We live in a world of games.
Our fitness is gamified through apps like Cadoo, where you can bet on yourself working out or not with real money. A gambling economy with yourself and randos on the internet. Work out tomorrow, get paid $20 from all the folks who bet that they would work out and didn’t.
Or better yet, strap your Fitbit or Apple Watch to your ceiling fan or pet, and still capture the rewards without even doing “the fitness”.
It brands itself as “The Most Intense Motivation App”. This branding simultaneously posits that we as humans are only motivated by gamifying and betting on our lives and baking those rewards into nearly instantaneous dopamine hits.
Screw motivation. The one way to truly motivate is addict. Through binge-watching. Through 30 book-long endless series on Kindle Unlimited that authors pump out every month, aided increasingly by AI software like Sudowrite that does more and more of the writing.
This isn’t a dystopia. This is our reality.
Our economy is ruled by microtransactions, dopamine, and an ever-increasing swathe of data that ML engineers use to “better” recommend and increasingly “better” create the experiences and products that shape our lives.
America isn’t run by the consumer economy. It’s an addiction economy with drink brands competing for throat share, social media apps competing for time share of our lives, and marketplaces like Amazon competing for everything we need — games, movies, books, diapers, fart spray to prank your friends, and even weapons to teach them a lesson when you bet all your money on Cadoo.
Crypto is the marrying of economics and code in what has become a religious-like movement to quantify every interaction in our digital lives — and move more and more of the real world into this digital “metaverse”. The more we consume, the more data we produce, and the more we consume in turn as the world around us continues to shape our hedonistic desires.
It’s easy to get caught up in this.
To lose ourselves to this endless race in what has become an instant gamification of everything. Stop thinking about the long term.
Go to school for 4 years— get a job in consulting or finance and cash out at 22. In 2 years the booze and NYC nightclubs fade, and you start taking pain pills to mask your anxiety and existential dread. Stop trying to think through ideas and sit with uncomfortable questions, have MSM deliver you their hot takes like fast food and become an endless promotion machine for the Pentagon and elite forces. Buy a course from a guru who can teach you everything about wealth, happiness, and love in just 90 days, to only find out that they are even more depressed than you.
Who wins in this game?
The game makers, of course.
The people who play the long game and live in the future as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk like to constantly do. But that’s such a cop-out.
Fierce, sweaty nerds rule the world, leaving everyone else out to dry, unless you want to become a recluse in the woods.
I don’t think so. I think we like to believe this narrative because it’s easier. We are stuck in the instant game. Searching for our next hit. Swiping to find that next hot model to “donate” to their Onlyfans. Staring at stock tickers and crypto coins, waiting to find that gem that will 10x your money in just a year so you can retire on a beach in Mexico.
This is the best we can do. Obviously we will never be Bezos, Musk, Mr Beast, or [insert ambitious, arrogant dude name here]. So let’s stop dreaming and make them the enemy. Or better yet, for the ones delusional enough to think that they will be the next BILLI TRILLY ZILLIONAIRE, let us have them chase “long games” in B2B SaaS pumping billions into software products for imaginary carbon credits.
How to Rule the World 101.
But this lacks imagination too. It plays the same game as the instant game, just with a bit more grit, the ability to delay gratification, and the delusion that once you get that nice, sweet hit of VC money, that exit, that election win… life will finally be good.
They are the winners. And maybe you can be too. But for the rest of us… we lost. That’s why we are sitting here searching for our bits of digital dopamine, swiping on Instagram, looking at the US college rankings incessantly, and copying that latest trend on TikTok.
We break free from this when we have the courage to find a different narrative.
When we stop being a player. And instead, enter the realm of the forever game.
A moment-to-moment day-to-day practice and mindfulness. An awareness that time goes in circles and wheels — progress isn’t linear, winners are defined by power not truth, and everyone has a God even if they say they don’t believe in one.
There’s no difference in 10 years and 10 seconds. The long game of starting a company and the short game of finding a Tinder match to hook up with. All of it is just ripples in the space-time continuum, two plays that our society rewards drastically differently due to no fault of the players.
The way to break out is to transcend. To stop worshipping and hating the winners. To stop hating yourself for getting sucked in. To realize the pull of the game never leaves us.
It’s why I’ve written my next fiction novel the Millennium Game all about us trying to solve climate change by gamifying the economy. Carbon becomes the dollar, and when you hit your limit you die.
People love games. We make them, because inside of games are worlds that we build that imbue our lives with meaning. It’s not about the competition more than it’s about hope and purpose — the idea that we have constructed a reality where we can win.
The scarier thought is realizing there may just be no winners and losers in life.
The Forever Game is transcending that dichotomy.
It’s grounding yourself in something deeper. Something more personal, holistic, and collective. Something uncomfortable, something less certain — but in it, something that can keep our lives from being defined by the Instant Game.
When that’s all we know, we all lose.