Pearls - The Game, The Life
I felt that at some level we choose what we want to believe. We can adopt an existing ideology (our parent’s religion perhaps), in fact most of us do and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But if we come across a blatant contradiction between what the ideology says and what we can infer from our observations, experiences and reflections then we should be prepared to discard or modify what we believe. Over time we should be able to fine tune our maps till there comes a point when we stop getting lost. I wanted to arrive at a set of axiomatic beliefs within which I could see no inconsistencies. A framework within which I could find a purpose for my life.
This Pearl is about the framework that I choose to believe in.
Belief 1 - Life is a game and the end goal is to be happy
All the religions that I looked at seemed to have one unifying goal – to increase happiness and avoid suffering. There were systems of laws like the Ten Commandments of Christianity, the Torah of Judaism and the Sharia of Islam which were all aimed at creating a stable happy society (no killing, no stealing, no cheating, etc, etc). Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism all preached detachment from human desires as a way of avoiding suffering. Confucianism, Daoism, Gaian philosophy, all seemed to be aimed at a harmonious peaceful style of living. Epicurean atheists look to pleasure as the ultimate goal. In fact when I sat down and thought about it, it seemed that every single human activity was aimed at increasing our happiness.
Some religious people might say that the true goal is to serve God but I think I could easily get around the apparent conflict by saying that it makes a religious person happier when he serves God and has a clear conscience than when he ignores God’s wishes and lets him down. There is no contradiction.
So the true end goal of life for everyone seems to be to be happy.
I felt intuitively that if the goal of life was to be happy then life should be fun and so today I tentatively wrote down in my diary that life was a game. There are far more people who would disagree with this statement than the previous one (ie that the purpose of life is to be happy). They would say that life is a very serious affair. There is poverty, violence, intolerance, death, crime, sickness, pollution, etc. But on a hunch I decided to stick with the ‘game’ hypothesis and so far I haven’t come across anything that has seriously made me reconsider rewording this belief. I’ll provide more backing for my view later in this Pearl.
So my foundation belief is that ‘life is a game and the end goal is to be happy’.
Belief 2 – You decide what the rules are. You choose what makes you happy
Everybody’s trying to achieve the same end goal so how come everybody is so different? Well I guess different people think different things will make them happy. The investment banker who earns a million dollars, the mother with four kids, the ascetic standing on one leg for a month, even the guy who enjoys whipping himself – they’re all looking for the same thing. It’s just that each of them has chosen a different path to get there.
I thought about it for a while and realised that ultimately no one path is better than another. Each one is equally valid. But then I got stuck for a while. If each path is equally good and equally acceptable then it makes absolutely no difference which path you choose and what you do. This conclusion was absolutely no help in deciding what the purpose of my life should be.
When I carried this belief to the game analogy I realised that the game was pretty boring. It was like moving the cursor in an infinite excel worksheet. You could move the cursor up, down, left or right – it didn’t make one iota of a difference.
But then I saw that the infinite freedom didn’t necessarily mean that there couldn’t be rules. It just meant that there were no externally set rules that we had to abide by. We can always make up rules and scenarios ourselves to make the game more interesting. We can set up the princess to rescue, the target to hit, the monster to fight. We can create challenges and boundaries for ourselves. We can decide to make our life mission bringing about world peace or we could decide to live in a forest and live on fruits and bugs. Both are equally acceptable paths to happiness. Because ultimately you decide what the rules are. You can choose what makes you happy.
Belief 3 – You can choose the character you want to play each stage with
Some of you will argue that you can’t choose what makes you happy. ‘Studying depresses me. That’s just the way I am’. If you choose to believe that then it’s true. If you choose not to then it’s false. It’s that simple. If you want to enjoy studying then it’s just a matter of changing an ingrained way of thinking. It’s a habit. You can change your personality to be whatever you want it to be for a given situation. It requires motivation, persistence, feedback and belief. It’s difficult and it takes time because you’re changing a set way of responding to things. But it’s not impossible.
