The Loss of the Hunt

Hyper-convenience has eliminated one of the true joys in life.

I had exactly one Tintin comic when growing up: Land of Black Gold.

I read this book several times, giving it worn corners and a few creases. But just as good as the content itself was the back cover. It listed all the other Tintin comics you could buy. A whole world of possibilities. More adventure. Everything a young boy craves.

But first, you had to find them. And The Adventures of Tintin probably weren’t carried in your friendly neighborhood bookstore. Nor could you hop online and have it sent to you with free two-day shipping.

My 10-year-old self never found another Tintin book. The stories remained shrouded in mystique.

A Successful Hunt

Final Fantasy 3 for the SNES was my favorite video game when I was twelve. At the time, I had no idea it was really Final Fantasy 6. I didn’t care. I rented the game at a local video rental shop (remember those?), and the game sucked me in like nothing had ever sucked me in before.

The story. The music. The overall presentation. I only had it for three days. Not enough time to get far in the game, but it was enough.

I rented it again and again. You couldn’t simply renew the game, so sometimes I would get back the cartridge, and my save would be gone. I restarted that game more times than I can count. I jumped into saved games other people left behind, mysterious artifacts that dropped me into some unknown future.

I had to have my own copy. The problem: the game was no longer sold in stores. There also weren’t any Gamestops or independent used game stores. EBay wasn’t a thing, and my family wouldn’t get dial-up internet for another few years.

What to do?

I started calling local pawn shops to see if they had a copy. Once per month, I would call the same three stores, the ones closest to our house, and ask if they had Final Fantasy 3.

After months and months of nothing, eventually, one of them said yes. And it was for a price I could afford.

My mom, bless her heart, left immediately to get the game for me, her purse filled with the cash from my saved allowance. She came home with the cartridge. No box. No rule book. Just the cartridge.

At that moment, I was the happiest kid in the entire world. I have no proof of that fact, but I know it was true.

It wasn’t just because I now had my favorite game. That was part of it, but not the whole. The game exceeded all of my expectations, and I played it until my fingers bled. I can still hum most of the soundtrack.

Beyond that, I also glowed with the victory of a successful hunt. The cartridge was more than a game. It was a trophy proving my prowess. That specific cartridge is now gone, lost in a tornado that also took away other relics from my childhood.

But the tornado could not take away the success of the hunt.

Something Found, Something Lost

Our culture of hyper-convenience has given us much. There are almost no barriers to getting what we want. There are no obstacles to climb or overcome. Modernity has bulldozed the entire landscape, so there is no need to discover a path through the forest.

Nowadays, if I wanted to play Final Fantasy 6, I could buy it digitally and have it in moments. If I wanted to splurge and get the actual SNES cartridge, eBay currently has 118 results.

Likewise, you can buy every Tintin comic ever written. Amazon has nice hardbound collections that are reasonably priced, and each one has three stories in it. Three! If my 10-year-old self could hold one of these books, he would treat it like a bar of solid gold.

I bought a few of these collections for my own sons. Do you know how they treat them? Like any other book. They are nothing special. They have no air of mystique.

And you know what? They’re not wrong. Why would they think them special? They didn’t long for them or strive for them. They didn’t spend hours and hours imagining the stories they might contain.

This makes me sad. But on the other hand, they have all the Tintin stories at their fingertips. Is the tradeoff worth it? Perhaps. I’m not saying we have to go back or that “WE MUST RETVRN!”

But we should recognize what has been lost.

The joy of the hunt has now been co-opted with cheap pantomimes, polished to extract the maximum dollar and sharpened to draw forth the exact right amount of dopamine. Video game achievements. Foil Pokemon cards. Gacha mobile games.

None of it satisfies.

Someone once said that if people are too happy, if their lives are too easy, they create drama and fake hardships. If there is no struggle, people are miserable.

For my own children, I often think about how to give them the joy of the hunt because nowadays, it doesn’t happen by accident. Our extreme wealth, often a blessing, easily becomes a gold-plated cage, and Jeshurun grows fat and kicks.