Spectres on the Screen

The Demise of Guys: How Video Games and Porn are Ruining a Generation

"Increasingly, researchers say yes, as young men become hooked on arousal, sacrificing their schoolwork and relationships in the pursuit of getting a tech-based buzz."


I agree with a couple of overall themes of this article. I know firsthand that video games and porn can be incredibly "addicting". However, having broken both of those "addictions", I would say the actual disease here is a lack of critical thinking and some sort of spiritual path. The real problem of this generation, as I see it, is a complete lack of any sort of foresight, any sort of motivation beyond acquiring money. Those of us who are lucky enough to get off of society's hamster wheels after high school see this immediately. Having once been what is now called a "New Atheist", the ideas of which were cast violently out of my mind soon after I was out of high school and began experimenting with meditation and drugs, I can easily say that it is a frame of mind that is a complete dead end and may be the most important factor of this "ruined generation". We are not taught anything that would be truly important to know, just a set of mental skills that will more easily convert us into servile tools of some faceless corporation.

With this article, the problem posited by the authors and by commenters is that by indulging in these vices we are incapable of being efficient drones. Some habits are just more profitable to our "benefactors", I suppose. Yet within this porn-and-videogames model, The dominator aspect of our output into the physical realm is reduced to an entirely mental interaction. Our emerging thoughtforms are what we now dominate, our creativity eliminated or transmogrified into seek-and-destroy urges manifest. The spectres on the screen are of our own dead dreams.

To what ideal do we aspire? Our aspirations lie just beyond this electronic window, the visual information displayed not damaged or pleasured by our internal transactions of primitive urges. Violence is being fomented in the cycles of the developing mind. When people say "go fuck yourself", it is something you really do any time you have sex, due to one only having immediate knowledge of one's own impressions. So the only difference between finding pleasure in a computer screen and another human being is the aesthetic association imprinted throughout one's life. However, that's only the sex part. The development of nurturing symbiosis with another human being is not attainable through a machine.

The video game part is a bit more concerning. From a very disturbing personal experience, I have related thusly: A few months ago, shortly after learning I could "embed" myself into a matrix-like superhuman ability-structure while playing a popular online game, the violence carried over into my physical form. The same night, I gave my rabbit a bag to play with, and he got caught up in one of its straps. In a natural fear response, thinking himself to be in the clutch of some terrible predator, he darted around the room in an absolute frenzy, smashing into the walls. Eventually the bag lost its grip on him and he jammed himself behind a bookshelf. It was the most horrifying thing I have ever witnessed, to see this creature I loved completely lost in his illusion of fear, hurting himself in the process of trying to escape. I could see the correlation immediately and did not play that game again for a very long time.

What does this mean? To me, it means there is no difference between killing through a surrogate in a virtual dimension or killing in "real life". Either way, you are accessing and enacting some latent wish to harm, and carrying it out in mental space.

This is not all doom and gloom. It means that what you seek in your world is already in your imagination and subject to a psychotronic relay. However, our priorities and goals must be clearly outlined. Personally, I am seeking love, wrestling with some internal demon for control of my interface.