I had an interesting philosophical conversation with my kids (interesting to me, and probably nobody else) about the nature of reality. It sprang from a conversation about Hadron colliders and the Higgs Boson particle (what the heck are they teaching in middle school?). We discussed the end of the universe and eventually wandered into conversations about reality and what constitutes one person’s reality vs. another. This, logically, led to a conversation about social reality and Youtube and Fortnite. All three discussed their own particular social realities and the values of those to them. Specifically, they were interested in talking about why what they care about matters in the larger scheme of things. What is most interesting is that they didn’t try to couch it in a discussion of how valuable their social reality is to my own. In other words, they were not trying to tell me why Fortnite matters in the real world, but instead describing the game and other aspects of their world in terms of what holds value to them and those around them.
It was an interesting moment for me, because I recognized that as a parent I am merely training them to perform in the ‘real world’ as I presently define it, and trying to teach them that games and all of that other stuff don’t necessarily matter that much. Why don’t they? Because they don’t necessarily translate to the things that matter in the ‘real world’.
This doesn’t mean that those things do not matter.