3 Reasons Why So Many Young Men Are Unemployed Gaming Addicts

Tyler Kirkpatrick
5 min readJan 23, 2022

It‘s Much More Than Just Laziness

Photo by Mike Meyers on Unsplash

I have a friend in Colorado who has never held a full-time job despite recently celebrating his 21st birthday. Let’s call him Cornelius IV.

Cornelius IV never went to college. Instead, he spends all of his time doing whatever he pleases, from exploring new hobbies to the most addicting hobby of them all: video games.

He probably games at least 10 hours each day. That’s almost two full-time jobs every week.

You’re probably expecting me to go on about how miserable and depressed he is and how he can’t pass any job interviews no matter how hard he tries. But that would be a glaring lie.

He’s an absolute blast to be around, both in-person and digitally. Cornelius IV is witty, extremely bright, and, most of all, happy.

But he must be incredibly lonely, right?

Wrong.

After thousands of hours playing online multiplayer games, he has amassed a fleet of friends in his city and from all across the globe. Cornelius IV has even gone on a few vacations with them, flying across the country to be with his digital brethren.

I know this won’t keep up forever. Eventually, my friend will find a career path that genuinely…

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Tyler Kirkpatrick

I write about politics, money, and my crippling video game addiction. Email: tkirkpatrick@smu.edu