Would young men be rioting in the streets if they didn’t have video games to pacify them?
Hear me out.
We are seeing record levels of young men unemployed and living with their parents: The future for them is bleak. Saddled with college debt, they can barely get a job that pays miimum wage, while living independently is forever out of reach.
I feel like at other points of history, there would be more social unrest, but things are exceedingly calm given the economics.
I was watching a video by Healthy Gamer, a gamer bro-turned psychiatrist. He points out that video games are very addictive and seductive because they MIMIC accomplishment. You can grind to get to the next level, you can gain new skills, you are continually put on a treadmill of constant progress. It’s very satisfying in a hollow way, satisfying in a way that might make you forget that society has nothing to offer you but debt and homelessness after you followed all the rules.
Are video games weapons of mass distraction, the metaphysical equivalent of a million Christians being fed to a million lions every day?
Yes.
When we were kids in the 60’s, we were perpetually bored and getting in to trouble.
Its not that we were socially active, we just had nothing to do, and wanted to impress girls.
What kind of trouble did you get yourself into?
Though you had less to complain about economically.
Mostly mindless vandalism and stupidity.
Also you do know there was the Vietnam war and the oil embargo, right? That all the factories shut down in the 70’s and nobody had any work because everything got outsourced to asia.
They didn’t say you had nothing to complain about, only that there was less.
Yes, Vietnam was a huge factor in the US, but you’ll also find that “the 60s” also happened in Europe; there was a component that was just a reaction to strict traditional society–or at least something in common that had nothing to do with an adventure in Indochina.
I guess I don’t know the nitty-gritty details of the economic situation in the 70’s, but I don’t think your generation was as economically fucked as the current one, though the drop off you may have felt might have been more severe locally.
From my perspective it was worse back then. I lived in a small town, when the war ended all the factories shut down, the town started to die and we almost ended up homeless. If my uncle hadn’t helped us out, my life would have been a different story. Then just as we started to get back on our feet the oil embargo hit and the off shoring started. The current reality isn’t near as bad.
Thanks for sharing that; I know things got bad before Reagan Saved The Country /s, but most of the details are from driving through some abandoned mill towns and from listening to Allentown from Billy Joel.
Hm. I wonder if there would be a way to compare economic stress between generations? But, yeah, having NO job is pretty stressful; and there’s no way you could know that the economy was abot to turn around.
I think today things are looking grim because the job market is so competitive, people feel forced to get a college degree to even get a foot in the door, and now they’ve started their life in a debt that in a better world would have been a mortgage, and they might be able to get a job, but it’s not going to pay for a car, an apartment, and their college loans, and the future is bleak af because the trend lines towards everything getting more expensive while jobs pay less and less have been ongoing for DECADES.