What would Schopenhauer do, in his spare time?

In the book The Wisdom of Life, Arthur Schopenhauer raises the question of how to spend our free time.

Leisure, that is, the time one has for the free enjoyment of one's consciousness or individuality, is the fruit or produce of the rest of existence, which is in general only labour and effort.  But what does most people's leisure yield? - boredom and dullness; except, of course, when it is occupied with sensual pleasure or folly.

 

Boredom and dullness are not the inevitable consequences of leisure.  To the contrary, Schopenhauer suggests that people should cherish the opportunity to experience "the pleasures of sensibility, such  as observation, thought, feeling, or a taste for poetry or culture, music, learning, reading, meditation, invention, philosophy, and the like."  But this kind of pleasure requires effort and "the use of one's own powers."  Card playing, in Schopenhauer's time, was therefore much preferred by the populace and much disparaged by Schopenhauer as "demoralizing, since the whole object of it is to employ every kind of trick and machination in order to win what belongs to another."

Let your leisure flow

Modern psychology has a slightly different take on playing games.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified an optimal state of experience known as "flow," which he describes in the eponymous book:

Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems. Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted.  An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it is difficult, or dangerous.

Csikszentmihalyi notes that flow is difficult to achieve during leisure because our free time "is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed."  Rather than putting in the requisite effort to enjoy their leisure, he concludes that most people will opt for the passive enjoyment of mass media events.  Or video games.

Schopenhauer would probably have dismissed video games as an anti-social form of card playing, and so doubly condemned them.  Csikszentmihalyi seems more appreciative.  In fact, he identifies games as the basic paradigm for creating the conditions of flow.

[Games] were designed to make optimal experience easier to achieve. They have rules that require the learning of skills, they set up goals, they provide feedback, they make control possible.  They facilitate concentration and involvement by making the activity as distinct as possible from the so-called "paramount reality" of everyday existence.

Video games take this to the extreme.  Anyone who has emerged from a session of Uncharted, Rocket League, or my personal recent favorite, Horizon Zero Dawn, with a sheepish glance at the clock can testify to the deep experience of flow (and distorted sense of time) produced by a good video game.

Does playing a video game bring happiness along with the flow?   For me, the answer is a qualified no.  Sure, they are fun, particularly if the gameplay is tied to a compelling story and engaging characters.  But more often than not, I play longer than I plan (this being a flow activity, after all) and finish feeling dissatisfied.

A happier time filler

Reading and writing, on the other hand, are emerging as reliable sources of flow in my leisure time.  Last weekend,  my wife and I got home after a drive along the ocean and lunch at a marina.  With nothing in particular to do, I was planning on playing my new video game Nier: Automata.  Before starting, I wanted to try uploading a picture to the blog.  Three hours later, which felt like the blink of an eye, the pictures were uploaded and most of a blog post was drafted.  I felt totally jazzed.  Nothing like how I feel after gaming for three hours.

What's the difference?

One possibility is creativity.  Games induce flow, but when the play is over, nothing remains.  The problem with this interpretation is that I know of several hardcore gamers who see gaming as fertile ground for their creativity (see the RadBrad, SunlessKhan, or YouTube's number one tuber, PewDiePie).  More likely reading and writing draw on my natural ideation abilities.  Who doesn't love using their strengths, even at play?