From Ran Prieur’s May 11th 2015 blog post:
May 11. I left off last Friday with this quote from Sarah Perry: “For many people, time is not a gift, but a burden, to be filled with alcohol and television and other palliative technologies.” My disagreement is not with that sentence exactly, but with two ideas that might seem to follow.
One is that it’s bad to have fun, or that all this fun stuff is distracting us from rising up and making a good society — as if we all agree about what a good society looks like and how to get there. This whole way of thinking is based on an assumption about the purpose of life: that merely having a good time is a bad use of your life, and the correct use of your life is trying to make a better world.
Humans have been trying to make a better world for thousands of years. In many ways we have failed and accidentally made a worse world, so we should be skeptical of making a better world as a noble goal. And to the extent that we have succeeded, we should appreciate and enjoy the ways the world is better, instead of being like an ambitious person who is never happy in the moment. Sometimes the path to a better world is doing something that seems fun and useless, and it leads to somewhere unexpected.
Notice that people who condemn TV and video games and recreational drugs never condemn books. Of course books are better in some ways, but the thing that’s best about reading can be good about any entertainment: it can expand your consciousness and show you other ways of being. I think even spectator sports are helpful because they generate public stories that are more honest than the public stories in politics, so someone who follows sports can more easily recognize political bullshit.
A reader sends this article from the Guardian about Eve Online, a massive multiplayer sci-fi game that has outlived similar games by making good decisions to keep players interested. People play games because they’re better than society: they’re a better fit for human nature. When we understand this, there are at least two directions we can go: make political decisions to make society more like a good game, or make society as stable and harmless as possible, and use it as a platform for artificial worlds.
While I agree with Ran deep inside of me, I’ve been influenced all my life by and gravitated towards people who strongly believe in making the world a better place, or that such a thing is possible. I’ve grown into the position that a balance between fun and “making the world a better place”, whatever that means, again, is more desirable than just having fun or following one’s one path, which might not necessarily include improving the paths of others. However, this implicit drive has brought me much conflict, self-doubt and guilt.
I find that I’m the most comfortable when I confront that “making the world a better place” is perhaps not such a good way of spending one’s time here, if purely for the quasi-impossibility of seeing results, unless one can have fun or feel good about it at the same time.