I’m very nostalgic about the countless hours I frittered away on video games and the internet as an adolescent. Part of me thinks it made me the person I am today, who I am proud of. I recently joined a Counter Strike team with work and had some of the most fun times I can think of recently. I compare that with the time I put aside to learn 3D modelling, which was fun in its own way but required more self motivation and the satisfaction took a lot more time to achieve. It made me question what society accepts as a valid way to spend spare time, as well as the purpose of how we spend our spare time.

I feel this deeply. I was extremely lazy in high school and college and then got my act together gradually throughout my 20s to the point where I feel like I no longer waste much time. I've experienced some success and accomplished goals as a result, but when I look back on my life, I remember those hours wasted playing video games most fondly.

There's a motivational saying that when you die you get to meet the person you could have become, and that's your individual heaven/hell. I've got a nagging fear that maybe if I learn to speak French or sell a business or whatever, raise a family, grow old and die, I'll come face to face with the guy who played 10,000 hours of Civ.

You can't play 10,000 hours of Civ. At some point, the game become repetitive because the possibilities space is very limited. EU4, on the other hand, has pretty much unlimited possibilities. You can negotiate deals with neighboring countries, there are way more countries (whole world actually) than in Civ, you have a complicated Trade system that can make you money, a more sophisticated religion structure that you can use for your advantage...

Wait, I should stop playing these games.

I'll think about you while I'm playing video games today

pours some Monster energy drink on the floor

Here’s hoping you don’t have carpets

Me too. I remember my countless hours playing (arguably wasted) diablo 2 very fondly. I still recall a lot of the detailed stats of specific characters I had built. Also helps I had sunk the hours playing with my partner at the time, so it was also a bit of a bonding moment. Didn’t help my grades any though.

If you remember those times fondly, no time was wasted.

Yeah, what's worse is spending hours on a game only to have forgotten those times, the memory existing only as a playtime stat on Steam.

You don't have to remember something perpetually for it to be worthwhile. I've got a young dog, and I've spent 1-2 hours (shared with partner) every single day for the last 18 months outside walking. I don't remember all of those walks, even some of the ones that were very enjoyable at the time. But I enjoyed them at the time, (or maybe I didn't, it was pouring rain etc).

Video games are an easy target, but you can make the same argument about any lesiure activity. Something doesn't have to have an output to be worth spending time on.

> Well, to be brutally honest with you, it's one thing for you to be proud of yourself for playing video games, but why would anyone else see that as something pride-worthy?

Putting aside the fact that many people have made highly successful careers out of playing video games, why should I care at all what other people think about it? Life is too short to only do the things that other people think are "pride-worthy". Do the things that make you happy.

My sons always said "Video games are our only education" because of the many times I was astonished they knew some obscure historical detail and they had learned it from a video game.

My oldest, who is math challenged, was livid when I finally successfully explained to him what Algebra was and he went "I've been doing that for years while playing video games!!!" He's still mad about it and it's probably at least two decades later.

Well, to be brutally honest with you

I read somewhere that "people who value brutal honesty value brutality more than honesty." As someone fond of the saying "I'm too truthful to be good," I took that to heart.

I’m pretty convinced that some games have made me smarter. It sounds daft, but I remember completing The Witness and felt like I had transcended somehow. Still haven’t found the right way to put it on my CV

> Well, to be brutally honest with you, it's one thing for you to be proud of yourself for playing video games, but why would anyone else see that as something pride-worthy?

For exactly the same reasons anyone thinks that reading novels is pride-worthy. People who plays some of the more complicated niche games have some respect from me at least.

Similarly getting good at a game requires dedication and work, so people with good ranks in games also has some respect from me.

I should clarify that I’m not proud of myself for playing video games, but that they were an important part of my life which no doubt shaped the person I am today. I do think people can be proud of playing video games though. The amount of hard work required to get into the top rank of competitive games such as Counter Strike is no different from any other sport. It’s a deep game with, I would argue, more to learn than most traditional sports.

Yes, I completely agree video games can be an unhealthy pursuit to the detriment of one’s life. If I’d put some of those hours I spent playing video games at uni into my course work I would’ve got better grades. I actually stopped playing games for the better part of my twenties to pursue more valid hobbies, such as photography, which I’m glad of. It made me a more interesting person. I came back to playing games a few years ago and realised I had given up something in my life that gave me so much joy. I think it’s hard to develop that deep connection to anything that we don’t do when we’re adolescents.

