Well, Spring Break is now officially over, so I’m back to the regular schedule. Tonight was also another superb night of my strategic management class with a thought-inspiring case. Tonight’s case was a discussion on Electronic Arts, the makers of one of the best video games ever — Madden (insert year here). It was a fun case, although I was a bit drained from spending most of the day finishing up my paper which was due today — the first day back from Spring Break. Who makes a due date the first day back from Spring Break? Anyway, I’m digressing.
Other than talking about video games, a couple other things spurred my thinking this evening. One was the eventual hack claim that video games cause violence, followed by video games are addictive and screw up relationships. Not like that’s the only thing that screws up a relationship — I hear spending $4300 hiring hookers named Kristen can do that too. I wish I had that much money to hire a professional — I’ve got $8 in winning lottery tickets in my pocket; what will that buy? Anyhow, the other thing that got me thinking was how the instructor realizing that we were all as apathetic and tired as any other Monday night, mentioned a couple of times something about not discussing Michael Porter’s Five Forces model. Every time she said this reminded of the episode of Coast to Coast AM that I listened to on February 16th.
The guest from that show was a guy named Dr. Leonard Sax. He was hocking a book he wrote called “Boys Adrift.” It was subtitled “The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men.” After reading the subtitle, I can tell Dr. Sax is definitely an overachiever. In this book, he talks about these five factors (video games being one of them) that are screwing up men and making them passive and less assertive. He makes some interesting points, but at some point he comes off as some sort of apologist for the 1950s. I mean, he’s getting upset about more women Ph.D.s and guys not being able to do aggressive things like drag racing. I didn’t get through the whole book or listen to the entire interview, but I’m sure he would have bitched about how people aren’t making babies (which I always point out is the central requirement to building nationalistic war machines hell-bent on rape, genocide, and destruction). The most galling point of the interview, though, was that Coast interviewer Ian Punnett (who I otherwise dig) has been talking about this like he’s the champion of manly-men everywhere. Kind of funny for a metrosexual that hosts a morning show with his wife.
While there are some valid points to be made about environmental conditions causing problems with male development, I think my biggest problem with this is that maybe guys aren’t getting lazy and demotivated. Maybe they’re just looking at the world around them getting worse and deciding that the rat race that drove their parents and grandparents to war and to the grave just isn’t worth it. Maybe if we all adopt peace or look inside ourselves or get on board with some other hippie mantra, maybe humans will actually evolve instead of continuing on the same messed up path we’ve been on for millions of years.
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