Endless games, and quest for a good life
Life is nothing but a grand game in which we keep ourselves busy with side quests. From the day we are born till the day we die, we are always preoccupied by some finite achievable goals that we either want to, or need to accomplish. Of course, there are always some intangible and abstract goals such as “pursuit of excellence” and “getting better each day” which are a lifelong pursuit, but mostly our lives are comprised of tangible, achievable goals we can and do achieve. It is then, when you suddenly find yourself on the other side, having achieved what you wanted to, that you realize a harsh truth. Your life is still not solved. Your life still have a million problems. And that, you haven’t even started to play the ultimate game because nobody told you about it.
Side quests
Ever since we’re born, we have some very set goals to achieve. When you’re an infant, unbeknownst to you some goals are laid down for you before you even gain conscience. Learning to walk, talk, eat etc.
After you complete 4/5 years of life, and start to understand the spatial contours of the world around you - you begin to set up goals for yourself. And thus begins the endless process, which predominantly defines what life is. What is life if not the pursuit of the next thing. In many ways, that is what gives meaning to people’s life - working towards achieving something. But the biggest problem with this is that it is endless. We never stop in this pursuit of the next thing. No matter how big your achievement is, there is always something bigger that you can achieve. It is a miserable cycle for anyone to be in. A cycle in which Sisyphus is never happy. But how did we find ourselves in this bad bargain? But who is to blame for it? All of us have grown up like this, chasing goals and targets. Before understanding the possible irrational drive to achieve everything, let’s understand what these quests are. These quests are predominantly of three types. Career based, extra-curricular based & sex based.
Quest of Career:
Starting from school, it is drilled into us that we have to achieve a certain grade, a certain standard, a certain rank. So begins the endless target chasing in academics, which is ultimately the starting point for the endless target chasing we all do throughout our lives in our careers. A major part of our life is spent in chasing this illusive, abstract and, ever changing target. Throughout our studies, we try to do better, get better grades, get better internships and then, get better jobs - perpetually. We jump from one job to the other in search of something elusive, something that we think is missing in our lives, something that we think will make us happy. That feeling of unknown that lies in the next thing is too alluring.
Quest of Extra curricular:
Likewise as above, some of us take extra curricular activities throughout school and university. Because everything is a competition, engaging in these extra curricular activities also gives us a sense of purpose, a send of drive, something to achieve. I must get better at basketball, I must get better than that player, I must score all the baskets I attempt, I must focus on my fitness etc etc.
Quest for Sex:
Of course this is something that you aren’t as occupied with in school, but as you grow older and become sexually active - trying to find a sexual partner becomes an important part of your life. Irrespective of the type of relationship you aim to have - casual, monogamous, polyamorous etc., chasing the person occupies your life and time. You think about it, you act on it, and many times this quest takes over the other two quests.
The point is that the human experience is comprised of us working on either of these quests, perpetually. We are always stuck in this endless loop. Of chasing the next thing, next person, next job, next phone, next sneakers etc. You chase one target, you instantly set a new one. And the process never ends. You’re in this forever. At some point you want to ask yourself, “Are these games even worth playing?” or, “Till when do I want to play these games?”
Play games you care to win
Naval Ravikant once said that “Only play games that you care to win, and the reason to win the game is so that you can be free of it”. For me this has been a guiding logic of my life. There’s infinite wisdom contained in these lines.
Firstly, it tells us that we shouldn’t get into things that we don’t intend to carry out to completion and give our best to. No half-assing in life. It also saves us from much unintended failure and trouble in life, because if we’re doing things even if we don’t really care for doing them, it is because we think we want to do them, but not really. Most people have a tendency of taking up more on their plate than they can manage. Ask yourself, amongst the things that you’ve taken up, winning at how many of those things is really meaningful to you? The answer to this will give you tunnel vision. It will help you narrow down to things that you really care for, which instantaneously also increases your chance of success at them.
The second part of this phrase is even more important, because it addresses the never ending perpetual nature of these quests. When do we stop? When do we know that what we’ve done is enough? Naval says that given that you only play games you care to win, the point of winning a game is to not signal status, but to become free of it. What this means is that to escape the never ending cycle of targets and achievements, you work towards winning the game and when you win it, you quit it and become free of it. Of course the number one question is how do we know when we’ve won the game. This is a personal question to answer, and of course the winning aspect of it may also be target based. But the key difference is that it won’t be endless. It will be finite in the sense that you say to yourself “I will have won the game if I have achieved this” or, “I will have won the game if I have spent a certain amount of years in something” etc. The point is that you set a discernable line for yourself. And when you cross it, you’ve won the game for yourself. And because you’ve won the game, there is no reason to play it anymore. You must become free of it. That game should not direct your life anymore. I’ll give you an example in which this worked for me. When I joined college, I desperately wanted to get good at debating. But to my misfortune, I sucked at it for the most part. I kept loosing and not doing well. It defined my self worth excessively. I thought of myself as a loser just because I couldn’t do well in tournaments. But I wanted to get better at it. So I kept practicing until I began to do fairly well, started to win debates and even tournaments. When the pandemic struck us, I looked back at my debating career and of course there were a million tournaments that I hadn’t won and another gazillion prizes I hadn’t won. I could’ve fallen down the black hole of endless quest, as most of us do, and I would have never left the activity convincing myself that I have so many things yet to achieve. But I looked back at my career and saw that I had achieved most things I has started out to do - consistent wins, a good reputation, and a good senior to my juniors. For me that was winning. I had won the game. I was content. I couldn’t let myself fall down the slippery slope of perpetual quests. So I became free of it. I no longer was bothered by the fact that my peers were still debating and achieving more and better things. I had become free of the game for I had won it for myself.
