"The Luxury Of Entertainment" | TP&C | Episode 101

Episode 101 — The Luxury of Entertainment
Think Pieces and Conversations Podcast

In Episode 101 of Think Pieces and Conversations, titled The Luxury of Entertainment, I discuss how entertainment has slowly turned into a luxury expense — especially in the world of gaming.

Video games used to be one of the most accessible ways for people to relax, escape, compete, and relieve stress. But now, the cost of simply entertaining yourself is rising fast. Consoles are more expensive. PC parts are more expensive. Games are more expensive. DLC, microtransactions, subscriptions, collector’s editions, and in-game purchases all add up. Even outside of gaming, concerts, movies, and basic entertainment have become purchases that many people have to think twice about.

In this episode, I break down how buying a new console can feel like making a major financial sacrifice. When systems are costing seven or eight hundred dollars — almost the price of a car note — people are forced to ask whether entertainment is still affordable or if it has become another luxury item in an inflated economy.

I also talk about how this affects real life. When people can’t afford healthy ways to decompress, unwind, or enjoy themselves, that pressure can show up somewhere else. Gaming is one of the strongest forms of dopamine release for people who love it, and when that outlet becomes harder to access, it changes how people deal with stress, boredom, frustration, and even their environment.

This episode is about more than video games. It’s about inflation, access, stress relief, modern entertainment, and how the cost of joy is becoming too high for everyday people.

Entertainment used to be the escape.

Now the escape is becoming expensive.

This is The Luxury of Entertainment.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

