The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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I don't see the relation between your first assertion and the quoted text. The quotation is referring to activities which have demonstrable benefits, and the author takes issue not with the idea that they're forms of leisure, but that they're unproductive forms of leisure, which they assume "hobby" to insinuate. Video games are absolutely unproductive in any real-world sense; music and reading are real-world activities in the actual, non-simulated world. The question is whether activities in the simulated world have any worth in our real one.
Reading can most certainly be simulated: consider smut, or cheap fantasy and fiction.
Same goes for music, the distinction between popular and highbrow musical productions has nothing to do with productivity.
What about "games" that straddle the line between real-world activites and simulated ones? Poker, sports gambling? People make a living off such "games". And pushing that idea further, what about the gamification of financial markets? Is there any productive purpose to the microsecond race to the bottom with high-frequency trading?
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Let's put it this way: you seem to already agree that listening to music is something that can be "taken seriously" (or at least, you didn't challenge that claim). If listening to music can be taken seriously, then why can't playing video games be taken seriously?
You seem to claim that video games are "simulated" and music is not. But I don't know what this means. You sitting in your room and listening to Beethoven's 5th on your laptop is surely no more or less simulated than you sitting in your room and playing Minecraft on your laptop. You could get together with other people and play music on real instruments. But you can also get a bunch of people in a room and play video games together. Again, neither activity seems more or less simulated than the other.
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