Your personality and public personas are just clothes that cover your inner core.
Why should you change your personality in the first place? Well sometimes habitual responses like jealousy, anger, pride, laziness, etc get in the way of your end goal of happiness (belief 1) and stop you from achieving the things you’ve challenged yourself to on your way (belief 2).
You should be able to change your public persona as the situation requires. For example if you need to be assertive in a team, be assertive. If you need to be passive be passive. Don’t feel that you need to display consistency in all settings. Nothing limits the closeness of our relationships more than our rigidity in wanting to be perceived in one fixed way that we believe reflects our ‘true’ selves. We take ourselves far too seriously if we worry too much about how people perceive us. Be respectful in a temple, obscene with your drinking buddies, yielding with your girlfriend, dominant while teaching a class; there are no contradictions if you don’t assume that you have to be one way with everyone at all times. Be whatever you need to be.
Nothing in our personality should be set in stone. This is not to say that a fixed personality is a bad thing. There are some personality traits that don’t cause you any pain so it doesn’t make sense to change them. But know this: Anytime you’re unhappy, any time you’re angry, any time you’re worried about something, the issue arises not from an externality but from an unwillingness to discard a belief about the sort of person you are. So be flexible.
Belief 4 – There is no morality in a game. There are only things that work and things that don’t
One rationale that people might use to having a fixed constant personality is that morality demands it. ‘I would never lie, I would never cheat, I would never steal’. They make absolute statements about themselves in an attempt to define the sort of person they are.
I had a look at morality and it sucks.
Neither is morality constant over time nor is it constant over geography nor is it constant over cultures nor is it constant over religion. To take two examples - Sati was considered acceptable a few hundred years ago and women of certain tribes in Africa walk around topless without eliciting the slightest scandal. We can see clearly that what is considered right today may not be considered right tomorrow and what is considered wrong by one person may be considered right by another.
Most morality turns out to be just one person with a superiority complex making judgements about someone else who follows a different path. But each path is equally acceptable so what’s the problem?
What ultimately decides if an action is right or wrong if everything is so subjective and contextual? Ultimately some ‘morals’ are more effective in pursuing your goals. If you consistently tell the truth, people believe you more and the credibility you gain helps you in life. If you don’t cheat on your girlfriend you’ll find the bond between you and her is stronger over a period of time than if you did. If people don’t kill each other or steal from each other then you will find that over a period of time people live more harmoniously together and are happier.
An action is right if it helps you achieve your goals. An action is wrong if it makes achieving your goals harder. So don’t worry about morality. But take the long term view.
Moral people make judgements on ‘immoral’ people. They avoid and dislike them. What they don’t realise is that those are the people most in need of affection and guidance. A five year child is no better than a one year old child. The difference is that it is more aware. A five year old child can walk and run easily while a one year old child will make mistakes and fall and hurt itself. Similarly a person who consistently lies will hurt himself over the long haul. The dishonest person is not a bad person, just someone who is less aware of what is effective in helping him reach his goals and what isn’t. He just has a little more to learn.
On the other hand ‘progressive’ people may sometimes resent ‘conservative’ people for being judgemental and condescending. They should remember that they themselves are passing judgements on other people and are also trying to define themselves by specifying what they’re not.
Never judge someone for thinking differently from yourself. There is no absolute right and wrong. There are only effective and ineffective actions and different people have different perspectives on what is most effective for them in reaching their end goal of happiness.
Belief 5 – The only thing you control is your own character
In a video game all you can control with your joystick is the movement and actions of your screen character. Everything else that happens around you – the ninja guards, the bonus points, the flying knives all make the game more exciting and challenging. We would never get rid of them in a computer game – the game itself would be pointless without them.
