring concerned or patient way which is part of life for all of us you know sometimes people are stupid and we can't punish them and we can't just press a button to solve the problem we have to have some patience and engagement and so on I think that when we talk about impatience we're actually using a very simple sounding word for quite a complex phenomenon and the way in which video games lead us to be impatient and frustrated and punitive care in relation to other people and it's an absolutely terrible set of character trades and I am just gonna appeal to my audience with their own anecdotal expense I think you know I think you know if you search your own feelings if you reflect on your own youth your own experiences of playing video games I think you know this is true if you think about what it means to be a compassionate open engaged curious person you know if you think about what it means to be caring someone video games do not cultivate these these qualities of character right many people talk about this in terms of you know the dopamine reaction and instant gratification and they try to they try to narrow it down to a flowchart but I think the truth is it's something quite profound that we can't simplify in this way we can't just talk about it in terms of a waste of time we can't just talk about it in terms of dopamine reaction and short-term gratification in terms of just how profound the difference is let me say this I am vegan if you take someone who eats a cheeseburger diet someone who eats normal American foods meat and cheese would have you and then one day they go on vacation for two weeks they eat a vegan diet so in effect for two weeks they quit meat they quit cheese I don't think there's any tremendous change in how they perceive the world in how emotionally they react to the world in how intellectually they engage though I don't think there's any big change even though I'm vegan I'm fond of veganism I think veganism is quite shallow compared to the profound change you undergo if you're playing video games every day for three hours a day let's say and then one day you go on vacation and in the circumstances of that book vacation for two weeks you have no computer no console no cell phone no internet access no video games of any kind some of you will have experienced that maybe in your childhood or something there is really a profound shift in how emotionally and intellectually you relate to the outside world that's linked to video games being a dominant part of your daily life or the absence of videos not having video games I really mean that I'm not trivializing or dismissing video games lately if anything I'm inviting everyone in the audience to reflect much more deeply on just how profound a difference in our lives video games really make emotionally and intellectually in the cultivation of our character in look if English is your first language reading a book in English is not difficult but one of the most commonly reported things of people who you know if you're devoting two and three hours a day or more than three hours a day to playing video games is this sense of frustration with how slow and unrewarding it is to focus your mind and read a book a book on paper to learn from a book that isn't isn't telling you instantly what you want to know it's not like a pop-up dialog on a computer it's not a problem that can be solved but pushing a button it's not a problem that can be solved by one glowing character punching another glowing character in the face over and over and over again the type of dulling of the social instincts that comes about through video games and the sharpening of a certain sense set of 80 social instincts I think it's something all of us have experience with even if you've only had one brief period of your life when you played video games great deal okay now the counter arguments that have been advanced to me the most legitimate of the counter arguments they either rely on a claim that if we calibrate this down to a fine enough point video games cease to be a problem at all which is saying oh well what if it's only 20 minutes a day what if it's only five minutes a day look if I tell you a certain food is unhealthy to eat that doesn't mean that half a teaspoon of that food once a month is unhealthy to eat it means it's a healthy to be part of your diet in the way that it's commonly consumed in our culture right I mean the unhealthiest foods imaginable when they get down to minuscule quantities all of us in our diet in the modern world we all eat steel we all eat aluminum we all eat dish soap there's soap left on your food and dishes and you eat it's on your fork and knife soap is not healthy to eat but in tiny amounts you can tolerate it and all of us do if you're willing to reduce this down to a point of absurdity you know of course I mean my argument against plain we're doing is for three hours a day it doesn't make sense if it's against playing video games for five minutes a day of course I have to concede this point but then by the same token if you concede that there is a quantity of nicotine so low there's a quantity of cigarette so small that the effects on your health both mental health and physical health are not significant or it's not addictive and where your body is just coping with the toxin you know what's the implication of that what are you saying that the fact that hypothetically it's possible for someone to ingest such a tiny amount of nicotine that it's not harmful for them does that mean we're wrong to say that nicotine is harmful does that mean I'm wrong to question what kind of person smokes cigarettes and what kind of a person do you become through nicotine addiction what kind of characteristics what happens if care and that that's the same question I'm asking about video games so this is one line of rationalisation diversification and then the other people trying to claim again this is really on that emotional basis of the sunk cost fallacy trying to claim that there's some positive character of mine they get out of it some characteristics some ability some form of mental acuity to get out of this that will justify the thousands of hours put into video games no I feel I already addressed this quite a lot in my earlier video I talked about two major forms of fallacious reasoning it's a very briefly to restate there's a problem of lack of consideration of opportunity cost what it is were comparing this to we can't compare it to nothing and you're I am forgetting what was the second point again kindest oh yes and the fact that the skills are not transferable to the real world so becoming very skilled at a video game doesn't mean that you have a skill that can be used for anything other than a video game maybe not even for other genres of video games right so that was discussed at some length in the earlier