https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Y6DrUCxXiOU
For my ally is the force and the power for all it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us. The history of Star Wars, I’m sure you’re aware, like the hero’s journey that’s embedded in there. And where that came from, and this is like distilled from all of our great religious myths. And then placed into Star Wars. So you could make the argument that it’s like this sacred story and it must have intense meaning. But I also worry that it might just be like an addictive substance like that. Has all the appearance of meaning, but doesn’t actually mean anything. And I can’t find an answer to that for myself. Well, let’s try it together. If you were to ask me, you get to ask Damien one question. And from that, determine how much meaning in life he has. This is the question I would ask Damien. How often do you enter the flow state? Not as often as I want to. Yeah, yeah. That’s exactly the right answer. That’s a good answer. So think about this. What, why, what does flow, what’s flow all about? Well, flow’s all about that terrific sense of being deeply connected to the world. Of the world, of having ongoing insight, of getting an enacted sense of being coupled to the deeper patterns of the world. Really great, what’s called implicit learning. So it’s this connectedness and sense making and insight. Video games are flow induction machines. Right? They put you into the flow state. Right? Really, really reliably. You’re getting everything that you want for meaning. But you’re getting into a situation that is not designed to transfer. It’s not like when people go to church. People go to church and they go into a huge simulation, a huge video game in which they’re doing all of this stuff. But the idea is that’s supposed to bleed. It’s set up, it’s designed, it’s cultivated to transfer out education. We just forget how weird and fictional education is. You go into this room and you spin all these possible worlds and ideas. And the whole point of that is to get people to adduce, to draw from them a new way of seeing the world, a new way of understanding themselves. I mean, that’s why they were originally called the liberal arts. They’re supposed to liberate us in some important fashion. They’re aspirational projects. My favorite author as a kid growing up was Roger Zelazny. I think of what I consider his masterpiece, Lord of Light. I was locked in a fundamentalist Christian worldview. I’d been brought up and I read that book and it shattered that for me. And not because he, not like Sam Harris, some new atheist come in and gave me all these. It was like, boom, I can be other than I’ve always been. And I can see other than I’ve always seen. And I experienced profound recovery. So the question I want to ask is that I hope this doesn’t sound too simplistic is how much bleed is there? How much transfer? How much does this participation in the Star Wars world genuinely enhance their capacity for wisdom in their lives? Is it transformative of their sense of self, their sense of world? And does it afford measurable increase? So, for example, if somebody is doing a lot of Star Wars stuff and that transferred such that they were getting into the flow state more often in their lives, or they were more capable of stepping back and looking at their own perspective and transforming it, then I wouldn’t say it’s an addiction. I would say it’s actually providing something like recovery.