(This comment ended up much longer than I ever intended for it to be, you can skip to the 6th paragraph for the idea I'm trying to present).

My family acquired broadband in early 2005 after having dial-up for the previous few years which I wasn't allowed to use for anything but playing Checkers and Chess on Windows XP, so when I started using the internet around March 2005 I was in this wonderful world that I'd never seen before and I was instantly hooked. For Christmas 2005 my parents bought me a Dell Dimension 3100 and the internet became my life, I didn't have to share our family computer with my siblings and parents any more, I have exclusive access from my bedroom whenever I was awake.

For the entirety of 2006 and 2007 I would wake up, go to high school, come home and play Call of Duty 1 and post on internet forums until 10pm when I had to turn my computer off so my brother could go to bed. I played over 1,500 hours of Call of Duty 1 in those ~16 months (and was pretty good[1]), posted over 10,000 times across many different forums and had some interesting social experiences. School wasn't much fun, people didn't like me and I didn't enjoy "learning" subjects that I didn't care for. An hour spent on the internet was an hour I loved, an hour spent at school was an hour I hated.

From my very first internet experience (signing up for Newgrounds.com) I knew I wanted to make things, at the time I wasn't making anything of substance just dumb things (claymation[2], animation[3], simple flash games) and the majority of my time was taken up by video games. Eventually I got tired of video games and I found that I wasn't very good at drawing or animating so I moved on to making websites, video games were still a part of my life but website development was a noticeable portion. I would wake up and make websites that would improve the experience of people using the same forums I used, websites that would solve dumb problems I and my friends had.

I left high school in 2008 and I left with no qualifications (because I spent the previous years enjoying the internet and ignoring my school work) and I've been so fortunate that my interest in website development led me to start 2 websites in 2009 that went on to be very popular and generate enough revenue to give me a very good life.

The problem is the majority of my teenage life experience isn't a rarity, I know many people that I went to school with that had the exact same experience as me except (and this is the important part) they didn't find enjoyment in creating things and they haven't been lucky enough to have their "addiction" to the internet work out in their favour. They would wake up, get through the school day and go home and have fun playing video games and browsing the internet, more fun than they could get anywhere else.

If you consider how life is for the average person (go to school -> graduate -> get a job that pays enough for you to live but never really enjoy life -> retire) it's... well, to put it bluntly, it's shit. Now imagine you present these people (that know their life is never going to be anything special) with something that they find fun, something that affords them these great social opportunities and requires no real hard work on their part. They're going to inevitably sink their lives into it... most people in their 20s have parents that work for their retirement, that sort of long term thinking is fine when there's no alternative, but why would anyone today spend 40 years working menial jobs so they can retire when they can get instant gratification on the internet instead?

This problem is going to get worse and worse over the years to come, I know so many people in their early 20s like myself that grew up using the internet but unlike me are still living their lives as they were at 15. One person specifically that comes to mind is unemployed (exactly as the guy in the linked article) living with his parents, he has no job and spends all day playing MMOs. Why wouldn't he? He has no skills, nothing better than he wants to do, the world has nothing to offer him that the MMOs he sinks his life into can't.

The addiction to gaming isn't an addiction to the gaming, it's an addiction to the easy gratification. The world is shit and doesn't offer anything better for most people so there's no reason to do anything but play video games all day. I genuinely fear the day I lose interest in developing websites because there will be nothing left in the world for me, besides consuming the internet and playing video games.

Every generation has had this problem (the world not really offering that much to people) but the newer generations are finding an alternative to sticking to the path we have laid out for us, an alternative that provides instant gratification: the internet (and video games are a large part of that for most).

If you were born 50 years ago and you were told "work hard in school, get a job for 30 years and then retire and enjoy life!" you'd do it, because why not, there's no alternative. If you're told that now you can just browse the internet instead, all you need are parents willing to let you remain in your childhood bedroom. Why would you work for 40 hours a week making $8/hour just so you can rent a shitty apartment when you could just... not work? and get more enjoyment from the internet?

I'm not particularly smart (spending high school playing video games will do that to you) so I could be way off the mark, but it will not surprise me if unemployment continues to rise (and is high right now) because, in part, young people have no real reason to work. The gratification you get from the money associated with a minimum wage job cannot compete with the gratification the internet provides. If your parents aren't willing to kick you out (took mine 3 years to finally commit to it, by which point I was finally making money and could show I wasn't wasting my life) you're fine sitting at home all day.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cALs2RLivJ8

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exiTcRnOCEk

[3] http://citricsquid.deviantart.com/art/Ian-the-elephant-48945... (warning: auto playing sound)