The Tyranny of the Measurable

 

‘For it is well that the years should not seem to wear us away and disperse us like a handful of sand; rather they should fulfil us.’

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

 

The final pose at the end of a yoga practice is savasana (corpse pose) where a practitioner assumes a supine position; closes/softens her eyes; relaxes her mind and dissolves all the tension in her body. This pose integrates the benefits of her asana practice. It has a reputation of being ‘the hardest yoga pose’ because people have a difficult time lying still after moving through an asana practice; and overcoming the restlessness of needing to move on to the next thing. Regardless, savasana is still a part of the practice and when a practitioner skips this part of her practice, her practice is incomplete. Interestingly, in the Learn Skills Faster episode, Andrew Huberman of the Huberman Lab podcast describes a neurological process that bears the verisimilitude of savasana. ‘There are also data showing that after any kind of motor movement provided, you’re not bringing a lot more additional new sensory stimuli, there’s a replay of the motor sequence that you performed correctly and there’s an elimination of the motor sequences that you performed incorrectly, and they are run backwards in time.’ This process differs from sleep in that in sleep the correct sequence is performed forwards in time. This process happens necessarily within the same session as the actual motor movement. It is a critical part of the learning process. It is both indispensable and unmeasurable. This is where the restlessness comes in. In a society where ‘time is money’ and productivity is valued above most if not all things; this ‘doing nothing’ can be quickly labelled as sloth. Novice practitioners can easily come up with a list of things they could be doing instead of savasana and they do, to the detriment of all the work they just put in. This brings me to the relationship between the symbolism of ‘coherence’ and ‘completion’.

 

Jonathan Pageau of The Symbolic World in a podcast episode titled ‘The Apple CEO, 666, and The Garden of Eden’ explicates on the relationship between the symbolism of the numbers 6 and 7. The easiest illustration is how they are connected in The Creation Myth. The work of creation was finished on the 6^th day and the 7^th day was the Sabbath, the day of rest. In Biblical symbolism, 6 is the number of coherence (the ‘consistency’ of the work week) and 7 is the number of completion. Essentially there are 6 days which are measurable in terms of productivity and then there is the 7^th day which is not. The cadence of the first 6 days is the same and it changes dramatically on the 7^th day. The 7^th day is a day set apart. Slowly, however, this day’s difference and essence has been lost to society, and the day has been changed into just another day to serve the means of production. In his book, The Disappearance of Rituals, Byung-Chul Han writes ‘God does not rest on the seventh day simply to recover from the work he has done. Rather, rest is his nature. It completes the creation. Thus, when we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine… Rest is not merely recovery from work nor is it a preparation for further work. Rather, it transcends work, and it must in no way come into contact with work… If rest becomes a form of recovery from work, as is the case today; it loses its specific ontological value. It no longer represents an independent, higher form of existence and degenerates into a derivative of work.’ When we fail to set aside rest, we become beasts of burden living mundane lives, reduced to servomechanisms of production. ‘Rest is made to serve production and is degraded into leisure and recreational time’(Han).

Han writes, ‘Most importantly, during the Sabbath man rests his tongue from the everyday chit-chat & learns silence and listening. The sabbath demands silence; the mouth must be closed.’ Most of the communication that takes place today is serving the means of production. There is on one hand the endless chatter of social media: posts, lives, boomerangs, comments, DMs, likes etc. which is mostly meaningless and on the other hand, businesses are becoming more and more dependent on WhatsApp for e.g., to achieve their productive ends. This, no doubt, makes it quicker to communicate but it also increases the endlessness of it all. Communication has become more about quantity than quality and we end up saying a lot about nothing or even worse, using our mental bandwidth in attempts to stay on top of unread emails or messages which themselves have an exponential life of their own. This has created a lot of dread; of missing important communication and of missing out on other important things in life. Production spills over and seeps into every crevice of our lives. And any silence from our side (unread and unanswered correspondence) is ill received and we are labelled as rude, and impolite. An app like WhatsApp has increased the accessibility of people beyond belief. For people who have had the same phone number since time immemorial; all the people they would have met over the years, in all those different seasons have access to them today, now, in this season. This hyper-accessibility may serve production, but the psyche takes a pounding. There is also a hyper-surveillance where people’s movements on the app. are tracked and timestamped. There is an expectation and entitlement, socio-normatively, that if people are online they imperatively have to acknowledge and read all the messages that come in.  