However often in life we look around at all the obstacles and rather than enjoying them, we wish they would disappear. We often forget that without all these hurdles we would have a really dull game. It makes sense not to stress about things that lie outside our control. It makes even more sense to actually enjoy the unpredictability of these externalities. Don’t cry when you get caught in a thunderstorm without an umbrella. Get wet and laugh. The girl of your dream tells you she likes you as a friend (or even worse - as a brother). Go out with her twin sister instead (you could never tell the difference anyway). Nobody turns up for your birthday party? Go outside and invite all the beggars in the road to have cake and dance to rock music – you’ll remember the bash for the rest of your life.
You shouldn’t feel guilty about anything you’ve done in the past. You have no control about it so don’t worry about it. Learn from mistakes if you need to and take remedial action if you want to but anything beyond that is pointless.
Never get angry or upset about things that other people do or say. Remember whatever happens around your character is what makes the game interesting. The only thing you ultimately control is what you do in the next moment.
Belief 6 – Play the game as if the outcome was really important but know that it isn’t
Detachment has been preached by a number of the major religions and philosophical schools.
I started thinking whether it was possible to really chuck oneself into something and live it to the fullest but at the same time be detached from the result. What would the motivation be to work really hard for an exam if you didn’t care whether you did well or not?
And then I realized that I already practiced involved detachment occasionally. Every time I play a computer game, I chuck myself into the make believe world. I’m completely absorbed. My eyes are glued in concentration to the screen. But when my character finally falls down a hole and dies, beyond muttering a ‘Shit. Not again!’ it doesn’t affect me at all. It wasn’t the result of the game that made me enjoy it and want to play it. It was the act of complete engagement in an activity.
There are times when results make you happy - A job promotion, coming first in your college, scoring a goal, etc. There are an equal number of times that the result will go the other way and you will suffer disappointment. The feelings of exhilaration that you get from result based emotions are transitory and superficial. Not only that but if you concentrate on the result, you miss out the joy of the activity itself. I think my ability to enjoy a computer game would be seriously diminished if I was only happy if I completed all the stages every time.
The trick is to transfer the ‘game theory’ attitude to real life. Involve yourself in doing the activity rather than the result. Embrace everything, hold on to nothing. If you’re doing anything, do it with passion without worrying too much about whether you will be successful or not..
If you concentrate on learning rather than the exam, you do better in your exam. If you help someone without expecting anything in return, you get more in return. If you concentrate on getting to know someone rather than getting them to like you, they’re more likely to like you. Everybody knows that you get out of life what you put in. Not everyone knows that you get even more when you don’t expect anything back for what you put in.
So throw yourself completely into whatever you decide to do and don’t worry if you don’t succeed. Play the game as if it was really important but know that it really isn’t.
Belief 7 – Your score is proportional to your contribution to others happiness
I have come to the conclusion that I should have a fun filled life, without worrying about what other people did or said, without worrying about morality, without worrying too much about consequences, without worrying about exams, etc. (If my parents had found these conclusions written on my wall they would have freaked).
But have fun doing what? That was the question that I had to answer.
If I were a blood cell then it would seem fairly self-evident that the purpose of my life would be to provide oxygen and nourishment to the other cells in the body and thrive in an atmosphere of self-reciprocity that would maintain the health of the person I lived in. So if I was looking for a purpose to my activities after knowing that I was just a human ‘cell’, just a small part of an unbelievably intricate network of other cells and relationships, then the most obvious life goal would have been to look after the health of the planet and the other cells that live on it.
I concluded that the purpose of my life was to try to increase the long term happiness of as many people as I could by as much as I could. In the game analogy the purpose of my life is to score as many points as possible and the number of points I score is proportional to my contribution to others happiness.
Belief 8 – You should spend time with the people who will allow you to boost your score (people you can contribute to and people who will help you contribute to others).
The Sikh religion has a concept called Seva which roughly translated means service to others. It states that if anybody asks you to help them YOU should be grateful to THEM because they have given you the opportunity to help them. The Hindu concept of Karma, The Christian focus on love and forgiveness, the Muslim emphasis on charity, etc all seem to hint at a universal principle. Look after people and you will be looked after.
