The Game Of Life

Life Is A Game

Life Is A Game

… until it isn’t.

Teachers from various fields of personal growth and smart (sounding) people from all walks of life have been comparing life to games for ages. What used to be chess or poker is now a video game.

You are steering your own avatar through different levels, trying to solve problems, always improving your own capacities, knowledge and skills. You are out there fighting different challenges, re-attempting the ones you’ve failed at before — getting rewards along the way.

In short, you are progressing through a world while developing your avatar.

I do in fact believe that this analogy can be very useful in certain contexts — especially when it comes to developing a different perspective on problems or re-calibrating your mindset that guides your day-to-day decision making.

But the analogy breaks down in four important ways:

As opposed to progress in most video games, real life growth often is unnoticeable, non-linear, fluid and limitless.

Un-noticeability

What constitutes personal growth can sometimes only be understood in retrospect. You might go through a phase of perceived stagnation, maybe triggered by the ending of a relationship or the loss of a job — only to understand years later how the emotional and spiritual chaos has helped you carve out what is truly important for you and now makes your life so much more enjoyable.

Non-linearity

Life is full of setbacks. Not just setbacks where you need to re-spawn and re-attempt the current level. Whether it’s health-related, economic, social or mental — life sometimes decides to set us back to level 1 and have us work hard for what we once thought we had secured forever. That’s okay, as long as we accept it as it is and not expect reality to be any different.

Fluidity

This might be the most nuanced of qualities: our own definition of what constitutes growth will change over time. This can put us into existential crisis-type situations once we realize that the thing we’ve been after all that no longer is meaningful to us. Phases of re-calibration can be hard, confusing and even painful — and yet, updating our inner compass and adapting our belief system is an essential part of a life well lived.

Limitlessness

Humans are the only living beings that are not confined by upper limits. We only have a lower boundary — death. The space of potential improvement is never fully exhausted. There is always some area in which potential progress presents itself in front of us, sometimes more, sometimes less obvious. There is always more you can achieve, more you can have, more you can experience, more you can be.
But more is not always better. A constant striving for more certainly isn’t. As humans — and as opposed to other animals — we are not suffering our bondage.

We are suffering our freedom.

Life is like a game. Until it isn’t.

Play hard. Live well.

- Phil