Are they a thief of focus or simply very efficient entertainment?

There is currently a 20yo in Germany, working tirelessly to document every beetle in their province.

The world is large and diverse. Its fine.

I would imagine every generation had their vices (lack of better word) that previous generations harped on. Why back in my day it was MTV (ok, occasionally they were right). But I’m sure when newspapers came out it was similar to tablets and phones. When tv came out, the radio-heads bitched about the “idiot box”. So on and so forth. Any history buffs out there care to elaborate?

And then there's the voynich manuscript, an old hoax/fantasy book documenting plants and animals that don't exist, in a made-up language.

That some people have dedicated their lives to "noble" pursuits and others to "wasting time" is entirely a function of who is telling you the story and how much money they stand to make off that other person's work. You get one life, do what you want with it as best you can.

Generations of monks did nothing but pray, work, and copy books for their entire lives. Is that a waste because they weren't writing novels instead? Because every one of them wasn't Mendel, obcessed with growing peas?

Play some video games, work on stuff if you want, or don't. Most people in history worked very hard and have been completely forgotten, all their works erased. With how easy it is to share your work online, you could even be famous for being good at video games (speed running, lore analysis, gimmick runs, etc) which may not change the world but objectively has more impact on more living people than writing small business websites or small farming rice in South Asia.

But I dont want to cure cancer, I want to make dinosaurs!

Permanently Deleted

It's not video games keeping me from doing my niche interests. It's my 60 hour a week job consuming all my mental resources. Then I have to go home and do all the other things necessary to keep myself alive. Not much left for getting immersed in cool projects after that.

This sounds like all of the people who were complaining about comic books back in the day. Or books before that.

I don't like this thing, therefore it's terrible and everyone should hate it and I am not prepared to have a discussion about it.

Yeah the people who were cataloging all the species of beetles in Germany were upper class types. Most people in 1820 were tilling fields or working in desperately terrible factories.

The 1800s gave us the likes of Michael Faraday the 2000s gave us the likes of Hank Green.

Everything in moderation. It's important to find an outdoor hobby you enjoy and make time for when the weather permits and let video games fill gaps when it's bit suitable.

Fishing kicks ass btw.

It is a crap shoot if an autist's fixation winds up being something beneficial to a single soul.

The tricky thing is that there's less "real" stuff to be done. Take my silly passion for rocks/minerals as an example. Back in the day I would've happily made geological maps but my country has already been fully mapped in detail. Similarly the guy in OP's post can look up the bugs of his area online because they've already been documented. Videogames can give us a sense of exploration and progress that is hard to find in real life these days.

Which is okay. Focusing on a happy life is imho better than to strive for becoming an efficient worker in some way or another. There is a lot more to life than this.

If people didn't have weird obsessions, then sciences like geology probably wouldn't exist.

What if I told you that you can do both things?

The worst thing about (thing I don't like) is that people do it instead of (working towards [goal]).

Why aren't you (working towards [goal]) ?

And yes, I get the whole undertone that this is about people with autism or hyper focus or whatever you want to call it. It doesn't make it any funny.

It's not an issue, since we have 10x more such guys than in 1820.

If you really look through history, I think you'll find that people did things like this because they were SO BORED. An entire town would come out to watch a small time trial because there just wasn't anything better to do. Hell, my parents who grew up in the 70's once told me "We'd be outside and bicycle around as kids all the time, after a while.. we were so incredibly bored." And during that time, tv and radio existed. I'm very happy we have the entertainment we do.

I thought they were going to say now there's a 26 part video on beetles. The beetle man never went anywhere. He's also on YouTube lol

I can't remember the name of the channel, but I've followed a guy rehabilitating a grocery lobster, one that took care otters, another with sea monkeys, and people just cleaning carpets. People with niche interests didn't go anywhere. If anything, they're more accessible because of the internet.

I’d like to see the author prove that beetle counting is more productive than creating game tutorials. People make all kinds of baseless assumptions that are biased by their personal values.

People can spend their time how they want, but when I hear people bragging about spending literally thousands of hours on game X and/or Y, it kind of makes me sad.

That being said, sometimes they're well adjusted and satisfied people and that's just what they want to do with the majority of their free time.

I do hear people make those kind of comments, but then in other conversations I hear them talking about how they're dissatisfied, life is unfair, their life sucks, they can't find a girlfriend, school is stupid, they hate their job, they have no friends, etc., those are the people that make me feel sad.

I run a company that does something very specific for some of the largest companies in the world. Key infrastructure is only functional because of what we do. One of the key skills that differentiate our people from the rest is something I often see in some of the top video game and TCG players. I always wonder, "what if they had focused that weird brain of theirs towards X or Y".

Either document beetles, or get REALLLY in to opium

So if someone wants to watch those videos on collecting all the rings in Sonic games, where might a link to said list be? You know asking for a friend.

Do what brings you joy? Like being a 🍌🦆!

Guy probably never heard of Tom Scott. Or CGP Grey.

Please, I need these YouTubers for things like the "Coin Collector" subset of achievements in Super Mario Sunshine, you really have to get every single one!

And I'll watch every one

I think this way about sports savants, which makes me think that maybe it's a bad take and that I should let sports nerds have their fun, without everyone having to worry about creating communal value in the world (explicitly, I am speaking here, as much as possible, in an acapitalist context).

And the target demographic of rowdy young men would be challenging each other to gun duels instead of FIFA matches or games of COD.

I don’t know but I know if you raise this topic usually you will get stoned to death by downdoots and comments like “I could be doing meth or killing people but I am a gamer instead”

In my opinion it is delusional to not notice that these things are mostly just slop. Sure there are some games that actually enriched your life and changed your perspective but compared to movies they are few and between. It’s the lowest entertainment for pleb in most cases.

Take something like call of duty what does that game brings into your life? It’s nothing just digital heroin straight to the brain. On the other hand there are sophisticated games such as disco elysium.

There’s nothing bad with slop but if you only consume slop your brain will turn into it. It’s all common sense

Efficient entertainment, almost certainly. People in past eras had completely useless time-consuming hobbies too, like memorizing chess openings

What this meme is really saying is "the main issue with video games is you aren't developing skills that can serve capitalistic interests via monetization of hobbies"