Some men just want to watch Youtube while the world burns

I’m tempted to say that for the last three months, after catching COVID in Berlin and ignominiously fleeing back to Bellevue, I’ve been doing “nothing.” What “nothing” is a cover for, in more detail, is: studiously ignoring my messages, watching nine seasons of NCIS, playing video games I promised myself I would quit, and developing strong opinions about gaming Youtubers. I have burrowed into the digital ground.

Scott's Thoughts is a channel that plays Pokémon and exclusively Pokémon; not the newer games either, but mostly Pokémon Yellow, with a sprinkle of Crystal and Emerald. Scott is on a quest to do solo speedruns of Yellow with all 151 of the original Generation 1 Pokémon. I like Scott and I find his videos charming. I have watched almost all of them. This has not in any way felt like a productive or virtuous use of my limited time on this Earth and yet I kept doing it even after my COVID symptoms slowly faded, even after the smoke that briefly gave parts of Washington some of the worst air quality in the world stopped poisoning the sky.

I have learned some impressively useless things about the fine details of the mechanics of Pokémon Yellow. I have become exquisitely sensitive to the difference between Pokémon with faster or slower experience growth rates, and between Pokémon who do or do not have access to the badge boost glitch, much like I imagine wine connoisseurs become sensitive to the terroir of their favorite vintages, whatever that means. There is an entire world of unintended and often bug-related detail to this game that completely escaped my notice when I first played it at the tender age of eight, and I find it at least funny if not sometimes beautiful.

A tweet crashes unbidden into my thoughts.

owen cyclops @owenbroadcast

the main issue with video games is that a guy who, if he lived in 1820s germany, would have done something like document every type of beetle in his local province instead ends up making a 26 part youtube series about how to get all the rings in every sonic game

There is an Owen-like voice in my head, whose origins I will not even bother guessing at, who insists that video games are fundamentally childish, and that when I became a man I was supposed to put away childish things.

“On your deathbed,” the Owen-voice spits at me, “will you look back on your time spent watching another person play Pokémon Yellow at age 32 and consider it time well spent? Weren’t you supposed to become a great mathematician? Or help the rationalists save the world from AI? Weren’t you supposed to do something with your one wild and precious life?”

To which I can only reply: I am a weak man and I needed comfort. For better or worse, I spent vast amounts of time as a child inside video games. Where children of an earlier generation might have frolicked through forests or creeks or the city streets, I frolicked through Viridian Forest and the Silent Cartographer and Neopia. They were special places of freedom to me, and returning to them ignites a digital nostalgia that I attach only to them and not to any physical locations. When a person shows me new things about old video game worlds that were more home to me as a child than the house in which I lived, it’s like they’re showing me new things about my childhood teddy bear, about my own fingers.

(Pokémon Red was not the first video game I played, but it was the first one I chose. The world of Pokémon is possibly the first place I decided to visit on purpose.)

How excruciatingly undignified. I wish somehow that I had a less lame backstory than this. The biggest difference between me and Scott, who has almost 50,000 subscribers as I write this and makes videos about a game that came out in 1998 as his full-time job, is that Scott’s love for Pokémon is untainted by any hint of shame, it shines through purely in his work. Meanwhile I also love Pokémon but I wonder if it is an irredeemable character flaw, I wonder if I have sinned.

The sin that is in English called sloth is called acedia in Latin. Spiritually I am told it refers not to laziness in the colloquial sense but to an abdication of one’s responsibilities to God. When I say I am doing “nothing” what I mean is that I am committing the sin of acedia, that I am sitting in a chair that hurts my hips watching the pixels flicker as my hair slowly thins, that I sacrificed an entire season on a nameless altar to an unknown god, a season that is lost to me forever, a season where babies learned to talk and couples got married and I missed all of it and I did it to myself on purpose, I chose it, I walked into the crypt eyes open.