Why research video games when the world is on fire?

Brief Ponderings On Being the Trashfire Generation: Ephemerality, Nihilism, and Hope

On Princeton’s application, I was asked to describe what motivates me in one word, and I chose “spite.”

Motivation? In this economy??? Even without the depression, the notion is laughable for my generation, since we’re constantly fed the rhetoric that the world is ending, doomed to always be filled with more awful things than good. Growing up with the rapid advancement of the internet means experiencing a constant stream of fatalistic news, because few things are as good at grabbing attention than fearmongering. I don’t know what it’s like to dream of living past thirty or aspiring to help future generations—my time’s always been limited. We were denied the ability to be kids and to dream unweighted by the crushing burdens of our reality. How do we keep going knowing that our time is even more finite and that no one with the power to do so is going to do anything tangible to stop it without radical change to the foundations of society itself? Especially when doing the bare minimum of continuing to exist already demands all of our energy at this point?

Well, what else can we do if not continue to try?

In my world, continuing to live and tend to my interests in the face of such hopelessness and dismissal is the ultimate form of radical defiance. Even if emotions like hope and joy and fear are all just socially constructed interpretations of sensorial arousal, what is hope nowadays if not just us finding justifications for our collective resolve to persist?

Why did I choose spite? Because in a world that force feeds us the rhetoric that we should give up, I choose to assert my agency by persisting anyways.

Where there’s no hope, we create our own.