What Game Are You Playing?
Remind yourself that you always have agency and can stop playing the game any time if you want to.
We have reduced our values to metrics, but how much of what actually makes our life valuable is easy to count?
On the latest podcast episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out, Pablo Torre talks to the author of The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game, written by philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen. He talks about how we now live in a society where everything is gamified and measured in metrics. Michelin stars, Netflix ratings, likes and followers and more.
I am old enough to remember the time before the U.S. News and World Report College Rankings existed. Back then, there were books with profiles of every college describing their values, campus life, and programs strengths and weaknesses. It required you to choose based on which school was the right fit for you. The rankings came along and simplified that choice by giving every school a numerical value with an arbitrary formula. And people just wanted to go to a school based on the rankings, rather than ask the hard questions.
As children of immigrants, many of us are forced to play the same game from a very early age: Get good grades so you can get into a good college so you can get into medical or law school and make lots of money as a doctor or lawyer. Eventually computer science engineering joined that elite group. Secure careers that were lucrative and stable. Although with AI, the game has changed and all three of those fields are a lot less stable now.
I played that game for most of my life until my 40s. Wanting to win the game by getting into the right college, the right business school, the right consulting firm, the right corporate job, raise money from the right venture capital firm, all because I was programmed to believe that at the end was a pot of gold that would ultimately bring happiness and satisfaction.
Since I stopped playing that game, I started identifying my superpowers and working on the things I care about. I have been far more successful and more fulfilled every single day because of it.
An undergraduate sent Nguyen an email that said his talk pulled her out of a five year depressive cycle. She was also an Asian immigrant kid like him, pushed to get a 4.0 GPA, a varsity athlete who suffered from anorexia.
She realized that her life had been trapped in bad games. She didn't know that she had any choice. She had taken the games that life had shoved at her and they were making her suffer. She said that something about this framing allowed her to believe that she had some choice about what she was doing and how she was going to be measured. She changed the background of her iPhone to remind her everyday of this: "Is this the game you really want to play?"
Ask yourself, are you playing the game you really want to be playing? Or was this game forced on you? Remind yourself that you always have agency and can stop playing the game any time if you want to.