Just as a preface I will say this is kind of me just talking about how I just get off of my phone/xbox and use my time better with a few tangents but it is what I’ve been thinking about so… I decided to add some fun images to make it better.
Once about every two weeks or so, I think about how I should never play video games ever again and that I should get a flip phone or something like that. But then I will play my Xbox, and it is so much fun that I wonder, how could I possibly quit? I have crawled through so many decrepit caves and dungeons in the expansive world of Skyrim and Oblivion. I can’t tell you how exciting it is to find a sword stronger and even more badass than the one I am using. The feeling of creating your own mysterious chosen one in a fantastic world is so fun for me.
I’m sure you can get a sense of the type of game that I enjoy playing, but there are lots of others as well. I think back to another time long ago—maybe just the 80s or 90s—when video games were around but still newer and not quite as entrancing as they are now, I would imagine. They hadn’t invented jiggle physics yet, and things were more simple. I feel like most games still just had an arcade sort of feel, where you could beat the game in an hour or so but the main idea was to try and get the high score, maybe.
Games today are definitely more of a black hole. They can just be played endlessly, and they are constantly adding new skins and maps and evolving the game to get you to keep playing. It seems like sometimes these games are being engineered by some kind of evil super genius who might get some kind of strange power or resource from young men who sink time into the game. Maybe they can steal your virility from the Xbox or something. Probably not… but you would almost imagine that there is more to it than just making money with the way they make these games. It just seems like it never ends no matter what you do, but a lot of people seem to like it that way.
I personally can enjoy those games, but the black hole aspect is really hard for me. I mostly play games where I know there is an exact ending and an end to the story. In Call of Duty though, when you reach the top level, they let you prestige and just start over—but then you get new stuff and it’s a thing you can just do a million times.
I just think back to the day though when you couldn’t play the game that long, or that games got boring faster, or there were no games. I’m like… what did guys even do on a Sunday afternoon? On a lot of Sundays, I just play video games all day. It’s wild. Or what did people do when they were sick or when they were waiting at the doctor’s office with no phone? Do people really read magazines? It feels made up to me.
There are also so many TV shows all the time. I feel like in the old days, there were like 10 TV shows and that was it. Now there are like 100 Netflix originals, and all of them are kind of perverted or something, maybe—I don’t know. It’s just crazy to me how much TV there is to watch. I know there’s not an infinite number of shows, but it will get there at some point. Where if you want to just sit and watch detective shows or murder mysteries, you can just sit there and watch your entire life.
All this to say that I get worried about myself sometimes, because at the end of the day—unless you are playing video games professionally or your goal is to be a streamer or something—there is really no benefit to playing. I know there are some studies that show it helps kids learn about problem-solving and can increase some aspects of brain activity or something, but mostly it’s just another way to spend free time. I know that not all my free time has to be spent in pursuit of something, and I also spend a lot of empty time on my phone or just looking at Magic cards I want online. So I’m not trying to come from a place of judgment—I guess I am just wondering if it is almost wrong to play video games as much as we do.
I wonder what—and how much—we as a society could get done if we watched half as much TV and played half as much games or just looked at Instagram half as much. I know not everyone has a problem, but I think it’s a safe bet that most people do. I just look at my screen time average on Sundays, and usually it’s 2 or 3 hours most weeks. But even then, I am always wondering what could I accomplish if I used those extra two hours to do something else. How many books could I read if I just read an extra 14 hours a week?
I just looked at my daily average for this week and it was 4 hours, which is not good. Some of that might be iPad time, and I do some reading on the iPad, so maybe not too bad. But! After crunching some numbers—I have done some loose math and guessing and maybe one or two Google searches—it says online that the average person who is pursuing a bachelor’s degree online spends 3–5 hours a day on schoolwork. So by my calculations, if I quit being on my phone so much and instead started doing school in that time, I could potentially—depending on my level of effort and a lot of other stuff—probably get a degree with the time I have spent on my phone.
I bet if we calculated all the time I have spent on my phone in the last five years, it is probably enough for me to have gotten a college degree. Now, I don’t even know if I want to go to college, to be honest—I have been considering that academia could be in my best interest as of late. But even if I didn’t, think of all the other things I could have maybe learned in that time or gotten done.
Online it says that to be able to read sheet music and play complex classical pieces on the piano, it takes somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 hours depending on the person’s general disposition and capabilities. Now if you spend 3.5 hours (most articles I read suggest it is 4.5 to 5.5 just on the phone) on your phone every day and instead spend that learning piano—which is a lot but bear with me here—it would take you about a year and a half to get to that point on the piano.
Now I am wondering what would happen if maybe half of people in the U.S. did that. What would happen? And then on top of that, what if I spent all the hours I play video games as well doing something like going to school online or trying to cure cancer. The world is just too crazy right now. I can’t even think of what I would do. I guess read and write more and maybe go to school. It is so funny to me that I can’t even imagine a world where I do something with all that time. But it could be up to like six hours a day.
