video games

For those of us late Gen-Xers or millennials, we’ve learned that adulting is hard.

Putting aside the Great Recession and the resulting under-employment for many new college grads, there are a lot of other reasons why our lawns look the way they do. Besides many of us not wanting to use weed killer on the same grass our kids play on.

Here are the top four reasons I came up with for why adulting is so hard.

1. Video Games –  Pick your flavor. Whether you play MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, console games like Skyrim or Fallout 4, or Angry Birds on your phone, this is not an option that even existed for my dad when I was a kid. The Nintendo came out when I was in elementary school. I didn’t think much of it. We eventually got one, and while I loved Tetris and Super Mario Brothers, it was really easy to put down. I didn’t fully understand the possibility of the system until Legend of Zelda. Now, you have the option for a fun little time-waster like Candy Crush while you wait in line at the grocery store to the black hole of time games like World of Warcraft and Fallout 4 are.

2. Wanna Watch Some TV? – When I was a kid, there were three television stations. Even if you were lucky and your parents sprang for cable, there was still less than thirty stations. You actually had to be sitting in front of the TV at a designated time (7pm Monday nights for MacGyver!) to get to watch a show. You couldn’t just watch whatever you want whenever you were feeling lazy or like procrastinating. I remember on certain nights the only thing on was bowling. Going out and “leveling up” your lawn or cleaning out the towel closet was infinitely more fun than that. I have no idea how many thousand channels are even available now (we gave up cable in 2009), but I do know you can stream TV shows through Amazon and Netflix. You can binge-watch an entire series on a Saturday.

3. Movies – We had a VHS player when I was a kid, but movies were expensive (like $75 in 1980s money). Most of the time, we rented them. It took forever for new movies to come out, and then there was a long wait until your name came up and you could rent the “new” releases. Going to the movies was an expensive endeavor with kids, and frankly, my parents didn’t want to pay theater prices for them to sit bored through a kid’s movie. Not only are dvds relatively inexpensive today, you expect them to come out within six months or so of the movie. You no longer go to the VHS aisle of your local grocery store and hope they have something decent. Now, there’s On Demand, Redbox, Netflix, and Amazon. The video rental places of my youth are all gone. Of course they are. Why would they exist when I can own anything in Amazon’s vast army of movies with two clicks? There were some benefits to a VHS, though.

4. The Internet – Whether surfing it, using social media, watching YouTube, or buying your groceries, the internet has changed the way we spend our time. Sure, some call it a time waster, and it can be, but it’s also become a vehicle of our leisure time. Why would you be chasing dandelions off your lawn when you could be watching funny cat videos? Reading blogs? Or literally doing anything else?

How about you? Do think today’s plethora of entertainment options has made it harder to be an adult? Or at least acting like the adults of the past? Do you find it harder to do lawn work or other boring chores when there are so many other fun things to do? Anything I missed that you find to be a distraction to the work of adulthood?