In 2018 I was in a call with a VC and he told me that they were bullish on video games because they were expecting universal basic income to arrive after some kind of event and that everyone would hate their shitty meaningless lives so much and live and work inside video games.

I was shocked by the cynicism and explained the psychological function of play—people retreat into video games when they have identity work or other growth work to do and eventually emerge from the growth period transformed and with renewed curiosity and purpose for their lives.

I hadn’t read or seen Ready Player One yet so I didn’t know he was just drawing on that fantasy or that one route by which media predicts the future is by giving fantasy to personally unimaginative people with vast amounts of money to invest. I thought it was his idea.

With video games there is the extraneous factor that many of them are designed to be addictive—so not only does our own psychological work to be done draw us to them but also the compulsion.

I’ve found that most addictions I’ve had through my life were not something that could be resolved with control but rather with transformation of self and/or environment. I was addicted because I had energy bubbling up that had no outlet in my life and that needed a channel.

Either way video games won’t replace life for us during isolation or under UBI or in any of these future scenarios, but they will potentially hold our interest much longer than is healthy while we do the growth work we need to do.

Now in this meandering set of thoughts, replace “video games” with “social media” and “isolation or UBI” with “late stage capitalism” and think about why we’ve all let our attention get subsumed.

(Does the word subsumed work there? I don’t know. It just came out. I literally just woke up. You know what I mean anyway.)

It’s true that it’s very bad to create addictive platforms that amplify our anxieties. It’s also true that we were already anxious. What growth work are we doing now?

Most of my life has been a struggle of my natural talents not being usually seen in a person who looks like me and so the opportunities to use my talents have been scarce and hard won and have required cutting through a lot of bias and harassment and other bullshit.

I’m extremely tenacious to the point of being stupid and so I’ve made it a bit farther than all the other people who look like me and so I don’t really have a community. And these are the two things that are the root of my anxiety and why I use social media. (Or video games.)

It has taken years but eventually I have learned how to address those root causes. They are things I can’t control so I learn to accept and surf them and I’ve been able to detach from most social media or use the social media I do use in an intentional way.

Of course I’m also working to make a new interaction model that won’t cause compulsive use and will provide growth experiences more directly. A loving interface.

I wouldn’t be surprised if much addiction was caused by people not having outlets for their natural talents. Of course I would think that, since I’m projecting my own experience. But indulge me for a moment.

In that case UBI would probably cause ripples or waves through society as people alternately found or created routes to developing their talents, sabotaged themselves since developing repressed talents is scary, and got involved in other things if they didn’t have routes yet.

When someone gets to develop their talent they get to give transcendent things to the world that function for the good of the whole, generally. I think this is true for almost everyone.

I hope we get there. I hope we’re patient with each other as we fumble along the way. I hope we accept and create routes for the full range of human talent.