Without being overly morbid about it, when you get into your fifties and beyond, you start thinking more about the endgame than opening gambits. When you are finally about to pop your clogs, what will you use as a yardstick for the success of your life? Great parent with wonderful kids that you brought into the world and educated wisely? A massive amount of money that you accumulated thanks to your outstanding business acumen? Some artistic meisterwerk that posterity will remember you for for decades and centuries to come? Maybe.
But have a look at your great great grandparents. What do you know about them? Probably not much or nothing. You will struggle to remember their names, assuming that you ever knew them, where they lived or what they did. What they did, particularly. Their entire lives you will be able to sum up in a couple of sentences, if at all. He was a banker, insurance clerk, blacksmith. She was a housewife, nurse, governess. That is the impression that they made on the world – a few lines in some old official documents that no one can be bothered to look at, unless they get bizarrely interested in genealogy.
Even a lot closer to home, you might think that authoring a book would assure your place in posterity. Wrong. Books go out of print the whole time. Just because you were published once doesn’t mean that you will be published in aeternam. We can mostly all cite quite a few 19th century authors, but they are surely a mere sprinkling of all the books that were published in the 19th century and now no longer are. For every Dickens, how many other journeymen novelists were there? There wasn’t any Netflix, no TV, no internet, no radio, no cinema. What were you meant to do every evening once you’d got bored of pointless needlework – samplers that people had about as much use for as an HMS Victory made out of matchsticks? You’d read a book, probably, and it wouldn’t necessarily have been Vanity Fair. Those books are now just mouldering relics in second-hand bookshops, if they haven’t been pulped.
You might think that the music of your youth will be enjoyed by everyone, forever, like Bach or Beethoven. No doubt the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Stones will indeed have a very long shelf life, but will they still bother pressing Barclay James Harvest in 30 years’ time? Indeed, will they bother pressing anything? Which means that if you’re not in some top Spotify playlist, your place in obscurity is assured. Jazz was once wildly popular; everyone listened to it. Now it’s reserved for middle-aged blokes with expensive hi-fis. How many talented jazz musicians have gone the way of the dodo?
The thing is, your life is almost certainly pointless in the sense of it having no point at all after your death. You’ll leave some fond memories whilst there are people alive who actually knew you, and a few photos and maybe video for those who never did. You’re unlikely to feature on any banknotes, assuming that they still exist in a few decades’ time.
Your life is, in fact, a game.
In a game, there is some artificial goal and you pit your energies towards achieving it within the parameters of the game. So, in football, there are all sorts of rules and then for 90-odd minutes the teams try to stick the ball in their opponents’ net, short of actually picking it up and putting it there (that’s rugby). In backgammon, you have to get all your counters “home” before your opponent does. There is no point to either of these exercises outside of the logic of the game. Ah, you say, but in both instances you could make a lot of money. Certainly. But why would you need the money? If we are talking about “a lot of money” then clearly, you wouldn’t. Once you’ve paid the rent/mortgage, bought food and attended to a few other pressing necessities, you don’t really need more money, at least not to live any better in a material sense, which is what Abraham Maslow was on about.
You would only need more money if it were a prerequisite for some other game that you are in fact playing. In this other game, amassing lots of cash and possessions is the equivalent of putting the ball in the net. Rather like a points total in a video game you can’t actually win, there is no point at which everything comes to an end. Continued success within the parameters of the game requires you to have ever more wealth, no matter that there is nothing of importance that you can do with it. You may have an obscene $500’000 watch as you had a few million or billion burning a hole in your pocket, but you would probably trade it for not having a continuous cold for a year. That’s how important it is to you. You might swap it for an extra couple of years’ life for a favourite pet. Money? It’s just points in the life game.
Now, we are not all playing the “make as much money as possible game”. There is an incalculable number of others. A very obvious one is cops and robbers, which children actually play as make-believe. But in real life, it’s drug cartels versus law enforcement. Law enforcement aims to disrupt and eradicate the drugs trade. They measure their successes by the amount of drugs they seize and the amount of people they put in prison. The cartels measure their success by the amount of drugs they sell and the money they can stash away. Frequently, the narco kingpins are on the run and have a rubbish life hiding in crappy basements, or substandard accommodation in order to maintain their freedom. It really doesn’t seem worth it. But then you aren’t playing the game they are playing. To them, it makes some kind of sense. As is apparent, for all the energy expended by law enforcement, it makes not a scrap of difference to the drug trade and the increasing amount of addicts in the world. So why do they do it? It is the game they have chosen, quite simply, the one that gives their life meaning to them, even if it really has no more meaning than a game of football.
