Nineteen: Tetris Expert (08-04-2022)
Recently watched a video on how to become an expert at anything, and what requirements exist to allow any activity to be capable of achieving expertise in. I don't remember the exact criteria, basically something requires luck, feedback on performance, and constant deliberate practice to achieve mastery. Looking around, none of the things I do in life have all those qualities, with most lacking the constant deliberate practice, which is hard and boring. As such, I've ventured to identify what task I can dedicate my time and energy to to achieve mastery and, more importantly, bragging rights regarding my expert status.
Tetris. At work, I usually kill time by writing these posts, which are terrible, easy, and garner no feedback. When I'm not endlessly putzing away on a viewerless website, I'm playing some free online flash version of Tetris, the classic Soviet time wasting addictive block game. I don't understand how the scoring works, and it certainly differs widely between the various versions I've played, but on at least one I was able to score over two hundred fifty thousand points, at a point in the game where the blocks were moving so quickly that I'm certain I've set a record for high score by a non-Asian.
From what I've heard, it's necessary to practice constantly, something I already do with Tetris, atop research and study of the game. I think I have study and research pretty much covered, since nobody else probably knew it was made by a Soviet math guy. Now all I have to do is play, for a few hours a day, until I'm so good I can call myself an expert, which should only take a few weeks or so.
Looking at other experts around the world, it's pretty obvious that being an expert in any given field or in any specific task, game, or object of study is entirely useless in the larger picture of life. What good is being a master of Tetris? Studies have shown that Tetris play can temporarily improve spatial reasoning and can lead to better mental aptitude, but is playing with glorified block toys on a screen the best way to achieve self actualization? Expert mathematicians, physicists, and other scientific professions ultimately spend the majority of their time begging for money by way of bragging about their credentials and performing the scientific equivalent of a minstrel show. The result of this charade is funding for "research" that involves putting broke undergrads to work while the supposed professionals return to begging for money for the next endeavor.
Being an "expert" athlete, in comparison, is a little more respectable as it requires both mental and physical fortitude. Athletes do make far more money at equivalent levels of success than intellectual professionals, but the additional effort as well as cultural influence permits this. For many, there is no option to become an athlete past early adolescence. In both cases, the mental and physical master is not guaranteed the freedom in time or attention to discover any deeper meaning about themselves beyond their success in a given field and whatever extraneous benefits drip upon them from their professional efforts.
This is the glory of Tetris: it is a party trick, it requires very little time devotion, and it isn't demeaning like intellectual mastery or homoerotic like physical mastery. While mastering Tetris in lieu of completing my assigned work, I can spend my other free time socializing, exercising, reading, writing, cooking, eating, pooping, peeing, wiping, flushing, returning, pooping, wiping, wiping, showering, pooping, stomping, and accomplishing the myriad tasks necessary to become a complete person mentally and physically. Mastery in a field or task that eats away at the aforementioned life activities is something many people search their entire life for, something that other yearn to achieve, and those who have would argue is necessary. The necessity to become a master, always peddled by the deceptive or by those who are masters in some given activity, is only necessary to masters. There is no need to become perfect at anything, and acquiring a wonderful mosaic of useless experiences and talents is a fine substitute for dedicated ability.