 

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, in their book Metaphors We Live By write ‘Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish- a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought of action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do everyday is very much a matter of metaphor.’ Communication, of the nature discussed above, is promoted and endorsed because it is highly measurable and can therefore be used productively. The content is largely insignificant because it is largely bullshit. Harry Frankfurt in Bullshit writes, ‘One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit’. However, this communication is measurable and measured. It is the bits/s that make this communication valued and the ringing bell that makes tech companies salivate like Pavlovian dogs is data. As Lakoff & Johnson put it; we live by metaphors and they can provide perspective on how we see things and their affordances to us. In general, living in the information age, this movement of information is described as the ‘flow’ of information. When we are on the internet; we are said to be ‘surfing’ the net. We ‘stream’ when we watch or listen to something online. There are data ‘lakes’ where raw data is stored. Our language depicts how we see data in relation to ourselves. This means we metaphorically see and experience data as water, and this itself is a harbinger of things to come. As fun as surfing is, human beings can’t ride waves indefinitely. You have to, eventually, get out the water or risk drowning. With the omnipresence of information and communication, drowning presents itself as a large and looming possibility. Also, is Big Data akin to a Big Wave of the Nazará proportion?  or is it like Meta Data and it represents a Meta Cosmic Reality named The Great Deluge and its mass extinction implications? Things to think about.

I would like to colligate this with another metaphor we live by. The word ‘understand’ etymologically means ‘stand in the midst of’. When we have grasped something than we are standing in it. It’s ok to stand in water up to your knees but what happens if the data is quantitatively large (as is its nature) or moving so quickly, it knocks you off your feet? How and when does understanding take place and become knowledge. Nicholas Carr beffitingly named his book, on our inability to ‘dive deep’ to understand and know ‘The Shallows’. Han writes: ‘processors are faster than a human being precisely because they neither think nor understand, they only calculate… the proponents of dataism would argue that humans invented thinking because they cannot calculate fast enough, and that the age of thinking will prove to be a short historical interlude.’ Homo Sapiens’ big claim to fame is this ‘thinking’. What then to become of the thinking man in the times of calculation and algorithm? If we are still standing then we are likely, sinking.

With our limited understanding and knowledge, one would assume we would have less to say and yet the means of production, press upon us more ardently; insisting that we continue speaking and increasing the speed at which we do this. Less to say. More communication. The proliferation of Bullshit. Frankfurt writes ‘Bullshit is unavoidable when circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus, the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled- whether by their own propensities of by the demands of others- to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant.’

 

‘Work, work, work, work, work, work’ Our Barbados-born princess sings in her not-so-surprisingly named song, ‘Work’. The hard work Rihanna is singing about is not traditional work but a labour for love, or rather a labour for a connection beyond sex. Dare I say a ‘relationship’. We are at least comforted that Rihanna only repeats ‘work’ 6 times and not 7. On the 7^th day, she can rest from the need to keep that particular ‘relation-ship’ afloat in these tumultuous seas that is modern day dating. Hook-up culture is one of the insidious ways which illustrate how far we’ve embraced the measurable; even in our so called private spaces. How many matches? right swipes? followers? subscribers? Frankly, How much? Interactions between people are fixated on sex. With sex off the table, the table itself ceases to exist. Sex sells now more than ever but now we are willingly pimping ourselves out productively. We have reduced one another into succubae and incubi where the sexual act and its finality is prioritized above all else. We consume each other to the point of disgust, if not physically then virtually. Han writes, ‘the sexual act in today’s porn films seems mechanical. The principle of performance has also taken hold of sex, giving the body, the function of a sexual machine.’ In the spirit of performance and sensationalism, we are continuously stretching the boundaries of sex and sex which is just one dimension of existence permeates all the other dimensions. Coprophilia and Bestiality are becoming commonplace. A few weeks ago, a sex scene from The Wife went viral and it was heralded as a first of its kind in the South African context. Not only was this inevitable, the general trajectory of broadcasting lends to an increase in gratuitous salacious content to garner more views. ‘What the Immanuelle is going on here?’ commented a viewer because there was a time when sex had a time and a place, it was contained, it wasn’t broadcast when children were wide awake. The broadcasting of sex in the first place has been a very slippery slope. And now it’s everywhere. How do we call it sexual liberation when we are clearly enslaved to sexuality and can hardly move in any direction without being bombarded by it? We’ve also violently reduced each other to faces and genitals which we use and discard. And why would a phenomenon such as ‘Ghosting’ surprise us? What justification or explanation would we need to provide to a face and genitals? And besides lengthy explanations would require time that the means of productions do not encourage; it’s simply on to the next one. ’Porn kills off sexuality and eroticism more effectively than moral repression ever could have hoped to… the pathology of today’s society is the excess of positivity. It’s a too much not a too little that is making us sick’(Han).