Really liked the separation between slack and laziness!

> Typically, one takes justifiable pride for accomplishments that stand up to external scrutiny. That usually comes in the form of the accomplishment having an element of sacrifice, of pain and difficulty

I think this is where a lot of people might lose themselves, and I might be misinterpreting you here, but: I think an important distinction is that people should take pride in providing value for their community, not having it be approved by them. Otherwise we might end up acting contrary to our beliefs, and feeling a hollow sense of achievement in the end.

Also, by your definition of hard work being pride-worthy, many gamers might meet that criteria, especially the professionals (?). Games can often be more competitive and demanding than anything I've experienced in real life. I've only teetered on the edge of competitive levels, so in a sense I wasted a lot of my time, since it all wasn't deliberate, but parts of it were definitely hard work, filled with passion.

Lots of us here have wasted our youth playing games and are uncomfortable with the fact that it was, indeed, a waste.

If you have twenty minutes now, and don’t know when you’ll get another twenty minutes, why not do it now?

When you have hours and hours available for the rest of the week, why fret about it? You have so many other opportunities ahead.

Alternately: When you have a wife and kids and job you like, a lot of your most important needs are well met -- if you can keep juggling everything.

Someone with hours and hours to do nothing likely isn't getting laid, isn't making much money, isn't intellectually gratified, etc. So you play games to occupy yourself to keep from going bonkers.

People underestimate how incredibly hard it is to pull yourself out of habits born from socioeconomic factors. Video games give you an alternate reality, likely much better than your own.

It wasn't a criticism of video games and if you are suggesting I am underestimating something, I got myself off the street a few years ago of my own efforts.

I still play plenty of videogames. It's something I can drop at will as I get my act together, make the connections I need to make, etc. I like games and my kids always joked "Video games are our only education."

But the reality is I would rather have a life and if I had more of a life, that fact would drive a lot of my activities and there simply wouldn't be time -- or need -- to play games for hours.

You're so right - video games shouldn't even have been mentioned. As human ingenuity goes, there's infinite ways to "waste time".

I've spent many hours with the family playing MineCraft, and it's an amazing way to teach things like not being selfish, being cooperative, etc. to children because they experience the effects or lack of in compacted real time without permanent real-world impact.

I homeschooled my sons. After seeing how vastly superior Gungan Frontier and a similar Sim game were to my "pen and paper" style simulation in my college class on environmental biology, I went through their games and decided which games I would count as educational and for which subject.

Their joke grew out if conversations that went something like this:

Son blurts obscure historical factoid.

Me: "Where the hell did you learn that?!"

Son names video game he learned it from. Punchline: "Video games are our only education." (Vin Diesel movie line, so another excellent reason to say it to me.)

They now have a blog where that's the descriptor, basically.

Personally, I owe my English skills to videogames. While I later continued with proper education, the basics of grammar and vocabulary (as well as many incredibly subject-specific words) I've learned from, in order: Star Trek: Generations, Fallout, and StarCraft. I fondly remember me sitting in front of the first of these games with English/Polish dictionary and translating things on the screen word for word.

Based on the sound of his typing -- which sounds like his dad typing and I know his typing speed because I met him in typing class in high school -- my oldest son probably types at about 80wpm. This is thanks to online games with chat functions. You need to "talk" fast to coordinate with your teammates and stay on top of your duties in the game.

That's very true. Another related phenomenon that improved my typing speed is games that require execution of a lot of complex actions very quickly. Playing them competitively essentially forces you to master random access to your keyboard. In StarCraft, after grokking the core mechanics, your next primary improvement would be raising your APM (actions per minute). In terms of an OODA loop[0], most players are constrained by the Act part. So if you wanted to win, you had to master the art of issuing keyboard+mouse commands at a rate of 3 per second (= ~180 APM, which isn't even progamer level).

--

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

I was Director of Community Life for the oldest set of gifted support email lists on the internet while I was a homeschooling parent. It was common knowledge in those circles that the best way to improve typing speed for kids was to encourage them to get involved in things like online games.

My son was already a gamer. He hated his typing program. I told him he could quit doing practice typing as one of his assignments if he exceeded 35wpm -- which is my typical typing speed and I had a typing class in high school and can type about 60wpm when I am focused and yadda.

