About Gaming

I’m reading a text about quitting video games[0]. I think he has some good points, but makes also quite generic statement. However, I like to quote an important thing:

Secondly, if we’re never bored, we get used to being constantly mentally stimulated and other parts of our lives will seem way more boring (read about dopamine stimulation standard here). The best example of this is when you view all the conversations with other people as boring, except for talking to gamers about your game.

I wondered about this posts in general, because I think you can translate it to many other topics too. Hacking, watching television or board games. This might be related to the underlying problem in the human nature. This is why technologies is a problem in our lives. It draws the attention away from what matters and creates a dangerous distraction.

It could be applied to other domains too, to have it only to gaming seems a bit aggregated. But it makes sense and shows how the human minds. The underlying problem is the ability of humans to cope with their emotions. This makes it often difficult for us to related to others. Hence, we’re looking for a subject that causes us emotion. When you get absorbed in a single subject completely, it is the only source of emotions. We stand still.

It is important to not become fixed on a single subject in life. Disregard if this is hacking, gaming or even spirituality. I remember one keynote on a hacker conference in which the speaker noted that his two-year-old daughter did not recognize him because he spent so much time hacking that he had barely made a connection to her. With Workaholics, it is the same as it is with every form of extremism. We can become equality absorbed by activism and with a defining narrative[2] it becomes dangerous.

So far, akendo

[0] https://www.deprocrastination.co/blog/should-i-quit-video-games [1] https://blog.akendo.eu/post/2021-01-21-defining-narrative/