 

In one of the Thinking Ape episodes, Stardusk speaks about an old duffel bag that was given to him by his father that lasted for more than a decade in good working order. And he laments how things are just not made to last for a long time anymore. Things have no durability. Which is precisely how a society of production would want it to be. Things are made, not mainly for the utility they provide, but to be sold. The sell is the bottom-line and there’d be just enough product substance to entice people to buy. There are times when there is insufficient product substance to warrant a purchase but once the hedonic treadmill has got people running on it like gerbil on spinning wheels; not much convincing is needed to have them spending money needlessly. We’ve fetishized the new and we are constantly upgrading and updating. We, as Han puts it, don’t use things but use them up. Even novelty is lost on us. Novelty is the new against the background of the old. When new is foregrounded against the new, it is not novel; it is just the sameness of the new; the coherence of production. Han, ‘the new quickly deteriorates into routine. It is a commodity that is used up and arouses the need for the new again. The compulsion of production as the compulsion to seek the new, only gets us deeper into the quagmire of routine in order to escape emptiness, we consume ever more new things, new stimuli and experiences. It is precisely the feeling of emptiness which spurs communication of emptiness which spurs communication and consumption.’ Our identities become as fickle as the ever-changing things around us. Nothing grounds us, and there is nothing to stand under (understand) either. Life is an ever-changing morass of insecurity and uncertainty. We are stabilized as every morning we wake up to new ceilings. We are unhomed, perpetually.

 

We’ve also lost the capacity to play and laugh. Play for the sake of play does not serve the means of production. It is merely unmeasurable in economic terms. It is the expenditure of energy that doesn’t translate into money. Han describes how poetry is becoming ever so rate because poetry is linguistic play. Haiku and Limerick are games with specific rules and the value of the game lies in successfully adhering to the rules of the game. On Monday afternoon at 3pm CAT, Chillers the world over gather to laugh while watching McGee, Sol Phenduka, and Ghost Lady play with language. A form of resistance against the tyranny of the measurable. Sure, the number of subscribers is a measurable metric, but that was the form that followed the function. And chillers aren’t mere spectators, they participate in following along and sharing in the laughter when Sol the PUNisher drops a pun. And there is no sophistry, no theatrics, no ‘TV personality’ paraphernalia, simple guys and girl, simply dressed, playing to their heart’s content. And it’s on productivity’s main day, Monday, during the actual workday. What was a Blue Monday?

 

Speaking of blue. There is a rhyme that goes: ‘something olde, something new, something borrowed and something blue, a sixpence in your shoe.’ This is a tradition that the bride incorporated when she married to ward off evil spirits and bring forth a good and happy marriage. Marriages themselves are falling apart quicker than they happened in the first place. There is a plethora of reasons why this is the case, (Rollo Tomassi has a comprehensive list) but my focus will be on one where productivity rears its head once again. In modern marriages, the marriage which has become an event (as opposed to a ceremony) of elaborate expenditure and consumption is disproportionality emphasized more than the everyday rituals of marriage. Even beyond the wedding, material acquisition (productivity) becomes the mainstay of the marriage or the online performance and parade of carefully curated consumption. Most of marriage is daily bread. The actual wedding is meant to be a ritualistic crossing of a threshold where a transformation takes place in the individuals who are about to start a life together. And yet this is not what takes place at weddings, the people in the advent of the marriage are the same as they were before the wedding and that marriage becomes like a house build on sand. Han, ‘The daily bread provides no stimuli. Stimuli quickly pale. Repetition discovers intensity in what provides no stimuli, in the unprepossessing, in the bland. The person who expects something new and exciting all the time, by contrast, overlooks what is already there [or simply loses interest in it].’ Marriages are frail because the objective unifying purpose of a marriage is lost to the subjective states of individuals within the marriage; the bond was flimsy to begin with.

