x-box games

G, the wife of W came today. They are both patients of mine. G has migraines, and W has Parkinson's. I had meant to write about W the last time he was here. It's on the list of things to write about, but it didn't get to the Blog yet. Some ideas seem to do better if they ferment in the mind cellar for a while. Parkinson's is such an amazing disease that it's hard to even explain in a book, let alone in a Blog. It's a slowly degenerative state in which we lose motor function as well as emotional function (it causes depression). There is shaking and slowness, especially slow reflexes. If you're a truck driver it renders you unable to work. The way we think is mostly geared towards accomplishment, prestige, success and productivity. It's how we define ourselves. We greet each other and ask, "What do you do?" We want to know what people DO. This doesn't really tell us anything. There are doctors who are wonderful people, and there are others who are terrible people. So how does it help me to know anything about the person? Still, it's our focus. When we lose our ability to produce, we lose our identity. It's a shame, really. It's a shame that our identity is now our occupation, our productivity, our economic contribution. I'm not sure exactly how that's happened. Parkinson's takes away your identity if your identity is your occupation. We value our "contribution". The problem is that our definition of "contribution" is largely an economic one. It's not our kindness, love, compassion, humor, personality -- those "don't count". Since he stopped work, he's been playing X-box games. He's "addicted to them", according to his wife. Video games suck people into an unusual interaction. They have "achievement". You can produce a higher level, a higher score, a "win" or some other sense of accomplishment. The "winning" isn't real in a certain sense. That's because it doesn't really create any benefit. So there isn't a contribution. The interaction is with a computer which doesn't change. So even though we play, we aren't really playing "with" anyone. "Playing" should involve interaction with others, I think. The video games cause us to suspend our perceptions of time and lose ourselves. They are an escape from the world. People want to escape when they've had their identity stolen. It's a shame, because what they do have left is given up. The illness takes part of you and you escape to survive, giving up the part of you that's left. I don't see us moving towards defining people more by their personality or their goodness. In fact, I think we're moving more towards seeing each other as "commodities" with "productivity" potential. We assess 0ne another according to our "worth". If you die through an accident, we have formulas used by the lawyers to decide what your life was "worth". Different people are "worth" different amounts. That's why they play video games. They're no longer "worth" anything. It's crazy, but there's a certain reality to it in our culture. If everyone all around thinks that way, it's hard not to let it affect you. So if it affects him, he has no choice but to go somewhere else - somewhere with different rules. X-Box world has different rules. In that world your value depends on how well you score in a game. If you can be completely objective about it, there isn't really any difference. Both criteria are arbitrary. If you are born with certain physical attributes, you may generate a huge income and be "worth" a great deal. It's a purely genetic lottery. At least with X-Box there is a certain amount of skill and practice involved. An altogether different approach would be to value humans because they're humans. Perhaps we could consider intrinsic human value. Or at least we could consider virtues such as kindness, love, caring, compassion as a factor in a person's "worth". It would help with Parkinson's disease, anyway.