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Old 2009-05-18, 03:04   Link #25
Kylaran
A Priori Impossibility
 
 
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: California
Age: 33
I'm a firm believer in the idea that individuals must overcome things of their own accord. You can give them whatever advice you want, you can bother them as much as you want, you can anger them as much as you want, but, in the end, most of it will be futile.

What's important is that something changes his life; finding a way to make him notice his own problem or find a way to get him obsessed with something else might be one of the best ways to solve his current problem. I woke up from a recent spurt of WoW playing (curse you Ulduar) because my grades were dropping significantly - the next week I skipped a few raids to study. It took me a couple of weeks to realize my own addiction, but no one could convince me of the problems I was having (weight gain, no social life) until I myself had become convinced of it.

However, before you attempt anything extreme to try and change your brother's life, you should make sure this habit is long-term. As others in this thread have mentioned, it is natural to fall into a period of immersion in a particular hobby or interest. It happens to all of us, despite how often we hear of people telling us to "balance" our lives.

And in regards to his friends: I hope by you don't mean drug dealing kids (and by drug dealing, I mean the hard stuff) involved in crime (I have the impression they just do "stupid" things and you don't seem to like their attitudes or their intelligence.) because that's just about the only real kind of friends I don't think are wanted. You don't need bright friends with perfect attitudes to necessarily have them be meaningful friends. I may dislike some of the habits of my friends (and some of them act the same way as your brother's friends), but we can spend a lot of meaningful moments together and we've been through some serious stuff as a group.
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