 

In Gabor Maté’s, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, he writes, ‘Boredom rooted in a fundamental discomfort with the self, is one of the least tolerable mental states.’ Tom Bilyeu says what usually gets people is boredom; it’s the taedium vitae that is part and parcel of any goal pursuit; long stretches of burden punctuated by the short excitement of a milestone reached. The measurable would want us to frame boredom in a negative light so we are compelled to seek out new stimuli. A friend of mine Katlego Letlonkane says, ‘there are no boring things; just uninterested people.’ Our relationship to the objects around us is discursive and dismissive and objects are viewed through a lens of disposability. This contemptuous ‘been there, done that’ attitude makes it very difficult to move away from our solipsism to see things as daily bread, to bear witness to them, to experience intensity and not tedium, to form relationships with the everyday things around us and the everyday duties required of us as to experience being homed and subsequently a homing. ‘Men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same desk and the same chair’(Han).

 

In a preceding paragraph I mentioned how porn as a machine of productivity has reduced people to genitals and faces. The process of legal identification has done the same thing. People are reduced to a face, a unique number and two or so more particulars. IDs, driver’s licences, student cards, employee access cards, passports etc. This is something we have generally accepted and relegated to that particular sphere of life. This process of reduction may be more pernicious than we think. Zoom, Skype and Teams are ways where only the face matters productively. Apple has Facetime because it is time with your face, only. Michael Phillip in his Third Eye Drop podcast once said that we have become heads moving way faster than our bodies and we have left our bodies behind. We live in our heads and because we live in the information age, prepositional knowledge is valued above everything else. Our bodies take up space and they are slower than our brain’s processing speed, embodiment requires time, deliberate action requires time, enacting requires time, rituals require time. But time is money. Intercourse is ignored for unrelenting discourse. As prized as prepositional knowledge is, it falls short in offering us what we need to live fulfilling lives.  Wisdom is rare while depression, alienation, formlessness and meaninglessness are rife. We are burnt out and our bodies have become landfills of pathologies. The hyper-exposure of the day denies the arcane and art, it also denies an agency that is unifying and complete. We are dispersed. We lack the situational awareness to fully participate in life because we are not situated.

 

And on the 7^th day God rested. He participated fully in his creation. He observed it. Observing the sabbath is a ritual. The disappearance of rituals has been a marker of the days where only the measurable matters and is attended to. Like all tyrants, productivity does not have limits. Its avarice requires all our lives.

And on the 7^th day God rested. He recognised his creation. He communed with it. Han writes, ‘But what is recognition? It is surely not merely a question of seeing something for the second time. Nor does it imply a whole series of encounters. Recognition means knowing something as that with which man makes himself at home in the world, to use a Hegelian phrase, is constituted by the fact that every act of recognition of something has already been liberated from our first contingent apprehensions of it, and is then raised into ideality. This is something that we are all familiar with. Recognition always implies that we have come to know something more authentically than we were able to do when caught up in our first encounter with it. Recognition elicits the permanent from the transient.’ 

And on the 7^th day God rested. Productive time became transformative durable time. John Vervaeke, ‘Ritual situates us in imaginal time in order to afford imaginally augmented cognition and perception to discern real patterns; to enter into right relationship with our future selves; to empower our self-correction and our self-regulation and to enact the serious play needed to self-transcend and aspire.’

