I was just playing Cities Skylines. I now have more than 2,100 hours in Cities Skylines. I remember noticing a few months back that I now have more hours in the game than there are years since the death of Christ.
That’s a lot of time——I’ve been playing it since the 8th grade. And thus, when I’m sitting at home after a long day at work, I get this jabbing feeling that I’m wasting my time. This massive city I’ve been building in the game for the past 3 years serves little value beyond myself. Someday, the save file will get deleted and it will only exist in my mind.
I start feeling like my time would be better spent creating things——working on my website, for instance. So here I am.
Things like writing, reading, programming, and anything that can improve my knowledge I have always regarded as not a waste of time. Working out I view the same way——not that I work out, but I like going on walks in nature sometimes. The common thread here is anything that improves myself is a net good.
Things that help others I also consider worth my time. Spending time with family, helping my parents and grandparents as much as I can, and being kind to others.
But by playing Cities Skylines and other games don’t I get better at said games? People are mostly just the sum of their experiences. What we do in our time massively effects everything about us. I’m sitting here listening to the soundtrack of Kirby Super Star Ultra as I write this for some reason, but playing that game is an experience that I have that is a part of me. Isn’t denying that like denying a whole part of me?
I’ve spent a massive amount of my time on difficult games like Sekiro and Dark Souls III. The more I play, the better I get at them——yet it’s not the same as learning something about programming or reading a book. There’s a fundamental difference, but how can one differentiate the two groups of useful and useless activities?
The issue, I think, is that there is no purpose to life. Nothing matters unless we personally make it matter. Thus, playing games matter a great deal if we decide the purpose of our lives is just playing games. But most people don’t decide this. And I certainly don’t. I feel like there is more to my life than that. I’m accruing all of this knowledge for something.
In the “Industrial Society and Its Future”, Ted Kaczynski——flips a few pages——mentions the idea of “the power process”, which is essentially the idea that humans need to have something to strive for or else they feel like life is completely pointless and want to start killing themselves. Paragraph 37: “in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.”
But Ted basically believes that every activity that isn’t necessary to basic survival is a “surrogate activity” which is “an activity that is directed towards an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work towards.” I don’t think I’m exaggerating by that either, to put it in his words exactly:
Given a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote most of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use his physical and mental facilities in a varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal X? If the answer is no, then the person's pursuit of a goal X is a surrogate activity.
So yeah, Ted’s answer to my question of what matters? is only things that seriously affect you. I take serious issue with what Ted says because, if it’s true, there’s no way for me and much of modern society to be happy and derive meaning from their life. Unless you’re a farmer or something, what activity do you do that, if you were unable to continue doing it tomorrow, you’d feel “seriously deprived”? I don’t think there’s anything unless we all go try to be farmers——maybe buying food or cooking satisfies this description.
I want to keep building my city in Cities Skylines, but becoming unable to continue building it wouldn’t leave me “seriously deprived”. Thus, Ted deems it a “surrogate activity”, which I feel Ted uses as a dirty word——regular people would probably call it a pastime or a hobby. Is Ted too harsh on us, or am I too weak? Why am I programming when I could be building furniture out of wood?
When I first read Ted’s essay, I thought it was this genius work that correctly identified major reasons why society is unhappy. However, I think believing too much of what he said has been damaging to me in the long run. If you start to believe everything in life is pointless, that this evil force called “society” has taken away all your independence and demeaned you into your pathetic “surrogate activities”, you’ll start hating everything. You’ll start feeling hopeless. You’ll start feeling that life has no meaning.
Ironically, this is exactly what Ted himself describes. When humans give themselves tasks too large to conquer, we become depressed——“he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.” Ted describes it as one of 3 human drive types——“those that cannot be adequately satisfied no matter how much effort one makes”. Ted’s answer here is to overthrow society and destroy all technology or something impossible like that, but the real answer to this is not societal, but personal.
We must learn as individuals to not grown overly attached to any drives in this 3rd groups. The 1st group as well is also dangerous——“those drives that can be satisfied with minimal effort” will leave us drifting aimlessly through life, bored and unhappy. We must find drives in the 2nd group——“those that can be satified but only at the cost of serious effort”——in order to be happy. The very drive of desiring to overthrow industrial society is in this 3rd group; thus, it is not worthy of our serious attention, and——by advocating for the overthrow of industrial society——Ted seeks to inflict unhappiness upon us by further burdening us with drives that cannot be satisfied.
Only those drives that can be satisfied are worth our time. We must live life doing what we can, not what we wish we could do through miracles and impossibilities——that is, assuming a natural human goal is to live a satisfying life. Some people may be fine living life in advocation of a cause that they will never see come to fruition in their lifetimes, but that’s not a life for me or for most people.
Part of the reason I find myself so interested in computers is partially because of what Ted says——“Our lives depend on decisions made by other people; we have no control over these decisions”. This is true more than ever before——think about how our world revolves around phone and computers, which almost no single individual understands in entirety! If your life depends on a cellphone and a car, the only way to become independent is to understand to the best of your abilities your cellphone and car and how they work.
Some people can’t even plug in a monitor into a computer. Some people don’t even know what a monitor is. Some people don’t know what code is——yet their entire lives revolve around code, silently doing its job.
I think Ted is right about how he describes human satisfaction in terms of the power process and human drives. But I think the main take away from the essay should not be about how terrible the industrial society is; rather, the main takeaway is that because of the industrial society, it is more important than ever to live life by consciously surrounding ourselves on the things that do matter——whatever those things may be, what matters must be in the 2nd group of drives in order to yield us contentment with our lives.
As an aside, this reminds me of a time I will never forget when I pulled up at a gas station——it was a station where a guy pumps the gas for you. The guy pumping my gas was an old guy with a gray mustache and an Eastern European accent. I was looking at my phone while we both waited for the gas to get pumped, and then he started talking about the weather all of a sudden. It was late autumn and he was talking about the weather. I replied back about how it was almost freezing temperature that morning. In response he said it’s getting colder again, and that the weather changes so easily, and that we never know when it changes. Then he said to me “we have no control”. I can’t remember what I said back to him, but I wish I had a deeper conversation with him about what he said. I thanked him for pumping my gas and drove off. I’ve never seen him since then, even though I frequent the same gas station at that same time multiple times a month.
Well I didn’t mean for this to devolve into another Ted rant, but I think it was relevant. There was more I wanted to say but it’s time for bed.
Sorry if there’s any typos, read it over a bit but I’m too tired to check again.
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