Now not to get all funky and tin foil hatty, but why are we as humans creating more ways to waste time and potentially regress? Are we so greedy as mankind that we would rather fry each other’s brains and make money than do something that would increase the height and potential of mankind? It just has to be evil sometimes.
Not to dwell on this too much, but I watched someone play Marvel Rivals the other day, which I am pretty sure is just like Disney Fortnite or something. But they had this chick on there that was absolutely not appropriate for kids to be seeing. It’s crazy because we really got guys going to school for four years or more and then working on jiggle physics for a game that is supposed to be for kids. Like damn. If you’re 11 years old and a young man, you just don’t stand a chance. They know how to suck you in and keep you on the TV. And unfortunately, a lot of the same tactics work on grown men too.
And what is the point of all that? Is it really just to make money? Because I can’t help but feel like there almost has to be something more sinister behind it. I know that TikTok is engineered to make us stupid and addicted to the app. In China, I’m pretty sure their version of TikTok only allows educational videos or content of that nature. Then apps are farming our data to feed us more things that we like or want to just keep us coming back.
And the craziest part is I feel like we all know this but it is just too good for us to care. The feeling of opening my phone and knowing that in 20 seconds or less, I could watch a funny video and send it to my friend Ian is just too tempting. Or that Ian has sent me a funny video, and I gotta open my phone up and see what it is. This process is just too addicting and honestly has started to make me feel a little guilty. Video games included. I am feeling guilty because I guess I am knowingly just wasting hours of time because it feels good.
And now I can’t even comprehend what it would be like to fill those hours with something else. So now I wonder—if I was to quit one of those things—what would I even do? I have gone through some phases where for a month or so I would try to read instead of looking at my phone or playing games, and that did work a bit. But I guess maybe if I really wanted to, I could use the time in a much more dedicated way and really accomplish something impressive.
I have to say, I don’t think I have felt really proud of myself for anything in some time. So perhaps here is my key to feeling proud of myself and really making it happen.
It also really makes me think about people who are creatives or people who make things like TV shows or YouTube videos. As a guy who makes music, I feel like when I make music, I have a really specific goal in mind. I want people to feel good and have fun. That is basically my mission with music in so many words.
But then when I think about Mr. Beast or people who produce TV shows or movies like that, I really wonder—what is the goal at the end of the day? I know that back in the 80s and 90s a lot of comics and cartoons were made basically just to sell action figures. But at the same time, I don’t think it mattered as much because Transformers is really cool and gets the imagination going. Anything that requires someone to suspend their disbelief carries some value based on that principle alone, in my opinion.
Then when I think about Mr. Beast just dropping a Corvette from 100 feet in the air, I’m sort of at a loss for what the point is beyond just getting people to watch. Because he is basically employing some of the most primitive tactics imaginable to keep us watching.
At the same time though, I don’t want you guys to think I hate Jimmy. I don’t hate Jimmy, and I respect his genius, but I do think maybe he is overall bad for mankind. I don’t know that much about him—maybe he’s done a lot of charity or some of his content is educational—but I think you guys get where I am going on that one. It’s just that content like that on YouTube and Instagram doesn’t really give us anything. It just puts us in a numb, almost catatonic state where we could just sit and watch forever.
Now basically to circle back—I just can’t help but keep wondering what is the point with some of this stuff. I don’t think it is bad for something to be created just to entertain. I love a lot of things that are made purely for entertainment purposes. But the best ones—and the ones I love the most—for example, classic Hong Kong action, are made with a lot of love and passion. And while it is basically just entertainment, it leaves me full and inspired and feeling better.
Now not all movies in that category do that, but I can tell you that way more than not. I think you can always feel it when something was made with passion and love—even if it is just action. I think video games have a lot of that appeal and do make me feel kind of fulfilled, especially when I play something that has a great story.
At the same time though, I do think they can be sort of an empty time sink, and I will feel that way sometimes. And I think that’s when I want to quit forever.
To be honest though, everything has its pros and cons. I could justify anything. But at the end of the day, I also don’t think I have to fully remove something from my life—like Instagram—if I feel like it is wasting my time. I probably just need to learn to have more self-control, I guess.
I do really think maybe I should run some kind of experiment and see if I can fully utilize the time I spend gaming or looking at Instagram Reels to learn something new. I did do it a while ago and I sort of learned how to knit, and I made a bunch of my homies beanies, which was really funny. I think maybe if I went cold turkey though, I could really tap into something special.
I know most people have had this kind of internal monologue, but I think it has to be done almost constantly. I feel like I am constantly weighing in my head if the time I am wasting is worth it—by whatever level of entertainment or relaxation I am getting. There is no answer here, but maybe I am closer to a decision./p>