 

 

Homo Ludens: Man, The Player

 

‘Any thinking person can see at a glance that play is a thing on its own, even if his language possesses no general concept to express it. Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstraction: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play’

Johan Huizinga

 

Woman: ‘"Grown men”, why are you still playing video games?’

Man: ‘Same reason you wear makeup. Nice lil’ escape from reality.’

 

Still. So. Funny. Although there is a consensus amongst the female population that video games are a waste of time; and since most men are trying to get the female population to copulate with them; they may begrudgingly give games up or play on the DL. Mark Rober, who came up with the Super Mario Effect offers a different perspective to gaming. Many a millennial is well acquainted with the Italian plumber that is Super Mario and therefore an effect that is named after him is nostalgically well received and simply lands for many of us. The Super Mario Effect occurs when we shift our focus from falling into pits to saving the princess, in this way, we stick to the task and learn more. The effect is centred around reframing failure. When we were learning to play Super Mario, every time we ‘died’; we would try again and do things differently to how we had done them before. That’s it. We didn’t really care how we looked when we failed or anything else besides getting good at the game. This in essence is what life is about; life is a meta- game. We could leverage this effect and apply it to the rest of our lives. It seems ‘grown men’ may just be in a better position skill-wise; to deal with life. People would argue that life is different from gaming in that games are low stakes. This is what makes Rober’s point salient. We decide if something is high stakes or not and when we do that we get to decide where we place our focus; on the princess or the pits; the prospective gains or the losses. Andy Frisella says that people assess risk from the perspective of what they could lose as opposed to what they could gain. ‘You’ve built this life that you are afraid of losing as if it’s extremely valuable. When in reality, the value is way down the road, that you haven’t build yet and you are afraid to trade what you have for what you could have.’

Another factor that impacts how we characterise failure is whether we see life as an infinite game or finite game. James P. Carse in his book Finite and Infinite Games: a Vision of Life as Play and Possibility differentiates between the two. He writes: ‘There are at least two kinds of games. One could be finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.’ Simon Sinek in his book The Infinite Game adds ‘No matter how successful we are in life, when we die none of us will be declared the winner of life. And there is certainly no such thing as winning business. All these things, are journey, not events.’

The idea of life being a journey ties wonderfully with the The Hero’s Journey myth (Joseph Campbell) which players tap into through games. Edward Castronova writes in a book called Life is a Game: what game design says about the human condition, ‘People want to be heroes. They crave agency, and the ability to do something that matters. They want meaning.’ Ray Dalio of Principles co-opted The Heroes Journey and formulated a five step process people can apply to get what they want from life: 1. Pursue Audacious Goals 2. Fail 3. Learn Principles 4. Improve and 5. Pursue More Audacious Goals. Whether you are trying to save Princess Peach from Bowser or trying to be an amazing athlete or trying to live an infinite life like Sinek’s grandma, this process is applicable to all facets of life.