I would assume that you do this for other things in life as well. You become free from a game that has excessively defined you and your self worth after you’ve won it. It is important that we let things go, that we allow ourselves to become free of it. If you don’t, we’ll always be stuck in this endless loop of quests. Never free, and never content. Always miserable. That, I don’t think is a life worth living.
The ultimate game that nobody taught us how to play
Even though the first step of knowing and realizing that you should only play games that you care to win, and that the point of winning the game is to become free of it is itself a momentous and difficult one, there is something that is even more important that lays beyond that. A game that nobody taught us how to play, or even think about.
After you win the game, and become free of it - you suffer from a void. If your life has been defined by the pursuit of something, you don’t know what to do with your time, energy and efforts after you achieve that aim. For a lot of people it is a job. Many of us study hard, do internships and engage in extra curricular activities mostly because it helps us to get a job. But when you get one before you graduate, what do you do with the time that’s left? Currently, this is s question that many of my friends are struggling with. Given that in many sense, we’ve won the game of job seeking - we’re free of it now. That quest and aspiration no longer defines us. You would assume that that’s a fantastic thing. But it’s not. It’s not because once you enter a phase in life where you realize that you’re more or less fulfilled the major quests if life for your age, you are forced to encounter and think about things you’ve always kept at the backseat. Issues that were, are and will always be, part of the ultimate quest that none of us was taught how to play. The quest of how to live a fulfilling life.
One day sooner or later you’ll have to realize the fact that the your next achievement won’t make your life better and you happy, unless you’re first happy and content with yourself. The next achievement won’t take your miseries away, or somehow make you happy in any substantial way. If you’re fundamentally unhappy in life, you’ll be unhappy even if you achieve all your dream goals. One day you’ll realize that while you were busy chasing endless targets on side quests, you forgot to start on the main quest of life - which is knowing how to live a life. A complete life. It is not completely your fault. Nobody taught you any better. Nobody told you that son, all this is fine but when you grow up you’ll need skills entirely different from what you’re being taught at in school and at home. I wonder who is to blame for it, if anyone. Parents perhaps? Because they did not equip or try to equip their children with the necessary skills to handle and cope with certain types of situations. But that’s also a tangent at best. The only ‘fact’ is that all of us find ourselves at a cross roads in life where we are lost. Where we’ve achieved what we had sought to achieve and then suddenly find ourselves facing problems that we brushed aside as secondary. Daunting problems. The main problems of life. The central questions of existence.
For me these are the questions I seek to answer for myself as of now. My questions for answering how to live a good life.
How to become a calm person?
How to be mature about people & emotions?
How to develop patience?
How to develop the ability to live at peace with oneself, free from external stimuli?
How to love yourself?
How to develop appreciation for little things in life
And so on…
I would like to clarify that I don’t think that there is any linear way to go about this, which is to say that I don’t think that you should only deal with these problems once you’re done with the normative tasks such as getting a job etc. Ideally you should start doing this meanwhile you work on other problems.
The idea is that the central problem we all should be thinking is to find out for ourselves two things:
What kind of a life do we want for ourselves?
How do we shape our life to make it in the image of the life we want?
It is imperative to understand that these questions are not capitalistic. Which is to say that the answer to any of these questions will not be a materialistic object. You may answer the first question by saying that I want a life for myself in which I can buy whatever I want. And you may also be able to achieve it. But when you’re sitting on the top of the pile of money, the same deep problems of life will plague you as they did before the money. Money cannot solve these problems. Money can only solve money problems. Acquiring new things will give you a momentary and cheap happiness, which fades away faster than it came.
So, what should be the answer? In my opinion, the answer to these questions is philosophical and spiritual. We must go deep into our mind to find out what plagues us, what makes us unhappy, what makes us happy, what makes our life worth living and what do we want tot do with our lives. All of these are deeply hard questions. Questions which cannot be answered in a day, month of even years. But then, this quest is a lifelong one. The answer to how to live a good life is perhaps a noble pursuit in itself to devote your life to. And anyway, it’s your life. If you don’t devote your life to figure how to make a good life for yourself, who else will?