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I lean toward "efficient entertainment", but I do sometimes wonder what that chunk of my free time would look like otherwise.
There is currently a 20yo in Germany, working tirelessly to document every beetle in their province.
The world is large and diverse. Its fine.
I would imagine every generation had their vices (lack of better word) that previous generations harped on. Why back in my day it was MTV (ok, occasionally they were right). But I’m sure when newspapers came out it was similar to tablets and phones. When tv came out, the radio-heads bitched about the “idiot box”. So on and so forth. Any history buffs out there care to elaborate?
You can find newspaper articles from the late 1800s IIRC, that decry the slothful youth wasting all their time reading novels instead of playing outside like the glorious generation before them
Longer than that. 2500 years ago ancient greek philosophers complained about the youth in the same ways.
One of the oldest written works that we have, and can translate, was written centuries before the Roman empire and it is complaining about "kids these days".
This crap has been going on for millennia.
Thank you very much for sharing that article! t's an awesome read.
“idiot box”
it was called the boob tube
“Stop sitting so close, you’ll damage your eyes! Sit farther back!”
And then there's the voynich manuscript, an old hoax/fantasy book documenting plants and animals that don't exist, in a made-up language.
That some people have dedicated their lives to "noble" pursuits and others to "wasting time" is entirely a function of who is telling you the story and how much money they stand to make off that other person's work. You get one life, do what you want with it as best you can.
Generations of monks did nothing but pray, work, and copy books for their entire lives. Is that a waste because they weren't writing novels instead? Because every one of them wasn't Mendel, obcessed with growing peas?
Play some video games, work on stuff if you want, or don't. Most people in history worked very hard and have been completely forgotten, all their works erased. With how easy it is to share your work online, you could even be famous for being good at video games (speed running, lore analysis, gimmick runs, etc) which may not change the world but objectively has more impact on more living people than writing small business websites or small farming rice in South Asia.
But I dont want to cure cancer, I want to make dinosaurs!
This answer scares me from a user named Mechaguana. You aren't planning anything the rest of us should be aware of are you?
Just in case you're not in on the joke:
Thanks for sharing the source! (Sincerely)
It's not video games keeping me from doing my niche interests. It's my 60 hour a week job consuming all my mental resources. Then I have to go home and do all the other things necessary to keep myself alive. Not much left for getting immersed in cool projects after that.
This sounds like all of the people who were complaining about comic books back in the day. Or books before that.
I don't like this thing, therefore it's terrible and everyone should hate it and I am not prepared to have a discussion about it.
Yeah the people who were cataloging all the species of beetles in Germany were upper class types. Most people in 1820 were tilling fields or working in desperately terrible factories.
The 1800s gave us the likes of Michael Faraday the 2000s gave us the likes of Hank Green.
It is a crap shoot if an autist's fixation winds up being something beneficial to a single soul.
The tricky thing is that there's less "real" stuff to be done. Take my silly passion for rocks/minerals as an example. Back in the day I would've happily made geological maps but my country has already been fully mapped in detail. Similarly the guy in OP's post can look up the bugs of his area online because they've already been documented. Videogames can give us a sense of exploration and progress that is hard to find in real life these days.
There are more unanswered questions in science than ever before, but researching them has become less accessible
Hey we share an interest!
My family would always say "why don't you do something with minerals?" And usually I say "well there's no job that is just admiring dioptase, and I really don't want to work for the enemy (oil companies)" lol
If people didn't have weird obsessions, then sciences like geology probably wouldn't exist.
Which is okay. Focusing on a happy life is imho better than to strive for becoming an efficient worker in some way or another. There is a lot more to life than this.
The worst thing about (thing I don't like) is that people do it instead of (working towards [goal]).
Why aren't you (working towards [goal]) ?
And yes, I get the whole undertone that this is about people with autism or hyper focus or whatever you want to call it. It doesn't make it any funny.
If you really look through history, I think you'll find that people did things like this because they were SO BORED. An entire town would come out to watch a small time trial because there just wasn't anything better to do. Hell, my parents who grew up in the 70's once told me "We'd be outside and bicycle around as kids all the time, after a while.. we were so incredibly bored." And during that time, tv and radio existed. I'm very happy we have the entertainment we do.
90% of them were so bored
the remaining 10% however
It's not an issue, since we have 10x more such guys than in 1820.
I thought they were going to say now there's a 26 part video on beetles. The beetle man never went anywhere. He's also on YouTube lol
I can't remember the name of the channel, but I've followed a guy rehabilitating a grocery lobster, one that took care otters, another with sea monkeys, and people just cleaning carpets. People with niche interests didn't go anywhere. If anything, they're more accessible because of the internet.
Leon the lobster! The channel just uploaded a new video a week ago. Channel name is Brady Brentwood, if you want the update. I haven't watched it myself yet.
I’d like to see the author prove that beetle counting is more productive than creating game tutorials. People make all kinds of baseless assumptions that are biased by their personal values.
I run a company that does something very specific for some of the largest companies in the world. Key infrastructure is only functional because of what we do. One of the key skills that differentiate our people from the rest is something I often see in some of the top video game and TCG players. I always wonder, "what if they had focused that weird brain of theirs towards X or Y".
Do you guys really need some intense clickers?
People can spend their time how they want, but when I hear people bragging about spending literally thousands of hours on game X and/or Y, it kind of makes me sad.
That being said, sometimes they're well adjusted and satisfied people and that's just what they want to do with the majority of their free time.
I do hear people make those kind of comments, but then in other conversations I hear them talking about how they're dissatisfied, life is unfair, their life sucks, they can't find a girlfriend, school is stupid, they hate their job, they have no friends, etc., those are the people that make me feel sad.
One of the things I'd like to put on the table is that most people who spend thousands of hours on video games are actively engaging on a mental level, most people spend thousands of hours in front of a TV basically disassociating. Could I be going out training to climb everest sure, that's not what I want to do, and the same could be said for most people who don't play video games.
If someone was bragging about the thousands of hours of television they watch and was then later complaining about their dissatisfaction with life, I would feel the same way. It isn't watching TV, playing video games, or training for climbing everest that's the problem, per se. It's how much a given activity consumes of your finite time, how much of an effect that has on the rest of your life, and your level of satisfaction with that exchange.
Learning to play music, having friends and a social life, being really good at video game X or Y, having a significant other, excelling in your career, educating yourself, and so on: these are all time-intensive tasks and there are only so many hours in a day. Letting any element of your life consume a majority of your time necessarily comes with sacrifices in other areas.
I get sad when people can't seem to connect the sacrifice of having thousands upon thousands of hours invested in various video games with the dissatisfaction in their lives caused by not giving time to other areas. Again, I know people who balance video games into their life and are satisfied. I also know people that basically game and work and that's it, and they're satisfied. I'm not judging how "full" someone's life is, as far as that goes.
I just sometimes see people that think it's unfair they don't just automatically get those other aspects of their life, but they are simultaneously unwilling to give up some gaming to spend the time working on them. Sure, gaming is easy, immediate, and can be fulfilling. But, it can also feel like "what did I do for the last ten years that weren't in-game accomplishments in games I don't play anymore?" That's really up to the individual.
Either document beetles, or get REALLLY in to opium