I also told him online gaming was a known way to hit a better speed and that's likely a factor in him going that route. He was gleefully happy to give up typing practice as one of his formal lessons.

I've always hoped this was a common knowledge, but unfortunately it somehow never reached my parents or my teachers.

> He hated his typing program.

I remember those typing practice programs. I always hated them. Super boring, couldn't stand them for more than 2 minutes.

Much later on (and well after I've achieved high typing speeds) I've discovered The Typing of The Dead - a House of The Dead clone where you shoot zombies by correctly typing words. For me, that was the ultimate typing program: it gave the same exercises, but in the context where I could spend hours in front of it. I suppose that was an early form of what we know today as "gamification".

I don't remember what typing program he had. Each of my sons had their own typing program because they had different learning styles.

I was very goal oriented. If they could meet the standard, they could move on to do something else instead. Where they exceeded grade level expectations across the board for some subject, I let them do whatever they felt like doing as "gifted enrichment."

For science, I got my oldest anything he was interested in -- books to read, magazine subscriptions, whatever he wanted -- because at age 13 he was talking slow and repeating himself a lot to explain the Theory of Relativity to me. This was enormously helpful in getting me through some of my later upper class college classes.

I doubt you'll find poor people playing video games in such disproportionately larger numbers to validate this hypothesis.

I think code did that for me! Not that I’ve been poor financially, but perhaps in terms of friendships.

It's hard to stop being lazy too

At age 35, I was diagnosed with a genetic disorder. I spent years joking "They finally found a better name for my problem than lazy or crazy."

What gets labeled laziness all too often seems to be exhaustion, invisible disability or other hidden problems.

> What gets labeled laziness all too often seems to be exhaustion, invisible disability or other hidden problems.

Agreed.

A good, old essay on this and related questions wrt. character and mental diseases, by Scott Alexander back before he had his own blog: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/895quRDaK6gR2rM82/diseased-t....

My perceived laziness turned out to be executive dysfunction caused by autism.

'all too often' is a bit subjective, and doesn't refute the fact that laziness exists.

I honestly don't know if that's true. Everyone I have ever known who was supposedly being "lazy" turned out to have some serious personal issues, often issues that were not being identified.

In my experience, if you want to cure "laziness," the best thing to do is identify the underlying cause of the failure to get anything done and address that.

I homeschooled two special-needs sons who had a lot of issues that did not resolve for being lectured or something. They resolved by figuring why X was happening and addressing that.

Sometimes other people find it empowering to get that point of view put out there. It's an epiphany for some people that they aren't actually lazy like everyone has always told them. They just don't have the energy for some reason and addressing that can help make their life finally work after decades of frustration.

I read this somewhere, I tried to find the source, and I'm sad I can't properly attribute it:

When you are young, you trade time for money.

When you are middle aged, you trade money for convenience.

When you are old, you trade money for time.

I've had a similar experience. There is something about scarcity of time that breeds discipline. Whenever I go through a period of life where I have to spend a huge amount of time on some particular task project I always think "man, when this is over I'm going to be able to use all this time to do X,Y,Z. It's gonna be great!" And then the project ends and I essentially waste all of my newly found free time. I end up accomplishing less, even on my side projects somehow.

A mentor once told me “if you want something done quickly, give it to a busy person”

Thats Parkinson's law phrased very nicely.

Wow. That is a great line.

reminds me of another one:

nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.

For me it just pushes the point that every situation is a negotiation.

This describes me very well. What the hell was I doing with all that time during my 20s? I wasn't out hiking up a storm, I wasn't making a lot of music, I wasn't out drinking with friends at every chance. I was inside doing nothing, shitposting online, watching trash TV that I can barely remember the plots of now. Work was productive, but when I went home, I left it at work... Relationship was stable, but I didn't max out every minute of it when I could...

Now, as soon as the kids are in bed, virtually every scrap of time is used for something productive. Except, obviously, for lazy Saturday mornings posting on HN ;-)

Yea there seems to be some thing of a positive feedback loop that one can get into. I’ve experienced this multiple times too. When I had a boring and easy job I had all sorts of aspirations of doing a side business or learning some new stuff etc. I ended up doing none of that and mostly playing games instead. When I had a busy (but interesting) job I ended up doing side projects, socializing a lot more and generally being more productive outside of work. Something like momentum from one activity carrying through to others.

Similar boat. I flip-flop between efficient time usage, and squandering my free time, because I'm so fried I just want to do nothing.