Now gamers, don't get your shorts in a wad. I'm not just blindly attacking all video games and board games. All I'm saying is that the trend is dangerous and shows we've lost the value of moderation.
In the last three years, young men have increased their time gaming while their time spent working and exercising has dropped.
Statistics released last month by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics from the annual American Time Use Survey show that the time young men spent "playing games" — the survey doesn't differentiate between electronic and non-electronic games, but most researchers assume it's chiefly the former — rose by nearly three-quarters of an hour from 2019 to 2022, more than it had increased over the previous 16 years.
So, for 16 years the time spent playing video games increased in young men at what was then considered a rapid rate. Then, in the last three years alone the pace of increase was matched.
It's almost as if some major thing happened three years ago that forced everyone to stay home and not leave the house.
What are young men doing less to free up time for all that gaming? That's hard to say with too much confidence: All these estimates are derived from a survey of about 26,400 households that is subject to sampling and other errors, and while the increases in gaming time are so big we can be confident that they represent a real phenomenon, some of the other changes could be mostly noise. Still, it does appear that, since the pandemic, most of the additional gaming time has come from work and sports/exercise/recreation.
Men, if you have the choice to either play a video game or go to the gym I know which you should choose. If you have a choice of whether to pick up another project or a few extra hours at work, but you choose video games instead, then that's an issue.
Work, physical fitness, and mental fitness are more important than leisure. They should be prioritized as such.
Let me go back to this chart:
Young men are sleeping less, doing household activities less, having less education time, and even lowering their TV time. That is in addition to the two BIG losers of work and exercise!!
I'm not an anti-video game guy. But everything has a time and a place, and with our society in decline, we're about to enter the "hard times make strong men" phase.
