By purest coincidence, the latest post from “Holly Mathnerd,” an eccentric but often perceptive substacker, raised the exact issue I was attempting to get at in yesterday’s ethics quiz. Apparently not too successfully: a lot of commenters seem to think that wasting money in the eyes of others is indistinguishable from wasting life, which is the primary issue I was trying to raise.
I realized a bit late in the erratic discussion that my ethics alarms triggered by a woman spending 70 days counting out loud are the same ones that ring over Americans taking themselves out of productive and collaborative society by using “recreational” drugs. If you live in a society, you have an obligation to participate in it, and as helpfully and productively as possible. Making oneself stupid by self-medicating isn’t doing that, and neither is counting out loud for 70 days.
Holly focused on the wasting life problem. She writes,
“Memento mori,” the Stoics taught us. Remember that you are going to die.
The idea is that keeping death in your peripheral vision — not obsessing over it, just refusing to pretend it isn’t there — the pretense most of us perform constantly and effortlessly — makes you live better. More deliberately. With less of your finite time squandered on things that don’t matter.”
Of course, the next challenge is how one defines “don’t matter.” If it matters to you, doesn’t that mean it “matters”? Or is there a useful, objective definition of “matters” that can distinguish between wasting life and truly using a life to its fullest extent? “Life is a banquet,” Auntie Mame memorably says in the novel, play, musical, movie and movie musical, “and most poor bastards are starving to death!” Her point was that there is no excuse for wasting a life.
Isn’t that a life competence lesson? Isn’t life competence an ethical value?
Ethics Alarms 
Ok, final assessment: She’s an idiot! 😉
https://www.youtube.com/live/WVWMqaVlW4Y?si=UG0XAr15dlDSqQxp
(Sorry, wrong place. Please be so kind as to place in Favour thread.
The vertical composition of her video is nice, even if it would benefit from here face being placed more along the bottom third of the frame.
Well, she was driving me crazy. Thank Heaven and antidote came along!
Now that’s no waste of time …
https://youtu.be/8HvKQZL-A1c?si=1oUtuasKp5fETOO_
Was she supposed to be actually counting in that video? I turned the volume up, but I couldn’t understand a word she said.
If one is going for a world record in counting, shouldn’t one have an obligation to speak so other people can tell one is counting?
I think were I Guinness, I might be tempted to award a record for gibberish……
If you live in a society, you have an obligation to participate in it, and as helpfully and productively as possible.
So…where do recreational games, reading, consumption of entertainment fall in this paradigm?
Jack,
I wonder if this would change your analysis. It is most probably false that she did nothing else for 70 days. If we assume that counting takes one second for most smaller numbers, then to count to 1,070,000 would take only 21 days, assuming spending 14 hours a day on the task, allowing for sleep, ablutions, and meals. Even if we say that the bigger numbers take two seconds apiece, which they did when I tried a few of them myself in a precise and clear fashion, we are still talking about spending between 4 and 8 hours a day on this pursuit. I know a lot of college kids in easier majors who have that kind of spare time, especially ones who are in their freshman year as this 18 year old may be. How is this worse than the folks who get done with class and go play (dating myself) Golden Eye or Halo for 8 hours? And where does that fall with the folks that get done with class and hang out with friends and get smashed?
We’ve already covered games, which are productive because they develop strategy and motor skills. Getting really good at anything through practice is productive. Kudos for thinking up the time angle: I confess, I never thought of challneging the 70 day calculation!
Edit: “People should only do things defined and quantified in a way that EA would authorize.”
Perhaps you could start your own ethics “church” and have strict rules for people to follow. You could start with a dress code like the church I went to. Business suits on Sunday because “we have a higher standard”.
You still have to define what productivity and participation are and how to measure it all. Otherwise, to me, you sound like a nagging cat lady staring out her window.
I agree that I would not spend 70 days counting out loud, but I have 5 natural born children. Their “stupid” “wasteful” “unproductive” behaviors, words etc. are part of the natural learning and development and are hilarious. In fact, Jack you would admire and commend the ambition and achievement of my oldest who also spends what appears to be enormous amounts of time slouching around consuming content which is opposite of his academic endeavors spanning music, sports, science, math and ethics.
Unless we are aged and crystalized in our thinking, we are neurologically flexible creatures- meaning creative. One person’s stupid is another’s creative.
It is stupid stunts like the COLF70D stunt that make us laugh and think of other derivative creative things.
Is it unethical for me to drown the opossum that keeps attacking my chickens?
Straw-man championship of 2026 so far! The behavior of children is so wildly irrelevant to this issue and topic that I can’t even conceive of a metaphor. And there is nothing in he post that suggests that EA has the power to or interests in “authorizing” conduct. This space has never suggested that it authorize or not authorize anything. It is also unnecessary to define productive or collaborative societal behavior, since it is beyond dispute that counting out loud for 70 days produces nothing but noise, and doing so on Youtube while alone in a room doesn’t interact with any human being.
