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9,999 Hours of World of Warcraft

Lucas A. Davidson
3 min readJan 6, 2025

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Daily Meditation 1,037–1/6/2025

The original WoW map from back in the day. What a banger.

When I was about 20 or so in September of 2008, a friend of mine spent a full day downloading a game onto his computer. It was something called “World of Warcraft.”

“Sounds lame” I said, but used different “brospeak” word choices as I turned back to my playing Final Fantasy XII on my PS2.

The next morning, it was done downloading. As I kept playing my game, I could hear the relatively infamous character creation screen loading music of WoW behind me. He had made a Dwarf Warrior.

Soon, the music, sound of battle and Dwarvish brogue as his character told jokes lured me over.

A complicated layout of spells, abilities, and stats were all shown to me. I was mesmerized. Then he showed me the map.

“This is just this one zone,” my buddy told me, moving his character for a good two or three minutes before reopening the map, revealing he had hardly moved across the map…
Then he clicked and said “but this is the entire continent of zones.” Before us was a swath of what looked like countries. He clicked again and there were two continents! One more click — THERE WAS A SPACE CONTINENT?!

That night as he prepared to go to bed, he helped me through the character creation screen where I made a…

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Lucas A. Davidson
Lucas A. Davidson

Written by Lucas A. Davidson

Daily philosophical meditations on Eudaimonia. These are distillations from the forthcoming book on the topic. Comments or jobs: lucas@multistatewide.com

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