video the other point is this the value of whatever it is you can learn from a video game has to be compared to the level of mental accomplishment you are at before commencing that process so I mean the claim being made that a video game can increase your interest in the history of world war ii only if you were starting from a position of like total ignorance or you know a grade 3 level of education oh wow gee world war ii seems it was ok for someone at that low level of ignorance yes it's possible a video game conforth what what does this justify again it seems like these two problems each relates to the other so how many minutes of playing a video game would be justified by this educational benefit that looks someone who knows nothing about world war ii will learn a little bit if this is the first learning about it right i mean this doesn't justify playing a video game for three hours a day it doesn't justify playing a game for 40 hours in total that there's a tiny tiny amount of educational value but only relative to the assumption that you knew absolutely nothing at the beginning now look but still i can concede the point there were probably i mean i when I was growing up in Canada there were children who didn't know that India was a country I remember that they had never heard of India either well I remember that you know I remember one kid this is in junior high who had never heard of Israel and he was asking me you know what is Israel you know I you know there were you know really basic facts of geography in history one of my professors actually once said to me that he had a student at University in first year of University who had never heard of World War one and who had also never heard of World War two there's someone who had completed high school and was managed to get in the university he it was kind of a funny story the student came up to the front of the class he said sorry during today's lecture you referred to World War two so does that mean there was another war before what what we talked so yes I mean there are some people as children or even as teenagers where you know again in the case of India I can really imagine there might be someone who's so totally ignorant of India including by the way like here in China there are Chinese people who just have no awareness of the history and culture of India next door and a video game that makes India look intriguing and exotic oh wow okay there's this place called India but but would this be a five minute education - ten minutes this is not three hours this is not 40 hours it's not three hours differ very very little just like that and again the next steps you'd have to take if you did get interested India you'd at least have to go and read a Wikipedia article you'd have to read a book you'd have to watch a documentary film you'd have to do something more productive than playing video so these same issues were brought up turned inside out in a very different manner by a longtime viewer of the channel who wrote to me saying that she's in a relationship to people dating one of the two people reads novels one of the two people plays video games and the video game player plays video games for perhaps ten hours per week so this would not be considered an addiction but ten hours per week still a significant amount of time and the woman writing in to me said look she is willing to admit that reading novels is considered a good use of her time considered not a waste of time largely just due to kind of cultural prejudices we have that were raised to regard novels as somehow a very refined thing to do with your mind she doesn't feel that reading these novels now as an adult I'm guessing she's about twenty-two years old she doesn't feel that she's really learning anything from these novels I sympathize it's completely possible that's true reading a book doesn't guarantee there's some kind of wonderful educational fight from the book some books may be so terrible that you learn less from a book that you learn from it's possible you know the fact that something is printed in book form doesn't mean it's a wonderful educational experience so she is willing to regard the novels she reads even though many of them are considered great books of literature as mere entertainment I I sympathize with her view I sympathize with her skepticism about the value of reading novels and she asked the question look is it really so different should should she really be so harsh in regarding video-game-playing which goes on I assume in her own apartment there partner there for maybe ten hours a week or something like that the value of reading novels is relative to your level of ignorance much as I said before all right there are eight year olds and ten year olds for whom reading a novel will improve their vocabulary will improve their spelling will improve their sentence structure for myself as a 41 year old man already had a very high level of literacy in English I'm not going to improve anymore reading a novel in English is gonna have almost zero educational value for me unless it's a novel that's really specifically about some kind of historical situation that I'm researching unless there's some kind of factual nonfiction value in the novel there's some reason why this should be important to me right which should be extraordinary and would be rare okay so when your parents and school teachers and professors encourage you to read novels you know they may not have been crazy the value of the novels themselves doesn't diminish as we get older the value is subjective it's relative to you okay bread is not delicious the value of bread is relative to an empty stomach a heart and a mind that desires it if you are hungry enough bread tastes delicious if you're already full it may taste like nothing at all the value of the bread is not inherent to the bread is not intrinsic to the bread it's extrinsic it arises from our own desire our own lack our own sense of want okay so the value of these novels the value of these even great works of literature okay for the most part were kind of trained to misperceive it or overrated because it does have some significance in terms of pedagogy in terms of the education of children now the woman who wrote in to me let me ask you what if you read the same novel in Chinese I recently got tempted to read the novel Gone with the Wind in choice I'm glad I talked myself out of it so Gone with the Wind is a novel about white people in the United States of America who owned black slaves but I would be interested in learning the vocabulary and even the sentence structure for how in Chinese they would talk about the history of slavery in America all right you could imagine what an incredibly difficult educational experience would be for me or for you to read that novel in Chinese however reading it in English you know