If you make it your life purpose to look after the happiness of others the first thing that happens is that your own ego disappears. Because if your focus is on others then you stop worrying so much about your own self image or what people think of you. You don’t feel the need to be a fixed person. Rather you concentrate on who you need to be to make the people around you more comfortable. Earlier I said that all the heartache, all the anger, all the frustration in the world originates because you want to hold onto a certain image of yourself.
One of the potential drawbacks about not worrying about yourself but focusing on the needs of the people around you is that you become too involved in other people’s problems that you can’t solve and this depresses you. But, as I’ve mentioned before, although you should act like everything really matters you should always remember that it doesn’t really. You shouldn’t even be worried if you haven’t done your best in the past. You can’t control that either. The only thing you can fully control is what you do in the next moment.
There are many things you can’t control. The only thing that you control is your character. Everything else is what makes life interesting. When you wiggle a finger it does not provide great satisfaction to you precisely because you have complete control over it. It’s only when you do things that you can’t always get right (shooting a basket from 20 yards maybe) that you will start enjoying life. And that’s how you should approach any aspect of life that you find frustrating - as a fun challenge that you might well fail at.
So concentrate on improving the lives of other people and don’t worry too much if you sometimes you feel like you’re not having as much of an impact as you’d like. Realize that some things are out of your control and focus on enjoying yourself by doing your best in the things you can influence.
One problem that arises is that it is impossible to make everyone happy. If you spread yourself so thin, you risk losing the ability to form deep personal relationships with a number of people. So you need to focus on the people on whose happiness you can have the most impact on. If a stranger tells you that you play the guitar beautifully and you should become a singer and your parents tell you that you should become a chartered accountant then it is obvious that your decision will affect certain people more than others.
I’ll just take a small detour from the main flow of the argument to reiterate that your own natural preferences are largely irrelevant because your life goal is to make others happy. You need to go where you are most needed. If you believe that with your strengths and talents you would make more people happier as a singer go for it. If you believe you can contribute more in the business world or the political arena then that’s where you should head.
Before the diversion I was just stating how you should focus on people who you can make happy. Your actions can obviously have a big impact on the happiness of your parents so you should look after their wishes. You should hang around the people who like hanging around you, not the ones who are considered the coolest people to know. You should propose, not to the prettiest girl, but the one that you think would be happiest to be with someone like you. You should improve your people skills to be able to bond with just about anyone so you can have the maximum beneficial influence on their lives.
There are some people that you will not be able to contribute to but they will teach you important things that will help you contribute to others. Teachers for example will impart knowledge that will help you stretch your own capabilities. You should spend time with them too if you want to reach your goals.
Belief 9 – You can increase your score by increasing your ability to contribute
If I played a game again and again and made no progress, after a while things would get stale. The constant increase in your mastery over the game as time progresses is a great source of satisfaction when you play.
Similarly in life if you stay at a certain level all the time then you will get jaded and bored. So you should always be on the lookout for things that will help you develop yourself and allow you to contribute more to others. These things could be as simple as learning a joke that you could crack at a party that will make people smile. It could be learning about strategic consulting so you can participate in improving the quality of life of people through your professional work. It could be reading a book on speed reading that will allow you to increase your speed of taking in information. It could be learning to speak in public so you can influence people to adopt a certain point of view that will be beneficial to all concerned. It could be learning the guitar so you could sing a song for a friend on his birthday. In fact it could be just about anything.
If you believe that the purpose of your life is to improve the lives of others then you should push yourself so that you can reach a position where you can contribute most. Don’t put any limits on what you can achieve because whether you think you can or can’t do something, you’re almost always right.
And by now you should have gotten the fact that just because you might not be able to do something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Just go ahead and have fun in the attempt.
I can lick that guy, I can kiss that girl
I can ride that bronc and make him whirl
- Unknown song
Belief 10 – The best way of increasing your ability to contribute is by learning from the past, approaching each moment with full awareness and having a coherent plan for the future.