The last couple videos I did. It showed me, yo, entertainment is a luxury purchase. Entertainment is a luxury item. To be entertained at this level, especially when talking about a video game, is a luxury item. You have to have a certain amount of money to use your leisure and play a game. This is one of the luxury items of entertainment that now has become a premium thing that wasn't luxury. It was considered affordable. Listen, bro. Video games, going to shows, shit, even working out sometimes. Like, if you want to go to a really good gym, you're gonna have to have that up front, whatever the money is, and you're gonna have to pay that monthly. And you got a car note, and you got a the Xbox Series X is eight hundred dollars. The PS5 Pro, the price went up. It's rumored that these consoles aren't even at their final price yet, as far as going up. They're not even at their final price yet, as far as going up. I built my PC in 2022, 2021, during the pandemic. I always wanted to build one, so I took the money I had saved up and I went and bought a PC. I was like, oh shit, this this is a lot of good things that I'm getting for 1500 right now. So it's a lot of good stuff. This is a really good graphics card. This is a really good tower. This is a really good SSD card. This is a really good hard drive. When Crucial was out, crucial is no longer with us. If you know about Crucial, Crucial is that company that made SSD solid state drives, memory, storage for the PC. Recently, they said we're gonna focus on creating RAM and memory for the AI race, the AI demand. So they completely stepped away from the business of the consumer. They went straight into military level, uh behind the scenes level, uh surveillance state level, smart city level, um AI, artificial intelligence, the thing that's burning the water, taking the water, raising the electric prices, the electric, it's raising everything, everything is going up. So for you to entertain yourself to turn on a game today, you have to be paying for an item that could easily be a car note in 2026. You getting a new car in 2026, that car note is probably gonna be six, seven, eight hundred dollars. Right? 550 at the the the lowest, and maybe I'm way off with 550. The reality of life is you gotta position yourself correctly at every downtime, downturn, especially, especially in the building parts, in the parts where you got hurt by something and you had to lay low and heal up. That's what COVID was. COVID was that for me. COVID was a wide, huge, gigantic distraction that told the world to stop and look around for a little bit. We had to find ourselves again. A lot of couples left each other because of COVID. A lot of couples didn't even know each other because of COVID. COVID took you, sat you down, and said, yo, it's time for you to think. You have to think, look around you, see what's going on. I want you to understand that this is probably gonna be your first time waking up. This is gonna be your first time. Maybe you your eyes opened a little bit during your years, you started to learn a couple things, see a couple things, meet the right people, then you just things just click. The thing that was considered severe that ended up not being severe was the thing that woke up a lot of people. This situation going on with the RAM, the memory, the AI, you must understand that there is a transition period that's happening right now in front of you. This is at the level that COVID did when it shut us down. But this energy has been transmuted into creating better technology, higher technology, saving companies money. Perceptively, even though I've seen a lot of news saying that companies are going back to human workers because the human worker at a certain part of the job, a certain uh field in the job, maybe it's more technical or engineering. In this example, it was engineering. They had to rehire 300 veteran engineers because the AI engineer wasn't doing the job correctly, it was making mistakes. AI isn't perfect. But I need y'all to understand when it's time to act on something, if you're saying, yo, I want to talk on this podcast, I'm gonna make this podcast, you got the idea in your head, you're taking too long to make it. If you keep thinking about it, it's gonna haunt you forever. What haunted me was I had to go and build that PC. I always wanted to build one, I always wanted to play with the PC players. I heard about frame rate, I heard about playing on Steam. You can use any controller, I could play with better graphics. I'm like, yo, I gotta get a PC. It's a perfect time. Everything is shut down. Now we're at the luxury of gaming right now. Where people gotta pretty much buy, you're buying a starter PC. $700, $800 is what people are paying for to have the luxury of playing a modern video game console. When you go to music concerts, guess what? The price of that luxury, which is to have fun and be entertained, to be entertained is a luxury. You gotta pay a premium. You gotta pay a premium to go to a concert, even if it's finesse two times or something. Them tickets ain't gonna be cheap neither. What? We living in times where everything is inflated. What you wanna do? Complain about it? Let me know if what you want to do is complain about it, you can do that right now. Complaining about it has never had the issue go away. It can help you brainstorm during these times. You gotta do a lot of brainstorming with how you're gonna entertain yourself. You're gonna have to really brainstorm how important is being entertained, how important is it is coming home from a crazy day at work, and you just trying to let off steam, you just trying to play Call of Duty, run around, shoot shit. You can't even do that. Because you don't got the system, or you had the system, but something happened to the system, and then it's like, damn, the prices went $200, $300 up plus on whatever it was before. So you like, shit, maybe I can't even get it. You finally figure out how to get it. Damn, you got it. Oof. You like, yo, like it took me. So you just really living in nervousness, like, yo, is my system gonna survive this? Who knows how long such and such is gonna be? Who knows how long this shortage is gonna be? Who knows how long this scam with supply and demand is gonna be? You don't really know. So when it's time to act, you gotta just act. You gotta understand everything surrounding your interests. Your interest is what you need to keep tabs of. If gaming is your interest, you need to think like a futurist, especially when there is something in your head. Something in my head was like, yo, build a PC, build a PC. If you're really in tune with the thing you love, something is telling you to go and make that move on something before something happens. I think so. That's just how I think. I think if you're connected with something, this is gonna help you stay connected and be stronger with that thing, especially if it's if it's supposed to be your thing. If it's supposed to be your thing, there's gonna be clues, omens, signals, synchronicity, angel numbers. You gotta you you gotta make sure that you're able to see though. And right now, what I see in 2026 and beyond any entertaining yourself, just sheer entertaining yourself, picking up a controller, playing it, playing with your friend, diving into another world. You gotta pay the premium price for that. You gotta make a sacrifice for that. It's crazy. One of the greatest joys on earth is when you're playing a game and it's your favorite game, you love it, you love the developers, you love your controller, you love life right now. You probably you could eat what you want. You every time you have a bad day at work, or if you think you're gonna have a bad day at work, you thinking about this game, like yo, I just can't wait to just play this shit and blow off stream. I just can't wait. You like, damn. This day was hard, but the day gets better because I know I'm gonna go home and play this game. Everybody in the neighborhood had a game. We had the Super Nintendo, we had the PlayStation 2, we had these systems. If we was fortunate, but it was it wasn't like that. Like, it wasn't like that back then. You thinking like if you was fortunate, because it was like, yo, this is actually reachable for people to get this system. Nowadays, you gotta make a real sacrifice, and when things are scarce and people it's hard for people to get certain things, when those people see other people getting that thing that they couldn't get, the streets become more dangerous, the streets become more dangerous like that. People have to blow off steam somehow, somehow. You have to blow off steam. If you don't blow off steam, that energy is gonna go somewhere else, and we want to minimize the problems we have when we can't transmute the energy into something that helps us, help us be more productive, help us be a better person. We don't we gotta be careful, you see what I'm saying? So while the world is doing whatever it's doing, you need to stay in tune with people like me, stay in tune with people like Big Homie CC. You gotta stay in tune with people that uh are independent journalists, they're checking things out. There's there's not there's no bias, they're not super politically in one way or another, or they have their own mind, so you gotta earn their vote. The independent voter. You gotta find these people, you gotta stay connected with the frequency that you're trying to reach. Because there's something in your gut, something in your head telling you, yo, I want to go this path. I've been thinking about going this path. I've been thinking about stopping drinking, I've been thinking about going to the gym four days a week. I've been thinking about putting out hella content every day. I've been thinking about uh just showing myself before even showing anybody else that I'm in tune with the game, I'm in tune with everything going on. It takes a lot to get there, it takes a lot of building, breaking and building to get there. To break and build, you gotta do that with a lot of things, you gotta do that with the way you see the world as well. Yes, you may think that everybody deserves to be to have a video game. You can think that, you could hope that you could do whatever you can to think that into fruition, but you need to open your eyes, look around.