This past week I spent around 20 hours gaming with friends. We played co-op video games — started in the evening and often sat there deep into the night. And I could have been catching up on sleep instead. Could have been productive. Could have spent that time on something more useful. Right? No, I couldn’t. Because there’s nothing more important.
And if there is, there’s very little of it. We’re waking up in a world where AI takes on more and more of the tasks. Where everything scales and copies itself endlessly.
Building relationships and friendships can’t be sped up. Friendship is built slowly — you have to live through meaningful experiences together. Different kinds of them. Full of meaning.
A work meeting on Zoom is a shared experience too. But it’s usually not as dense with meaning. The best work meeting (other than a one-on-one) is a joint brainstorm — when something new is born out of the shared effort. For everything else there are those round little Telegram video notes, Slack, and transcribed voice messages. Someday I’ll get there.
There are also masterminds — where people are genuinely curious about each other and try to help. Relationships grow there too. And one-on-ones, of course.
By the way. Even my relationship with my son I partly build and keep alive inside games.
So — what’s the point of all this? Playing games with friends is priceless. Especially when life has scattered you across different countries and cities. Play, learn, love. For everything else, there’s GPT.