12-Year-Old Spends Entire Hiking Trip Fantasizing About Which Video Game He’ll Play When He Gets Home
12-Year-Old Spends Entire Hiking Trip Fantasizing About Which Video Game He’ll Play When He Gets Home
CHATHAM, NH—During a long-planned excursion with his family through the White Mountain National Forest, 12-year-old Austin Tanden is said to have spent an entire hiking trip Tuesday fantasizing about exactly which video games he would play when he got home. “First, I’m going to boot up Fortnite and ...
This was me, skiing with my dad when I was a kid. Brand new Amiga 500 waiting in my room, along with 200 borrowed floppies, and dad wants to spend the Saturday skiing. Yay.
Watterson is a treasure.
I've used to do semi-competitive swimming as a child. Honestly one of the worst (as in boring, great for health and fixed my scoliosis) types of sport to do for an agitated child who wants to explore the world.
For an hour and a half you do laps while staring at the tiles on the bottom of your olympic pool. Would spend the entire time memorizing every crack on the tiles as well as doing entire video game playthroughs in my head lol
They actually sell headphones now that work for swimmers.
I feel called out
warm hug
Wait, why did they post real content?
If the Onion stopped posting satire and just started posting actual "human interest" stories and quotes from insane people on Facebook, how would we know?
How long could they get away with it?
Part of me thinks they already do haha
I haven't properly played Minecraft in years but I find myself out in nature and just imagining how I would build the area up, how the house would be made, what sort of pathways I would make. Guess what I am saying is I left Minecraft a while back but it has not left me yet.
And I can't play it anymore because it just makes me want to start doing that to the real world.
To be honest, I've done that while enjoying the activity I was doing, or at least not resenting it. I have ADHD so I know I can hyperfocus on something for too long, but I also k ow I can burn out. So I specifically stop doing things I want to keep doing because I know I'll enjoy it more later if I do so.
Stopping the hyperfocus activity before burning it out?
Is this a power you can learn?
Right?
My ADHD is shaped like this: Hyperfocus on a new interest. Read everything about it. It's the best thing ever. Think about it while doing other things. Then about a week or two later, I have 6% less fun when I do that thing and it's time for a new interest.
I'm honestly very good at many things you can learn in a week or two for this reason. I also have at least a laymen's understanding of many, many topics. But I am an expert in nothing.
When I'm very lucky, my interests overlap later and I can look like a pro when I "just started" this new hobby.
Plenty of non-gaming examples but one that comes to mind is Besiege / Trailmakers. I loved Besiege deeply for about two weeks. Built everything you could build in that time. When I played Trailmakers, I was outbuilding my much smarter friend because I already had a pretty good understanding of how the gyros and logic blocks would or wouldn't work in that type of game.
ADHD really is the perfect example of a blessing and a curse. A superpower with an equal and opposite cost.
Lost in the Android store looking for a game to play, not noticing my PC game has now loaded, and I no longer need a mobile game to make it through the PC game load time.
On Day One of a three week trip I bought Pokemon Silver the day it came out. I didn't even bring my GameBoy with me that trip because we were going camping on Day Two.
Longest 3 weeks of my life.
I'm sure the level of excitement when you got back home and could play was indescribable.
At least back then you still had the manual to be addicted to
Yep.
Did a cross country trip from the east coast to the Grand Canyon in a van as a kid.
Stopped at some old family friends who bought me StarTropics for the NES. This was day 2 or 3 of the trip. We spent the whole summer driving to the Grand Canyon and back with that cartridge in the back of the car…
Yup that was me as a kid lol. Took me a long time to just enjoy where I was at and not rush to do the thing that gave the most dopamine. Games, porn, drugs, sex... There's always something to jonse for, but just breathing in and out where your at and relaxing where you are just doing what you're doing is super great
I'm about to be 38 and this is still me. It's rare that I can sit somewhere and not be thinking of the thing that I'm dying to get back to. Even vacations are almost always a miserable experience. Is there a trick to turning off that part of my brain? I don't want to be anywhere but home 99% of the time.
Hey, I don't cotton to people spying on my childhood!
Or my adulthood, for that matter.
Y' know - if it gets the kid through the hike, there's nothing wrong with it. (Yes, I know it's the onion, but let's be real).
When I was a kid, I had my nose in books all the time. On long road trips, my parents sometimes told me to put down the book and look out the window, appreciate the landscape. I had no appreciation for landscape at that age. I do now that I'm in my mid-40s. But back then? I wanted to read my books.
My parents loved to go on long hikes. I kept up, I sometimes struggled, I sometimes hated it. What was I looking forward to at the end of the hike? Settling down with one of my books. My reward, if you so will. I like a good hike these days, back then not so much. If I'd had video games at the time, I'd probably have fantasised about them too, if it got me through a long and (in my mind) boring hike.
The only thing I ever saw break my kids' device spell was the Grand Canyon. When we walked up to it, my son was stunned and said, "Whoa, what happened?"
Literally was thinking about how I'd have made my last worldgen datapacks differently on my last hike.
It started snowing in the middle and I ended up going for like 5 times longer than I intended and meandering all over every path on Cougar Mountain literally, I'm embarrassed to say how long I was out. Had to do all my errands today instead. Was totally transfixed by the beauty of these gigantic Dippin Dots ass snowflakes
I saw what I was looking at, kind of, the beautiful lichens and mosses. But I constantly thought about them in potential Minecraft/Minetest terms. Worst Tetris effect there is!
Story of my life
Having the down time to let my mind wander is one of the best parts of hiking or any other alone time, even if it's about the stuff you plan to do when you're done. It's underrated imo