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Comment by lynguist | Hacker News Reader

There's a certain culture that prefers "efficiency", punishes non-productivity, and every little slack, even enjoyment of life must be "earned". In that culture these video games that are pure playfulness (but it doesn't just have to be video games, it could be poetry, whatever, just something with no productivity!) are the antidote.

I'm happy I wasn't born into this culture. (I've seen and heard absurd, almost comical examples of this from my colleagues, like justifying not replacing a black and white TV in the 1990s... From my point of view they're ascetics, but from their point of view they're normal.)

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Interesting take. I'm in my 30s and not sure I've ever known that kind of culture, yet I do understand the sentiment against heavy media consumption (which most video games fall under).

Video games, TV, and movies put me in a situation where I must gamble several hours of my time to digest them. That kind of time investment cannot be isolated from the rest of a day. Media has a tendency to set my mood regardless if I liked it. Most fandoms are radioactive as well. I'm pretty sure what I'm saying is the majority opinion, so it shouldn't be a surprise that so many people shrug their shoulders and strongly avoid both that media and its fans. It doesn't help that there are no shortcuts around this either because if honest critics ever existed they definitely don't now.

The result is that many have a very high bar, and even when it's met they still don't want to sink more than about an hour into it at a time. It's less about efficiency and more about having better things to do.

Precisely. The 'hustle' culture and the fetishization of hyper-efficiency act as a catalyst for a wide range of systemic societal problems. I'm glad that I'm not part of that sphere.

A “certain culture” is an euphemism for bad economy, I assume?

When I was a kid the general setup seemed to be the poorer the kid the more toys and higher weekly allowance it had. To compensate I guess.

Obviously not very poor but relatively poor.

Totally the opposite, from my recollection.

Number and value of child’s toys/belongings correlated directly with parental income, with parental attitude as an independent variable.

For example, my parents were probably at the lower-end-of-comfortable but definitely not wealthy, but I had less money spent on me as a result of their beliefs around raising a child, and politics more broadly.

It can also be argued that when a culture seeks escapism it's because things are bad.

In other words, there's no correlation.

No, because it existed when economy was good too. It has nothing to do with economy state.

It is more of moral judgement thing, completely divorced from both needs and outcomes.

Yeah, the state of China.

My first thought was the Protestant work ethic - a very American phenomenon

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