I urge you to take some time and actually make a substantive argument. This isn’t one. If you just don’t want to consider the issue, that’s fine too, but just throwing stuff at the wall like “but my kids!” isn’t good faith commentary.
Alright, new question: What happens to your ethical verdict when the rubber meets the road?
Let’s say someone tells you that they’re going to start doing something that you believe is a waste of their free time. It doesn’t improve them or the world in any observable way, or at least not nearly as much as something else they could be doing with that time.
Maybe they want to count to a million, or maybe they want to watch a stupid TV show, or read trashy books, or make mediocre art, or run a long way, or climb a mountain, or stare at clouds or stars or birds or trains. (At this point I have no idea what hobbies you think are worthwhile, so for the purposes of this question, please pick one you think is not.)
If I correctly understand your use of the word “unethical” (which I might not), you hold that the way that they choose to enjoy their limited time on Earth makes them objectively a bad person, at least in part.
How do you respond? What do you tell that person? How do you say it? What consequences do you impose on them if they are not persuaded by your superior grasp of virtue? Where do you draw the line past which you become more unethical in your treatment of them than they are in their idleness? If we want to hold people responsible for contributing to society beyond purely voluntary acts and quid pro quo transactions like holding down a job, when in that process do we become communists?
I have no obligation to say or do anything. It would be exemplary ethics if I chose to try to persuade them that life involved more than counting, but trying to talk a useless person who is determined to be useless out of wasting their life is, eventually, wasting MY life. The point where there is a duty to try to intervene is when someone is going to do actual harm while wasting a life: as with committing suicide.
Like others, you are using false equivalencies. “watching a stupid TV show, or read trashy books, or make mediocre art, or run a long way, or climb a mountain, or stare at clouds or stars or birds or trains” all have some value, enhance an individual’s life experiences, increase their wisdom or critical faculties (you have to experience bad art to know what bad art is). Counting out loud does none of this. Those are all false arguments: they have value, even if it is minimal, so you can say, “See? It isn’t a waste of time/life!” Counting just to count isn’t like any of those activities.
It sounds like we agree that there are degrees of unethical behavior. I’d argue that if someone has a right to do something and it’s not actively making the world worse, then it’s ethically neutral rather than unethical, although that might just be a semantic distinction.
I think we agree that the world will gradually fall apart if everyone is ethically neutral, even in the absence of people actively harming it. If we’re not creating an upward spiral, we’re in downward one, even if it’s very slow. Society needs people to be actively constructive, even if we can’t compel any specific person to take that responsibility. (Trying to compel constructiveness gets compliance, at best. That can work if someone constructive is giving the orders, but forcing people to think independently just leads to that independent thought being used to game the system to survive, unless they actually want to do a good job.)
On a separate note, I did explicitly state that I didn’t know what you’d consider to be an equivalent waste of life or not. To me, your decisions about which hobbies have meaning and which don’t are somewhat arbitrary and black-and-white. I think what we’re both overlooking here is that most of these activities aren’t inherently useful or useless, but the more time a person spends on them, they run into diminishing marginal returns. The dose makes the poison.
Counting can help a person’s resolve and mental focus. Many people need a meditative activity to provide them with stability. Sometimes there’s value in not absorbing new information, just as there’s value in picking up and putting down weights even if you haven’t actually moved them anywhere. So the question then becomes, “how many hours does it take before a particular hobby stops generating enough value compared to some other way they could be spending their time?”
All that being said, in this particular case, I looked up Ogechi Ani’s comments on her reasons for trying to set a new record: https://www.coasttocoastam.com/article/woman-captures-guinness-world-record-by-counting-to-1070000-over-70-days/.
Per the above source, we have an “internal desire to break limits and achieve something extraordinary,” “my passion for counting kept me going” but also “It kept me motivated, knowing people were watching,” and “It was an incredible feeling, knowing I’d achieved something unique.”
I’m not sure who was paying her bills while she was spending 14 hours a day on this, but I’ll file her motivations under boldness (breaking limits), and probably idealization (in this case, seeking to be socially significant, or “special”). Maybe acquisition as well, if she continues to seek accomplishments and followers for their own sake.
I would describe this feat as an ambition for the unambitious, a narcissistic method of distinguishing oneself in a way that requires persistence but no significant skill. Come to that, counting to a million almost requires a person possess no impressive abilities, because if they did they’d quickly get restless and want to go exercise those abilities.
If someone said they were trying to break the record for counting, and I thought they had any potential at all, I’d ask them to think about what they’re trying to accomplish, and then look at other options for accomplishing it. I don’t think they’re obligated to do something useful with their life, but I have every right to try and inspire them to consider it, as long as I’m not browbeating them into it.