
Young men are dropping out of the job market to spend their time gaming - WheelsAtLarge
https://www.1843magazine.com/features/escape-to-another-world
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itchyjunk
Feels like i've seen this article around 3 times. 2 times within a month and
has made it to front page every time.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13890782](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13890782)

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HONEST_ANNIE
Creat Filter[1] Hypothesis:

The reason why it's difficult to meet technically advanced aliens in the
galaxy is because technology brings direct ways to get meaning and
satisfaction that far surpasses anything the real world can offer. Each
civilization develops to the point where they can produce technology that can
short circuit the evolutionary drive and replace it with something better (It
can be 'Enlightement', 'Soma', 'immersive neural lace games and soap opera',
or 'permanent intellectual, physical and existential orgasm by brain fungus')

Intelligent agent can't derive meaning from rationality or intelligence using
deduction. Self preservation is not more logical than being happy, it's
provided by evolution. Those who explore universe have not fallen into this
filter.

Civilizations that pass this Great Filter are puritans.

\----

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter)

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speeder
I would flip the headline around a bit.

It is more like Young men are blocked from job market and forced to spend
their time gaming.

Some people then ask me, forced how? They can't do anything else?

Well, I know I can't... I don't own a car, no women want relationship with me
(what sane woman would want a jobless carless guy that live with his
parents?), I don't have money for any other hobbies... so I help with the
business that still profit (I own and can inherit several of them) and play
games, there is not much else to do, in fact many days were EXTREMELY boring,
if I wasn't being treated I know I would be suicidal by now.

~~~
throwaway_374
Don't you feel the drive and thrust to create and innovate and contribute to
society? You're on here so you can probably code. You probably are lucky
enough to have a very deep understanding of your family business (supply chain
dynamics etc). Let's say it's a restaurant. I'd be killing to learn every
detail inside out, spending hours on the internet trying to figure out how
others approach the problem, improve efficiency and possibly create a product
specific to the industry.

~~~
speeder
I am helping my dad code programs that generate some documents that are
mandatory to make business in the country...

But that is basically endless work, because the government here keeps changing
the laws constantly.

We also have a gigantic website mostly with static pages that needs lots of
SEO (almost all our sales come from people find our webpage on google, and
calling us).

Still, right now that company doesn't exactly profit, we are using it mostly
hoping the economic crisis will end before we run out of open grass field
(because the runway ended for quite some time ago already...)

I really want to find some other business to start and see if I can get some
short term profits, but I have no idea what to try, most of my ideas doesn't
work because my country laws. (brazil won a couple times the dubious honor of
being the hardest country in the world to do business :/ I have random
companies in my name that I can't shut down because leaving then running is
actually cheaper, even if I have pay taxes for business that doesn't
nothing... tax law is so byzantine that we are listed as the country where is
most expensive to pay taxes, ignoring the taxes themselves, because of the
sheer amount of accounting and legal work needed).

~~~
throwaway_374
Thanks for your insight... as an aside, I heard in Brazil it is possible to
invest at a rate of government risk free rate of 15%... is this true?

~~~
speeder
Yes.

Sort of... But that is how much the government theoretically pays in interest.

For this reason people don't bother in investing in companies (when I had
startups, people would batantly tell us they wouldn't invest because buying
government papers was more profitable).

Also getting loans to start a business is insanity, for example my bank
charges 13% PER MONTH, CC can reach 450%+ per year.

I have lots of ideas, but no capital, no investors, and I am not crazy enough
to get more debt here, so I end not doing any of them.

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k__
Can't blame them.

Coding is a game for me too and its fun.

If I had a less fun job, I'd probably play more games.

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RockofStrength
Brave New World

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dade_
"Today’s games seem to be displacing careers, friendships and families, and
thus stopping young people (particularly men) from starting real, adult
lives."

How very American Beauty. It is probably best for economists to avoid the
topic of friends and family.

What I see is a relatively untapped workforce segment that connects via a game
console, handheld device or VR.

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ocschwar
This would not bother me that much except for the way gamers get their minds
warped by immersing themselves in their fantasy worlds for hours at a time.

~~~
zero_iq
My god, they're almost as bad as books.

~~~
rabbyte
I don't know. I've never had an argument with an infantile book.

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Safety1stClyde
The link sent me to an article about umami, "the fifth taste", not related to
games or men. The main protagonist is a woman called Bonnie Chung who likes a
Japanese food called miso.

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EJTH
In many places of the world you get to work your ass off for decades while you
see 1/3 of the population sitting on their hands while living of the back of
the tax paying worker. I can understand that many get fed up, especially if
they didn't get paid a whole lot to begin with.

~~~
charlesdm
To each its own? People are free to live the life they want to live. No one is
forcing you to work hard.

~~~
wiradikusuma
and then expect good life? shouldn't it like "you reap what you sow"?

~~~
onion2k
If the expectation is that you should be able to live a good life if you work
hard then something is very wrong. A _huge_ number of people work _incredibly_
hard, yet still don't get to live a good life. A teacher (or nurse, developer,
construction worker, etc) who puts in long hours working a stressful job and
still doesn't earn enough to invest in a home, take a vacation, or raise a
family. Where is the incentive for people to work hard if that's the case?

You can't tell people that "you reap what you sow" if they're seeing other
people sowing a huge amount and actually reaping very little.

To anyone who might reply to suggest this means the reward for not working
should be _even lower_ , read The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek
first. He made a very good case that there's a necessity for decent welfare in
modern societies because without it poor people will eventually rise up in a
bloody revolution. It's happened many times in the past. Lowering welfare is,
by logical extension, an argument in favour of murdering the wealthy.

