Conversations

I asked my grandson, “How did work go today?” He replied, “It was a waste of time.” I said, “Really, what would not be a waste of time?” He said, “Playing video games.”

I’d like you to give your perspective on this, but I don’t want any kind of surface response. I’ve thought about this a lot and would like to know if I’ve missed something important.

ChatGPT said:

I think there is considerably more in that exchange than the usual “young people would rather play video games than work” interpretation. In fact, I think your grandson accidentally posed a fairly serious philosophical question:

What makes an hour of a human life worth spending?

His answer and yours may differ because you may be using entirely different definitions of waste.

Suppose he worked eight hours and earned money, helped an employer accomplish something, perhaps learned a little, and contributed to producing whatever the business produces. By a conventional adult definition, those eight hours plainly weren’t wasted.

But your grandson may have been answering a different question: “Was there anything in those eight hours that I experienced as worth doing?” If the answer was no, then from inside his life, “waste of time” makes a certain amount of sense.

And that makes his video-game answer much more interesting.

A video game may give him things his job doesn’t

A well-designed game creates an extraordinarily concentrated little world of meaning. You know what you’re trying to accomplish. Your decisions matter. Difficulty generally rises with your ability. You receive immediate feedback. You acquire competence. You can see yourself improving. Failure usually teaches you something and lets you try again. Often you’re cooperating or competing with people you like.

Most importantly, you have agency.

Compare that with some jobs, particularly jobs available to younger people. Someone else tells you when to arrive, what to wear, what to do, how to do it, and when you may leave. You might spend hours doing something whose larger purpose you cannot see. Competence may merely earn you more of the same work. Feedback may consist mostly of being told when you’ve done something wrong.

Seen that way, the puzzle isn’t entirely why someone would prefer a video game. The puzzle is why we’ve constructed some real-world activities that provide people with less of a sense of purpose, progress, and agency than an artificial one does.

But I wouldn’t stop there, because that lets your grandson off too easily.

There’s something the game conceals

A video game supplies manufactured consequences.

The dragon matters because the designers have created a world in which killing the dragon matters. The points matter because the game says the points matter. The better sword matters because it allows you to defeat the next enemy, which matters because it gets you to the next level, which matters because there is another level.

It is an internally coherent circle.

That doesn’t make playing meaningless. Play has been part of human life forever. Pleasure, friendship, mastery, imagination, competition and recreation are genuine goods. An afternoon playing a game can be a perfectly good use of an afternoon.

But there is an important distinction between feeling that something matters and something having consequences outside the activity itself.

Work often has almost the opposite problem. Its immediate experience can feel meaningless while its consequences aren’t. The paycheck buys food. Somebody receives a service. A machine gets repaired. A field gets planted. A building gets cleaned. Someone who doesn’t show up leaves somebody else with the work.

So the video game can have high experienced meaning with relatively little external consequence, while a tedious job can have low experienced meaning with substantial external consequence.

Neither one, by itself, gives us a complete definition of worthwhile time.

But there’s an even deeper wrinkle

I suspect the really interesting word in your conversation is not work. It’s time.

When your grandson says work was a waste of time, he’s treating time as something belonging to him that ought to produce a satisfactory return.

That’s not unreasonable. Time is ultimately the one resource we actually cannot replace.

But what counts as a return?

Pleasure? Money? Achievement? Service to someone else? Learning? Relationships? Duty? Creating something that remains after you’re gone? Simply enjoying being alive?

A person who says, “Only productive time has value” can waste an entire life being productive.

A person who says, “Only enjoyable time has value” can discover eventually that a great many enjoyable hours have accumulated into very little that he cares about.

I don’t think either philosophy survives examination.

There is another category that becomes increasingly important as we get older: things worth doing that aren’t particularly enjoyable while we’re doing them.

Raising children contains a lot of those. So does farming. So does maintaining a house, caring for animals, helping somebody who can’t repay you, learning something difficult, keeping a promise, and staying with a problem after it stops being interesting.

Some of the most meaningful portions of a life would fail the test, “Would I rather be doing this than entertaining myself right now?”

That’s something a young person may not yet have had enough life to discover.

And perhaps your question to him was better than it first appears

You didn’t tell him, “Work isn’t a waste of time.”

