Life Is A Game

You reach a point in life, hopefully sooner rather than later, if at all, that you realise life is not what you thought it was or what it would be.  From a young age you're raised inside a system.  From birth to death there is a pathway that your life is expected to follow.  You will be born, you will grow up, experiencing childhood, teenage years, passing through education, then you are expected to prioritise three things: love, money, and happiness.  The order you choose provides variety but you're expected to chase all three.  You're expected to seek love, seek out money through a career or other means, and you're expected to find happiness.  Happiness itself is something which for the most part we never get to decide what it actually means, unless we wake up to reality.

Instead, we live in a world where the success and failure in these three goals are decided for us by other people.  They may be friends, family, or colleagues or even complete strangers we've never met.  In any case, our success is defined by their perception.  We're taught that even if we think we are a success, but every other person thinks we are a failure then we are deluded and that we are not accepting reality. 

The rigidity of this framework in which we live out our lives is insidious.  We live by it, hoping to achieve the trifecta before we die.  In death our lives are then judged by those we leave behind after we are gone as to its success or failure.

That is the system we are born into, we live through, and leave as we die.  Unless you wake up to reality.  By this I mean achieving the level of consciousness about your life and the lives of others that recognises this world is controlled by systems with rules and regulations to maintain order.  Once you recognise this for yourself you get to choose whether you want to take part, whether you want to play the game as the rule book states or whether you want to make up your own rules and play it your way.  When you achieve this level of awareness as the meme goes you become "woke" and choose to live a life that is defined within yourself.

Defining your own life can be a very powerful thing, it lets you take control of the facets that for a long time you believed were in the hands of other people.  Love no longer becomes defined by finding one person and settling down and living happily ever after, but by the realisation that love is quantifiable and that we can find it in many people, in our friends, our family, in partners if we choose to take them.  We forego the notion that we have to find one person to fulfil this need and suddenly it becomes a lot less difficult to find.

With money our success no longer becomes defined by the reach for the 1% and the desire to be a billionaire, which for most people was always a pipe dream.  The reality is for the vast majority of people to have that level of wealth you have to be born into it, and the idea that you can reach it through work or through other means is nothing but a means to control your behaviour.  Once you forego the idea of adding yourself to the minority of minorities, you come to define your financial success not by the extremity of it but simply by the question of whether you can afford to do the things you want to do, and the self awareness of the desires to do things that you cannot afford and questioning why they are things you want. 

To give an example we all dream of mansions and estates with sprawling grounds and develop visions of ourselves living regal lives but when you wake up from the dream and look at that desire for what it's worth, you begin to question why you want it.  You are one person alone, perhaps you include your family or others in your inner circle.  At best you form a small collective of people.  What purpose can you really gain from a 28 bedroom palace, will you ever live in that building to the extent the desire can be justified?  How many outfits sit in your wardrobe or closet that you have not worn in months if not years?  Can you recall the last time you wore each?  Of all the material possessions you have amassed in life, how many sit on shelves never touched, in boxes never seen, in drawers never opened.  Do you need to have so much stuff?  How much money have you spent in your lifetime on all of these possessions and if you had never bought any of them, how much would you have saved?  How much time could you have gained by working less than you did to buy it all?  What could you have done with your life instead?

Happiness is the most elusive of the three aspirations that society instils within us all.  It is perhaps the most elusive because there are no clear goals that we as a society have agreed upon to indicate success.  With money it is defined by how much we have, and with love it is defined by how long we can spend with one other person to make us feel like we're doing something right.  Happiness on the other hand is elusive because it means so many things to so many people that it's hard to get anyone to agree on it.  It's also one of the most elusive for the simple reason that it has not yet become a commodity.  You can't buy a bottle of it, although advertisers try and insinuate such things as implicitly as possible.  The truth is you can't buy it and we are led to believe we can, so much so that many reading this post right now will attest that they could make themselves happy if they had x amount of money to spend right now.

The thing about money, just like fame, and power, and all that they encompass, is that they never truly change people, so if you're not happy already, money won't make you happy.  All these things do is accentuate our own neuroses.  Your problems will be replaced with others, your focus will change, but your mentality will remain the same.  If you worry now you will continue to worry with money, all that will change is the object of your attention.

While society requires the majority to accept this reality, it does not prohibit your adventure beyond it.  Instead it actively encourages a minority of us to explore lives beyond it primarily as a means of entertainment for those that remain within the system.  The motivation most of the time for doing this is the expectation that you will fail, and you will fail spectacularly, and that your fall will serve as warning to others who dare to do the same.  The trouble is, there are a growing number of people whose ventures into this world outside of the system are not motivated by avarice or any malign intent, but simply a desire to unplug.  There have been movements of varying sizes and success throughout history that had their moments, perhaps the most well known today is the hippie movement.  These movements attempted with varying degrees of success to create new societies that existed outside of convention.  Think of the reaction most people have to these movements and the element of portraying this as a life choice that should be avoided becomes self-evident.  Most people won't think of these movements as being something they aspire to - a minority will but that minority is very small.

The only other choice for people who do not wish to wake up, who want to remain part of the system but do not want to follow its rules is the choice of apathy.  To daydream.  To exist within the system, never challenging it, but never contributing to it.  Whether this is a choice you can make will ultimately depend on how much, or to be more precise, how little, attention you draw to yourself.  So the question becomes not whether you want to leave the system or not, but whether you wish to challenge it, or whether you recognise its purpose and accept it as a reality you want no part of but have no desire to change.  You might ask how someone can make such a choice if they are aware of all it entails and the answer is simple, if you're aware of it, the chances are, everyone else is too, but they are complicit.  The reason no-one challenges it from within is because they have no desire to, instead they all believe they can find a way to exploit it, to make it work for them, in short, they play the game.