No Stupid Questions

Eh, I'm not sticking up for OP here but I'm gonna pick apart your argument for logic's sake.

I think you're making an assumption that the way things have been is the same as the way things are or they way things will always be. I don't think that's the case though.

Change is the only constant in this world, and many things are constantly changing. Civilizations change, societies and cultures change, individual psychologies change, and trends on the collective level.

People in the 70s got by just fine without smartphones, but that doesn't mean people today would be just fine without them. Maybe we'd be fine eventually, but not without a period of strife.

People are addicted to phones, for one. Without that constant dopamine hit, millions would start tweaking like addicts without a fix. For another, as a society we've adjusted to depend on phones for so much. Sociality, navigation, banking, transactions, etc.. So many things that are so essential to life, and the skill sets associated with each one's analog counterpart have atrophied greatly. People these days are expected to be reachable anytime, anywhere. If suddenly we could only reach each other by landline or snailmail, we'd have problems to face as a society. If people can't access wikipedia or search engines and whatever else at a moment's notice, it would be a huge adjustment.

Maybe in the long term we'd be healthier as a society and as individuals if all our smartphones suddenly just disappeared one day, but it would take a huge adjustment before we returned to a sense of normalcy. And there's no telling what might happen in that time.

That's all just an example of how something that was once completely normally and even the baseline -- i.e., no smartphones -- could become unthinkable and catastrophic over time as technology develops and becomes the new norm.

So in that light, I don't think we can simply say "The Byzantines didn't have videogames, and their civilization lasted a thousand years." They had other pastimes, distractions, diversions, etc.. But people forget, skills and knowledge atrophy. We couldn't simply immediately return to relying on Byzantine-era hobbies and games. That might take decades to reestablish.

Now obviously I don't know the context of the conversation. On the surface, it seems wrong that he would limit the argument to just young men. These days people from all generations play video games. And people of all genders play video games.

I could be charitable and assume OP only said young men because they're presumably the majority of gamers and the usual targeted demographic of the gaming industry. But I'm not sure how true this is anymore, whether it's backed by research or just a stereotype. Even so, I think it's wrong to exclude other groups even if they're a minority of gamers. But I don't know that OP was deliberately excluding them, or if it was simply an oversight.

Then there's also the perception that young men are more aggressive than other groups, and therefore more likely to riot. Again though, this might be more stereotyping and not research-based. It kinda reinforces toxic standards and expectations of masculinity, while also dismissing the prevalence and salience of women et al in large-scale protest movements. So it's not fair to either gender, or for that matter, any other gender which gets marginalized or erased by this false dichotomy.

Lastly, I assume the topic of the larger conversation was video games, and that explains the focus on those. Like, of all things that could start a riot, it would seem strange to fixate on that. But again, I don't know the context. Maybe he was responding to someone who was already speculating on what would happen if video games disappear, or maybe someone aired a wish that they would disappear. I don't know. So I'm not gonna focus on the logic of discussing video games specifically, unless you mention a different reason why they were brought up in the first place.

There. I think that about covers it, at least from what I can glean in these few comments