In general, make decisions according to the furtherance of your current set of priorities.
Personally, though I enjoy certain persistant-world games for their content and lasting internal advantages, the impression I’ve gotten from reading others’ accounts of World of Warcraft compared to other games is that it takes up a disproportionate amount of time/effort/money compared to other sources of pleasure.
For that game, the sunk-costs fallacy and the training-to-do-random-things-infinitely phenomenon may help in speculating about why so many sink and continue to sink time into it. I’ve noticed that people who bite the bullet and quit speak not as though they were dependent and longing to relapse into remembered joy, but rather as though horrified in retrospect at how they let themselves get used to essentially playing to work, that is doing something which in theory they enjoyed yet which in practice was itself a source of considerable stress/boredom/frustration. (Again, I have had no direct experience with the game.)
For cocaine, straightforwardly there’s the expectation that it would do bad things to your receptors (as well as your nose lining...) such that you would gain dependency and require it for normality, as with caffeine and nicotine and alcohol. Your priorities would be forcibly changed to a state incompatible with your current priorities, thus it is worth avoiding. If there were a form or similar thing which in fact had no long-term neurological effects, that is one which actually gave you the high without causing any dependency (is that even theoretically possible, though, considering how the brain works? Well, if dropped to the level of most things then instead, say...), it might be worth trying in the same way that music is helpful to cheer oneself up (if it cost less as well?), or perhaps sweet foods would be a better example there.
The standard answer for sex is that it’s already part of your system of priorities, and so there’s little helping it. Practically speaking, it would probably be far easier if one could just turn off one’s interest in that regard and focus one’s energy elsewhere—particularly, in terms of the various psychological/physiological health benefits, if one already cannot experience it yet is near-futilely driven to seek it. Again though, there one more wants to turn off ‘the impulse to have sex’ rather than sex itself, since there are advantages if you want to have sex and do compared to if you want to and can’t, and also advantages if you don’t want to and don’t compared to if you want to and can’t.
Hm… returning to the original question wording, if one treats World of Warcraft as a potentially-addictive use of time that may truly or otherwise effectively rewire one’s sytem of priorities to the point of interference with one’s current priorities, then it is likely reasonable to avoid it for that reason. It’s again important to note which priorities are true priorities (such as improvement of the world?) that one wishes to whole-heartedly support, and which are priorities which, when stopped to think about, don’t have a particularly reason to value (such as the sex drive issue, which actually doesn’t have much going for it compared to other ways of pursuing pleasure).
(Species-wide reproductive advantages are acknowledged.)
In general, make decisions according to the furtherance of your current set of priorities.
Personally, though I enjoy certain persistant-world games for their content and lasting internal advantages, the impression I’ve gotten from reading others’ accounts of World of Warcraft compared to other games is that it takes up a disproportionate amount of time/effort/money compared to other sources of pleasure.
For that game, the sunk-costs fallacy and the training-to-do-random-things-infinitely phenomenon may help in speculating about why so many sink and continue to sink time into it. I’ve noticed that people who bite the bullet and quit speak not as though they were dependent and longing to relapse into remembered joy, but rather as though horrified in retrospect at how they let themselves get used to essentially playing to work, that is doing something which in theory they enjoyed yet which in practice was itself a source of considerable stress/boredom/frustration. (Again, I have had no direct experience with the game.)
For cocaine, straightforwardly there’s the expectation that it would do bad things to your receptors (as well as your nose lining...) such that you would gain dependency and require it for normality, as with caffeine and nicotine and alcohol. Your priorities would be forcibly changed to a state incompatible with your current priorities, thus it is worth avoiding. If there were a form or similar thing which in fact had no long-term neurological effects, that is one which actually gave you the high without causing any dependency (is that even theoretically possible, though, considering how the brain works? Well, if dropped to the level of most things then instead, say...), it might be worth trying in the same way that music is helpful to cheer oneself up (if it cost less as well?), or perhaps sweet foods would be a better example there.
The standard answer for sex is that it’s already part of your system of priorities, and so there’s little helping it. Practically speaking, it would probably be far easier if one could just turn off one’s interest in that regard and focus one’s energy elsewhere—particularly, in terms of the various psychological/physiological health benefits, if one already cannot experience it yet is near-futilely driven to seek it. Again though, there one more wants to turn off ‘the impulse to have sex’ rather than sex itself, since there are advantages if you want to have sex and do compared to if you want to and can’t, and also advantages if you don’t want to and don’t compared to if you want to and can’t.
Hm… returning to the original question wording, if one treats World of Warcraft as a potentially-addictive use of time that may truly or otherwise effectively rewire one’s sytem of priorities to the point of interference with one’s current priorities, then it is likely reasonable to avoid it for that reason. It’s again important to note which priorities are true priorities (such as improvement of the world?) that one wishes to whole-heartedly support, and which are priorities which, when stopped to think about, don’t have a particularly reason to value (such as the sex drive issue, which actually doesn’t have much going for it compared to other ways of pursuing pleasure).
(Species-wide reproductive advantages are acknowledged.)