To contribute the most you can you need to develop yourself as much as you can and that can only come from constant learning.
The bedrock of your knowledge comes from your prior experiences so you should look at all the things that you thought were mistakes in your life at the time and evaluate what you did wrong. Really dissect yourself as a person and your life. You’ll learn things about yourself. It’s one of the fastest ways of learning.
There’s actually an even faster way of learning (and a less painful one) – learning through others mistakes. People around you are screwing up all the time. And you can learn from them. So pay attention to what other people are doing right and consider whether you would have done those things and if not then why not. And consider whether you might have done the things that they did wrong and if so then why.
Constant improvement should be a fixed feature of your life and one of the things you should learn to enjoy. Improvement can only come after you critically evaluate the areas you need to improve on and therefore you need to dispassionately dissect yourself and see what you need to do to be the sort of person you need to be to achieve the things you want to. Feedback can come from any source. Even if somebody yells at you and says things to deliberately hurt you, there is always a grain of truth in what they are say and rather than taking it personally you should look hungrily for things you can take away and work on. Every time some is angry at you or something goes wrong there exists a fantastic opportunity to learn something new.
Obviously a completely acceptable path to happiness is just moving here and there in any direction but if your goal is to improve the lives of others you need to be more focused. You travel furthest from where you start if you pick just one direction and keep heading that way. If you keep changing directions in a completely haphazard manner then mathematics will tell you that you’re unlikely to move that far from where you started. Make a plan of what you want to achieve, understand what you need to do to get there and then practice being the sort of person that will be able to do those things. A survey of Yale graduates showed that those who had formally written down their goals far outperformed the ones who hadn’t in professional and personal aspects of their lives when they were revisited years later. How can you hit a target that you can’t even see?
Sometimes even if you think about what you want to do, you still end up making mistakes. If you make a mistake after thinking about something for a long period of time it usually isn’t really a mistake. You generally make the best decision you can given your level of knowledge and experience at the time. And you need to make that ‘’wrong decision to allow you to move to the next level of understanding.
Most mistakes are actually instinctive actions that arise from habitual responses. You should therefore try to raise your level of consciousness as much as you can at all times. When your mind is crystal clear you are more likely to notice things and learn from them. You become more sensitive to people’s emotions, you notice birds singing, you pick up the nuances in a lecture, you can catch yourself in the middle of saying something obnoxious and stop yourself in time, etc. There is no formulaic way of increasing your awareness. All you can do is to keep in mind that it’s something you’re trying to do and keep practicing being alert till it becomes second nature.
The map is not the territory; Redraw the lines if you need to
If you were looking at your map and the map showed you a path that just clearly did not exist would you believe your map or your eyes? (Pssst, the correct answer assumes that you can read maps accurately). It is likely that you would assume that the map you had was incorrect and you would alter it to reflect reality.
Currently I believe that the purpose of my life is to improve the long term happiness of as many people that I can by as much as I can. I believe that everything I do should be aimed at achieving this aim. I believe that I should be whoever I need to be and do whatever I need to do to do this. I believe that it is possible for me to take full responsibility of my happiness and not be affected by what goes on around me while at the same time being intensely involved in everything I do. I believe that nothing is really that important and everything should be fun. I believe that I should have no desires of my own. I believe that I shouldn’t fall in love with a girl who doesn’t feel the same way about me. I believe that the Earth is a living being and we are all intricately connected and that looking after other people is the best way of looking after myself.
I believe a lot of things. Above all I believe that sticking to these beliefs will ultimately make me happy.
But I may be wrong.
I may be wrong about a lot of things.
I won’t be rigid about these things. I’ll persist for a while if things get a little choppy but I know that these aren’t absolute truths. They are just my beliefs today given the level of experience and knowledge I’ve gained so far. I’ll change them if I have to.
The map is not the territory. I’ll redraw the lines if I need to.
Comments
if u see past that ... u dont need to come back after u are gone!!!!