Comment on YSK: The CIA proposed a 9/11 style false flag attack on US citizens to justify invading Cuba
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 17 hours agoAnd video games. MANY people play video games for hours, every day. Imagine what else they could be learning, or doing, in that time. When they graduate from college, they will have played hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours of video games, and have nothing to show for it. They could have learned to play a musical instrument, or learned a language, or learned to code, or how to repair cars, or had a job, or started an online business, or a relationship with another person, or gotten in shape, etc.
But they spent their time staring at a screen, playing a game that rewards their dopamine receptors, but provides literally nothing else of value for your life.
They spent their entire childhood doing nothing but becoming Dopamine addicts, while their parents allowed it. Millions of them.
Parents are just grateful to not be disturbed i think. They are also exhausted from their lives, working full time.
The system is designed this way, because then those people become good consumers for the corporations. They fill their emotional void with stuff the system sells. Games, movies.
And then you have the hypersexualized movies, designed so people will jerk off. There is also a reason behind all that.
Valid. It’s Bread & Circuses, and in the 21st century, screens provide the Circuses.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 17 hours ago
Ok Dad, not like people rotted in front of TVs hours a day, that never happened.
Poojabber@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Yup. Prior to video games no one wasted hours a day staring at the TV, or listening to the radio, or reading the newspaper, with nothing to show for it… no one talked on the phone for hours a day just to gossip with nothing to show for it… but lets lump all of that technology in together since the printing press was invented together with the evil video games and go back a bit further…
Surely back in those wonderful times no one was wasting their lives on useless things. No one drank away their day with nothing to show for it… no one sat around telling pointless stories to anyone who was bored and willing to listen. Kids didnt waste their time drawing in the sand or playing in the mud. It was nothing but hard work and learning back in the good ol days.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 16 hours ago
It’s not the same. Until fairly recently, TV only had a few channels, and most of the day it was showing stuff that no kid would be interested in - talk shows, game shows, soap operas, etc. Every afternoon, every station would show a three hour block of soap operas. EVERY station. So for that block, if you weren’t in school, you had NOTHING to watch.
So you went outside, found your friends, went on a bike ride, played a board game, or maybe just went “exploring,” just to see what you could find. I would do that MOST days as a kid.
Today, of course, you are right. Between cable and streaming, most kids have a LOT to distract them on TV, but it wasn’t always that way.
My son escaped the lure of video games, and anime, but he loves movies, so he spent a lot of time in front of the television, but he became a bonafide cinephile. He has actually been carefully curating his TV watching since he was a teen, searching out the best classic movies, and building a mental database of films.
Now he’s gone back to college for film studies, and his time in front of the TV, carefully watching high quality content, has put him miles ahead of his peers. His film classes often feature the prof and him having a discussion about a movie, as the rest of the class listens, and the faculty is starting to pay extra close attention to him. They’ve clearly pegged him as a future professional in their industry, because he is so obviously far ahead of every other student. And that’s because he didn’t waste his time as a teen on things like video games and social media, and actually used that time to learn something that would be useful to his future.
TerdFerguson@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
So If he was interested in video games, you would have supported that?
Because, you are right, it’s parental failure that’s the problem.
I think your post is a bit confusing because it mostly seems to blame the tendency to kids to enjoy the fun things, rather than feature the parent’s responsibility to regulate those things to an appropriate level.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 16 hours ago
Parental regulation in the old days was telling kids to get out of the house, and don’t come back in until whatever the next meal was. I’d leave on my bike in the morning, with no idea where I was going, so my mom certainly didn’t know. Or care.
I’d leave with empty pockets, no money, no ID, no phone, no watch, nothing. If I got thirsty, I’d knock on a door and ask for a glass of water. Sometimes a kid would knock on our door and ask for a glass of water. Or the time. That was parental supervision on the old days.
I actually bought a video game console, and we played some. He was in Cub Scouts, and all the kids there were fanatics. They would even have Cub Scout parties where the kids would bring their consoles and favorite games and play, and he couldn’t really participate, because he was the only kid who didn’t play video games (I was trying to get them to get together for star-watching parties with telescopes, but they all though that was dumb, including the parents. Scouts has changed a lot).
He loved Legos, and he loved Star Wars, so I got him a Lego Star Wars game, and he played to the very end, closed it, and walked away. Didn’t ask for another one, didn’t start looking into what other games they had, etc. Just stopped. I kept playing for a while (I like shoot’em ups like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor), but I like video games too much, I could EASILY get hooked, so I generally avoid them. We still have the console in a box somewhere. I recently asked him if he wanted it, and he said No.