Herbivores spend a lot of time eating. This is because there isn’t all that much nutrition in a leaf or a blade of grass. They don’t have to be particularly bright because the grass or the leaves aren’t going to go anywhere much. But even cows like to have a little fun from time to time, which is why they quite often come up to the fence to see who you are. Carnivores, on the other hand, have to be more intelligent as they have to work out how to get hold of a meal that doesn’t want to become food and might up-sticks at any time. But once they have solved that problem, eaten their fill and had a snooze, they can become bored. What they need is a game. This is why you have to entertain your cat or dog but your goldfish probably won’t require as much stimulation.
Humans, in societies where people don’t have to spend most of the day wondering where the next meal is coming from, need constant entertainment. They have to find something to pass the time, a game to play. We tend to call these games hobbies, but of course the biggest game many of us play is what we do to get paid. We sign up to some species of game that has little to do with our actual salary. Indeed, it has been shown over and over again that just paying people more money does little to motivate them. What does provide motivation is goals and some species of measurement for establishing if those goals have been met. In other words, the key constituents of a game: you need an objective and some way of establishing your progress towards it. This is where being a football manager is hugely advantageous. Every week you get a result, so you know how successful you have been and how close you are to the goal that you have been set. Only one team will win the championship, so all the other teams can have another shot next year. The game never ends, but it will define your life, motivate you and impassion you. It really does make everything very simple.
Other games we play are less obvious. In some menial jobs, it is necessary to set oneself somewhat pathetic objectives to make life meaningful. How many letters can you sort in an hour, how many cherries can you pick? Can you beat your own record? Without these crutches, your job is just filling in hours and that can be massively tedious, even if you have little imagination. People find other objectives in their game. Can they, as a postman, get greeted and thanked by more people they deliver to? Can they finish their round earlier, as proof of some sort of performance or improvement?
People in jobs with more autonomy will be far more implicated in their game. A friend of mine is a top commercial lawyer. He spends an unfeasible amount of time “working”. Although he is, of course, working very hard, what he is really doing is playing the game that he has chosen for himself. He has reached retirement age, has no need for the considerable sums of money that he is making, but rather like Roger Federer attempting to achieve an umpteenth grand slam victory, he carries on being a lawyer because it is what amuses him the most. Within ten years of his retirement, no one will remember his contributions to his firm although achieving them has filled most of his professional existence, not to mention his existence full stop. There is nothing wrong with this per se. It is the life he has chosen, the one that makes him happier than most other lives he could have chosen. But it is important to realise its complete artificiality. His job is not “more important” than that of the supermarket shelf stacker.
As a top M&A lawyer, his professional life is peopled with abrasive executives, top business characters who manipulate billions of pounds. With so much money at stake, they demand unswerving dedication and service. But these people are just playing their own games, trying to create bigger and bigger companies and make more and more millions that are totally unnecessary. Do customers and staff benefit from these company mergers? Normally, the precise opposite is the case. Those creating them are doing so uniquely because within the parameters of the game that they have decided to play, these actions are the best moves to make.
It must be obvious by now that Apple has an obscene amount of wealth and doesn’t even know what to do with it. Does that mean that it goes easier on its business partners and suppliers, or lowers prices for its customers? Of course not. It carries on being just as hard-nosed, if not ever more so, in the attempt to accrue ever increasing billions of dollars. That is the yardstick for success in the game it is playing, and all its employees are signed up to this spurious existence, or if they aren’t, they either leave, are fired or just become miserable.
No one really makes you play the game you are involved in. You can change at any time. Indeed, looking at Apple, it is interesting to note that Bill Gates packed in his game at Microsoft, having pretty much won it, and decided to participate in an entirely different game or games, such as eradicating disease, or improving the lot of mankind. These are still games, just more socially useful ones. You do in fact have agency. If your life is destined to be pointless, you might as well play whatever game it is that floats your boat. Some people want to create a huge YouTube following, some wish to save lives in hospital, others want to put as many people behind bars as possible, and still others want to sell a maximum amount of spaghetti.
By now I expect that all religious people are screaming that life is not pointless and that the service of God gives it meaning. Fine. My answer to that is that for these people, life is just a dress rehearsal, the opportunity to accrue brownie points that will ensure your charmed entrance to the kingdom of heaven or the afterlife or wherever it is that you think you go after your earthly demise. If ever there was an example of a game, this would be it. And once again, that is all tickety-boo. There is nothing more stupid about attempting to achieve the entrance ticket to the afterlife than there is in selling more toilet paper or creating the world’s biggest mining company. All of it is equally futile.
The only thing to bear in mind is that in choosing your game, try to choose one that doesn’t make other people miserable as they try to play theirs. And if you can choose one that doesn’t actually ruin the planet and put the future of mankind in peril, then future generations will be able to have fun playing their own games.