obviously if I'm really interested in history of slavery in this to the Civil War there were better things I can read okay so it is a very peculiar comparison and in this context where video games aren't attached to other problems they're not attached to obesity or ruining your education you know dropping out of school it's not attached to dropping into college it's not leading to you losing your job so you know this is a couple where one person reads books the other person plays video games and in this case there isn't a problem with the waste of time element destroying someone's life not leading to the distant disintegration of their relationship or anything else okay but this is where we have to stop and really reflect on the extent to which the problem with video games fundamentally is not just that they're a waste of time the problem is precisely in the cultivation of your own character the problem is in asking that question what kind of person what kind of adult plays video games what kind of adult makes excuses for playing video games right and then what kind of a person do you become how does that transform your character as time goes on now I say this skeptically I have known white men who speak English who slept with prostitutes I knew one guy who started sleeping with prostitutes he started sleeping prostitutes a very young guy I've known several other men who made the decision at different times of their life to commit to sleeping with process I remember I met I met and spoke at length with one guy he'd only ever had one girlfriend he dated one woman and it didn't go well it didn't work out and then he just started sleeping with prostitutes for the rest of his life he never he never had a normal relationship again I'm not here to demonize and vilify the role the prostitute himself or herself I'm not here to fearmonger about prostitution with the other there is a very profound question how for these men for the clients of prostitutes how does it change their character who do they become over time Sigma positives and we all again even just intuitively we have some sense of this of the danger the danger for corroding the corrosive effect on our lives and our character if we start to go down this road right if we engage in the commodification of of sexuality if the most intimate relationships in our lives becomes something that's bought and sold right apart from the question of the impact in the life of the prostitute or the economy or ethical questions that are external just subjectively just in a self-centered way I think there has to be a profound sense of concern for what kind of a man pays prostitutes what kind of a man makes excuses for paying prostitutes for sex again if if this is you if this is you over time doing this again and again what kind of person do you become and of course it's interesting to note I don't think anyone is wealthy enough very few people are wealthy enough that they could possibly be spending 10 hours a week with prostitutes these are this is probably some of these guys did for two hours a month or something I mean all right multimillionaires could be spending 10 hours a week if the company of prostitutes like for the most part this doesn't add up to many hours the way video games do right and of course part of my interaction with these guys was using Socratic method to challenge the excuses they made because I warned you again and again quitting video games is hard quitting the excuses is even harder overcoming the excuse making mentality is the hardest part of all all right and these guys who sleep with prostitutes even if they only super the prostitutes for two hours a week four hours a week whatever it is they're living with the uses 24 hours a day seven days a week and those excuses changed the way they feel they change the way they feel about women to change the way they feel about relationships they change the way they feel about earning money in the economy right they change the excuses they live with change the way they see the world change the way that they emotionally and intellectually experience them that's the most startling concerning corrosive thing about video games when you play video games as an adult for many hours a week all right it changes the way emotionally and intellectually you react to the world it changes the way you perceive the world it changes the way you feel about the world and that's why it's such a shock it's so strange it's such an adjustment if you go from playing video games for three hours a day to stop it what that's on a vacation or otherwise even if you didn't choose to quit but you just circumstances for a couple of weeks you're cut off from all that you stop playing video games and you start to feel differently you start to think differently you start to perceive time differently you start to relate to other people differently there are all these changes that come into your life right and I admit quitting meet by contrast is much more shallow I think I'm going to ask you I think that quitting nicotine quitting smoking is much more shallow when we talk about the impatience of that video-game-playing mentality and you know the excuses that you have to wear like armor all the time right the same way that these the guys who the men who sleep with prostitutes to some extent they're always wearing this armor because they don't want to feel ugly they don't want to feel weak they don't want to feel immoral they don't want to feel stupid if they don't want to feel like a trick we're going to say you know they know that this is something shameful they know this is something most people in the society think they should be ashamed of and some of them to some extent feel ashamed or feel regret or just feel some wish that they could have lived another way or a better way some of them not all of them right but they wear the armor of their excuses all the time okay whether they do that by mocking it and making light of it and joking about it whether they do it by presenting tremendously serious philosophies that justify their I've heard it all I've heard the whole range of those kinds of excuses and actually I've read books about it too I did some formal desk research on that topic which is quite quitters there have been some put good books written about that okay men who spend hundreds of hours adult men who spent hundreds of hours engaged in children's entertainment playing video games they also live wearing an armor to try to separate themselves from that sense of shame they want to feel strong not weak they want to feel smart not stupid they never want to face up to that sunk cost fallacy where they look back at their life and say wow I had amazing opportunities and I squandered them sitting on the couch playing this fundamentally childish repetitive and yes addictive form of entertainment video games