You asked:

“What would not be a waste of time?”

And he answered.

That is actually the beginning of a much better conversation than an argument about work ethic. I’d be curious to know what happens if the question keeps going:

“What is it about playing video games that makes the time not wasted?”

Not “Why do you like video games?” Those are different questions.

If he says, “Because I’m having fun,” then the next interesting question is whether enjoyment is sufficient to make time worthwhile.

If he says, “Because I’m accomplishing something,” you’ve stumbled into the strange fact that he may experience virtual accomplishments as more genuine than accomplishments at work.

If he says, “Because I’m with my friends,” then perhaps the important thing isn’t the game at all.

If he says, “Because I get to decide what I’m doing,” then the subject has suddenly become autonomy.

And if he can’t really say why, that’s interesting too. He may never have separated “I want to do this” from “this is worth doing.” A lot of adults haven’t either.

There is one last thing I think is easy to miss. Your grandson’s original statement might not really have been a proposition about work at all. “It was a waste of time” could simply mean, “Nothing happened today that engaged me.” And “playing video games” could mean, “At least when I’m doing that, I feel involved in my own life.”

If that’s what lies underneath it, then lecturing him about the dignity of work would miss the important part entirely.

And yet his grandfather has something that the game cannot give him: decades of evidence about what happens when today’s use of time becomes a life. At his age, he mostly experiences hours prospectively—What would I like to do for the next three hours? You have enough years behind you to experience them retrospectively—Which of the things I spent my time doing turned out to matter?

Those two perspectives aren’t enemies. I think the genuinely difficult business of becoming an adult is learning to reconcile them:

to build a life that is worth living while you’re living it, but that also looks worth having lived when you look back.

Your grandson’s answer doesn’t strike me as shallow. Taken seriously, it raises exactly that question.

I let the conversation drop, partly because the purpose of my conversation in the first place was to connect and I wasn’t entirely certain that anything I said after that would produce or break a connection.

ChatGPT said:

I think that changes the meaning of the whole exchange.

You weren’t conducting an inquiry into your grandson’s philosophy of work. You asked, “How did work go today?” because you wanted to enter his world for a moment. His answer happened to open a door into a fascinating subject, but walking through that door might have defeated the reason you knocked in the first place.

There’s a useful distinction here between understanding a statement and responding to the person who made it.

Intellectually, “Playing video games isn’t a waste of time, but work is” invites all sorts of questions. Relationally, though, your grandson may simply have been saying, “Work was lousy today.” If you’d responded with a discussion of purpose, responsibility, or the value of work—even a very good discussion—you might inadvertently have changed roles. Grandfather interested in grandson becomes grandfather instructing grandson.

And young people are remarkably good at detecting that transition.

I also think there was something valuable in what you didn’t do. You allowed his answer to stand without correcting it. That communicates something rather powerful: you can tell me what you actually think, and I won’t immediately turn it into a lesson. If your larger purpose is connection, that’s probably worth quite a lot.

But there is a tension here that I suspect you’re noticing. A grandfather isn’t merely another friend. You possess experience he doesn’t have, and presumably part of being a grandfather is passing some of it along. So “never challenge him because I want to preserve the relationship” wouldn’t be quite right either. A relationship in which one person carefully avoids saying anything consequential isn’t much of a relationship.

The question becomes when.

I think there is a substantial difference between pursuing the subject at that moment and remembering it. If six months from now you’re doing something together and the subject of work, games, money, satisfaction, or time comes up naturally, you now know something about how he sees the world. You might say, “You once told me that work was a waste of time and playing video games wasn’t. I’ve thought about that more than you’d probably believe.”

That’s very different from, “Let me explain why you’re wrong.”

In fact, if you ever return to it, I think the most interesting thing you could give him isn’t your conclusion. It’s your genuine uncertainty:

“I’ve been thinking about what you said. I’m not sure what makes time wasted either.”

Because I don’t think you are sure. Your original question to me suggests that you’ve discovered there is something genuinely difficult underneath his apparently simple answer.

And perhaps that’s the thing you were instinctively protecting when you let it drop. You wanted the conversation to say “I’m interested in you,” not “I’m interested in improving you.”

Those can coexist between a grandfather and grandson. But they don’t always coexist successfully in the same five minutes.