Funny. I have smoked regularly for two decades, yet also have two STEM degrees, a full time EE job, occasional side work, and I’m fixing up a 100 year old house.
But I started in farm land learning to build with raw materials, fixing tractors and other machines, growing food, while most of my peers sat inside watching TV. My muscle and cognitive memory is well developed from development of electronics products, a life of building homes and barns to stripping cars to frame and rebuilding them.
Weed has nothing to do with underachievement. It’s a contemporary culture that champions low effort fail up office work or asset ownership. Having worked in web apps the last 10 years, the only challenge I’ve faced is keeping pace with low output office lifers who never learned to rotate a tire or grow a potato.
Weed just makes someone more of their inner self. I get stoned and take on a project because that’s what I’ve done my whole life (built new garden boxes and ripped up an old sagging deck last weekend). A stoned couch surfer was already a lazy couch surfer.
All video games are empty time sinks at the end of the day. It’s a matter of what people want their escape to look and sound like.
Anyone expecting real world prestige for 100 percenting the last Mario? It’s all still literally accomplishing sitting on the couch only barely rising above passive consumption of entertainment.
Asking “what does it all mean” to everything gets exhausting. Human existence is arbitrary; it happened because it could.