I feel like I am an inattentive, disenganged person, and nonagenty people do suck the life out of me. What changed in your case which made you see things differently?

So if you are basically a Sensate, seeking to experience everything in the multiverse, then (good) Internet articles, books, TV and video games are like memory stones: objects containing the experiences of others, which allow you to experience something that you might never be able to experience yourself.

It's a trade-off. Media provides alternate experiences much faster than you could do them yourself, but also at a more shallow level. There's a case to be made for alternating between both: once you have viscerally experienced something yourself, reading about something related may make for a stronger experience, since it activates more memories and associations in you and allows you to better simulate the original experience behind the account. At the same time, having experienced second-hands accounts of something may make things in real life more rewarding to experience, because you can look at them from points of view that wouldn't have occurred to you if you were only going on your own experience. Some of this may come via very unexpected routes, such as the time when I ended up playing sports and ended up appreciating them more due to my gaming experience:

Ended up playing some sähly (rather like floorball, with some differences such as a lack of goalies) yesterday, and was somewhat blown away. My previous experience with sähly, football, etc. had come from the physical ed lessons in school, and I'd mostly experienced it as aimless running around the ball.

But this time around, I'd played enough strategy games to pick up on the fact that the game actually had a definite tactical dimension as well. Now I didn't realize anything terribly complicated, mostly just basic stuff like "well I could be rushing on the offense, but then if the ball gets thrown back to our side of the field, then everyone in our team will be on the wrong side, so maybe I should hang back a bit" and "I should go after that guy with the ball, even though I won't get it from him I can force him to pass it to someone else, which is much better than letting him do whatever he wants". But I'm not sure how much I ever thought in terms of those kinds of concepts back in elementary school - e.g. I'm pretty sure that I only had the latter insight now because I'd played enough strategy games and had read articles about military strategy.

I imagine that if our PE teachers had bothered actually explaining to us that these games had an intellectual component as well, and weren't just about pure physical fitness, geeks like me would've enjoyed the thing a lot more.

Don't throw hedonism out of your 1000 year plan so easily. The described habits are not bad for their hedonism, they are bad because they are easy, boring, and safe. They compare to 1000 year hedonism the same way joining the local jogging club or nature group compares to a tour in the armed forces. If you want to expand yourself, make life hard, build a stronger ego, try out a WoW addiction, or push your sexual comfort zone.

Disclaimer: These suggestions may be bad, may be good, but I the perspective is consistent with the 1000 year plan. It is important to recognize that the listed vices (tv, games, etc.) are unwanted because there are boring, nothing to do with hedonism.

Hrm. I'm not sure if I've gotten better at what I do, but I certainly know a crapton more than I did when I started, mostly because of exposure to new (to me) technologies. So I would say yes. It's too soon to say if it's begun to level off, but I suspect not, since my responsibilities are still in flux.

Thank you for the followup.