For whatever reason, playing Assassin’s Creed seems to bring me relief, and it occurs to me at this moment, after playing for 2 hours or whatever, that it is really no different in principle than all the countless abstractions and imaginings I have been using my entire life to take the sting out of emotions I could not process, which threatened to overwhelm me at an existential level.
I ask myself: when I do my Life Review–which I believe we all go through when we die–what will be the status of time spent playing video games? On the one hand, I suppose it is like playing dice games or any number of other outwardly useless diversions. On another, it seems to me no different in kind than what I did in graduate school, reading erudite but largely useless texts on various religious traditions, and philosophical treatments of religion. I just went through my bibliographies, which I have kept for some 20 years, and threw them away. I looked at them, and smelled dirt–the sort in which no life grows.
If I play video games, some good things seem to happen. Certainly, that is how it feels to me.
What happens, though, reading Jacques Lacan, or Karl Marx, or Jacques Derrida, or Michel Foucault?
I would argue, in large measure, that in dealing with virtually any thinker of the 19th or 20th century that college kids study, you are dealing with orcs and goblins, elves and dwarves.
What concrete good comes from reading these people? In what way do people get practically smarter? In what ways do they learn to live with happiness, sang froid, and tranquility?
My oldest has gotten the bug to read the classics. I bought her “A Farewell to Arms” as something extra whenever school work gets old. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, of course, as a parent I am glad to see she is not a flippant, frivolous kid like so many seem to be nowadays. At the same time, I know Hemingway was a lifelong alcoholic who killed himself. What did he REALLY have to teach us about living?
In my crankier moments I feel nothing useful has been written in a thousand years, but then I look to people like Martin Seligman, and Mihaly Czikszenmilhalyi, and Anton Chekov, whose short stories I adore.
And I have discovered it is actually FUN to listen to the plays of Shakespeare on CD while reading along. Shakespeare was and remains useful. His work can enrich a life.
So to end this minor rant, I am still an anti-intellectual intellectual who likes to call himself a thought worker.