antonim

I wonder if he's ever actually enjoyed and been sincerely enthusiastic about video games, or he's just playing them in a pathetic attempt to come off as cool and attractive to younger generations.

but instead of finding a path toward healing

You might even say, he's ended up on a... path of exile.

There's so much black and white thinking here, and maybe my previous comment is partly to blame too...

"Documenting beetles" can be exactly what you do in your spare time because you enjoy it, without productivity being your goal. You can do it just so. It's nothing unusual.

The point of the OP is that some people have a lot of focus and curiosity that makes them fixate on solving stuff even if it seems mind-numbing to outsiders, and that a lot of that mind-numbing stuff-solving can actually be incredibly valuable for others, expanding our understanding of the world, etc. It does feel wasteful that such energy ends up spent on something that has way smaller or entirely nonexistent benefit for others.

I should have said this in my comments sooner, while the thread was still active, but here it goes anyway: we still absolutely need this sort of meticulous, "mind-numbing" work. Wikipedia is probably the best and most prominent example of such an effort that is run basically just on people's free time and curiosity and willpower.

This also isn't meant to say that playing video games should be avoided completely. I joked about my "utilitarianism calculator" in an another comment, but hopefully it's obvious it's an exaggeration. OP specifically talks of people who spend exorbitant amounts of time and effort optimising how to play a game, they're not just enjoying it and relaxing with it as is otherwise normal for games and sports and similar activities. So it's basically just the same sort of work as documenting beetles, but without the eventual benefits...

Because my utilitarian calculator says so.

Spend time becoming a scientist instead of optimising how to play Sonic, get the resources for further beetle documentation, bam!

Controversial take: advancing science is better than spending weeks optimising how to play video games for children.

It took them some time, huh?

Wouldn't it be fine to just let people post their small questions as their own threads? There's not a ton of activity here (yet), and the questions would thus get more exposure while not really hindering the visibility of other threads.

Ehh sorry. I assumed/hoped you were talking about something more, that I wasn't aware of. I know of these protests, but they were not nearly intense enough to disrupt the system. Much of the urban youth that might have led the protests has left the country in the meantime too, so I wouldn't be surprised if the next round of recruitment is met with even weaker resistance...

Maybe I should just Google it but... do you remember any specific cases of this pushback?

It's not even "both sides" necessarily, to me that sounds a bit too elaborate for the rather dumb forces at play. It could be just "whichever side is more economically/politically useful at the moment". After years and decades of LGBT activism, companies turned to LGBT acceptance to give themselves a more tolerable human face (after someone else has already done the work of humanising LGBT, but the companies want some of that aura). When they feel that it's not politically profitable anymore, they just switch back to homophobia. Case in point: Musk who used to tell people not to buy his cars if they don't support LGBT.

I don't get the impression the people who've downvoted this have read the second part of the comment.