I was never really into video games.
Growing up in urban Canada in the 2000s as a young child and then a teenager, on dozens of occasions the topic of video games would inevitably come up. When it was revealed that I didn’t have an Xbox, Playstation or Nintendo player and had little interest in them I was universally met with the remark:
“WHAT!?!? What do you even do with your free time then??”
I assured them that I did indeed find activities to fill my free time with. I would read, do homework, spend time with family etc. And before you get the wrong idea I did also become very proficient at wasting time on the internet, I just almost never extended that to video games.
But the consistency of the remark I received is fascinating considering that as early as the 80s personal video game consoles were extremely rare. 1972 saw the first personal video game console come to the market. The first television was created in 1927 but TVs only began to be adopted widespread in US households in the 1950s. Yet Homo Sapiens have been on Earth for a few hundred thousand years and believe it or not, for the majority of that time humans figured out what do to in the absence of video games.
It appears evident how natural it is for people to adapt to the environment they are in and have difficulty envisioning a different world. But the world – technologically speaking – is changing now, faster than it ever has been. A convenient point in history can be placed around the mid to late 18th century when this rapid change in western technology began to accelerate exponentially. That point in time is now referred to as the start of:
The Industrial Revolution
Here are some things you use on a daily basis:
- Toilets
- Toothbrushes
- Toilet paper
- Refrigerators
- Lightbulbs
- Phones
- Microwave Ovens
- Cameras
Here are some things you may or may not use daily, but have likely used many times in the past at least:
-
- Bicycles
- Air conditioning
- Vacuum cleaners
- Sewing machines
- Pencil sharpeners
Before the mid 18th century, all of these things many people take for granted on a daily basis did not exist. Then there were a few revolutionary inventions that essentially outsourced a huge chunk of human manual labor to machines. People figured out how to get non-sentient machines to do work for them which increased the amount of output a single human worker could produce by an order of magnitude or more. Machines don’t get tired, or complain, or fight, or demand time off. They can happily work 24/7 and for tasks that required no creativity this proved to be revolutionary. In short, this changed the world. Human population skyrocketed, billions of people were raised out of poverty, wars were fought with new frightening technology, countless lives were saved through medical advancements, and to today, the internet has revolutionized how the world shares information. All of this and a billion other things were made possible due to the newfound ability to harness the power of steam and coal.