As hilarious as the tweets I opened this essay with are, they only scratch at the surface of the role games and makeup play in the lives of human beings. As contemptuous as the woman is towards men who play games, she doesn’t realise that she is playing as well. You only have to watch women dressing up and beating their faces to know that they derive plenty of fun from it and are essentially playing when they engrossed in cosmetics. The man dismisses the makeup play as a form of escapism, but he is only considering the aesthetic, tangible morphological aspects of makeup. Of course, there is another game at play here called the mating game where women use makeup to beguile, lure, out-compete other women to win over the affections of suitable males. The biological seriousness of mate selection is used to cover up the fact that makeup is both ploy and play. All roads lead to Rome. Even when men play video games, they are learning important skills which when applied to other contexts of life propel the species forward evolutionarily. Michael Phillip of The Third Eye Drops podcast says in an episode on Transrational Oracles and Magical Thinking in the 21^st Century with Sarah Zucker, ‘I would posit that play leads to evolution, to curiosity, to exploration, eventually to acts of creation, science and even art. I think they are all derivative of play.’ Play creates reality, it does not escape it, well at least it shouldn’t. While Icarus was instructed to fly neither too high nor too low; play, too, has a golden mean: The Divine Child archetype. If we play to distract, to wile away our time, to numb or escape reality, we miss the golden mean and spend much of our time at the extremes of the continuum of play: being Peter Pan/ Wendy Darling whose play renders them impotent or ineffectual in life or Adulting-Adults who have removed all play from their lived experience. For the most part, makeup is low-hanging fruit when it comes to playing games particularly because there aren’t really any higher-order skills that women tap into during that form of play. Jordan B. Peterson qualifies games worth playing by asking: ‘To what degree do you practice a wide range of subset of skills that would be transferable to other games while you are playing that game? I think you could make the case that if you are playing a very complex video game; that the activities that you are engaging in, which involve leadership, and cooperation, and communication and problem solving are actually a more comprehensive subset of the skills that you would have to develop, to work in the world as a complex place?’ Castronova breaks down game design into two main components: strategies and stances. He describes a stance as ‘a combination of three things: an assumption about what victory in life is, a strategy for winning, and a set of tactics for carrying out that strategy on a day-to-day basis. A stance is an attitude towards existence, when existence is understood as a game.’ I think that there are conducive stances and obstructive stances in life. It is usually obstructive stances that hamper people’s progress in life. A stance can go awry at any of the three junctures listed above: viewing failure as rigid and static losing as opposed to dynamic nuanced learning (antidotally addressed by The Super Mario Effect); having no strategy and/or doing things on a day-to-day basis that do not move you closer to your goal. Strategy is what allows us to exercise our agency effectively. Games do not only develop these skills but they also impress upon us that ‘agency [in the world] is taken, not given’ (Ryan Holiday).

Holiday shares an anecdote about General James Mattis in Courage is Calling. ‘“What keeps you up at night?” General James Mattis was once asked by a television reporter. Before the question was quite finished, he was already answering. “I keep people awake at night.”’ Mattis is a strategist. Alternatively, we can have life happen to us and be in constant reactivity mode like tacticians. Robert Greene in The 33 Strategies of War writes, ‘In war, strategy is the art of commanding the entire military operation. Tactics, on the other hand, is the skill of forming up the army for battle itself and dealing with the immediate needs of the battlefield. Most of us in life are tacticians, not strategists. We become so enmeshed in the conflicts we face that we can think only of how to get what we want in the battle we are currently facing. To think strategically is difficult and unnatural. You may imagine you are being strategic, but in all likelihood, you are merely being tactical. To have the power that only strategy can bring, you must be able to elevate yourself above the battlefield, to focus on your long-term objectives, to craft an entire campaign, to get out of the reactive mode that so many battles in life lock you into. Keeping your overall goals in mind, it becomes much easier to decide when to fight and when to walk away. That makes the tactical decisions of daily life much simpler and more rational. Tactical people are heavy and stuck in the ground; strategists are light on their feet and can see far and wide.’  Strategists keep people awake at night and take the offensive in life and accomplish their overall objectives. ‘Few men of accomplishment, da Vinci noted, got there by things happening to them. No, he said, they are what has happened’ (Ryan Holiday).

‘Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play’ (Heraclitus). In his Ted Talk, Mark Rober illustrates that people succeed because of the way they frame failure. This is crucial because the manner in which we frame failure will predict how much more practice we put in i.e. repetitions. There is a characteristic of video games called ‘Lives’ where a player has a finite number of tries before the games ends with a game over. This has been one of the developments of gaming that have been for me, a game-changer. Andrew Huberman describes two types of motor skills: open and closed skills. Open skills are performed in a dynamic and changing environment, while closed skills take place in a predictable environment. Skill type as well as focused attention determine how readily a new skill will be acquired. Repetitions lead to errors which let us know where we need to focus our attention which increases our plasticity and improves our skill. Lives incorporate all these aspects of skill acquisition. A novice can learn quicker, and an advanced player can take more risks. All this hangs on one thing however: The reps. There’s a word in adulting-adults language, that gets a bad rep; that word is discipline. When we frame failure negatively, discipline means doing hard things that we hate but are good for us. When we frame failure like the Divine Child: we see discipline as doing something we love to do anyway; that may be hard because its good for us. Discipline is ‘the seriousness of a child at play’. G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy writes ‘because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘do it again’ and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-ups are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun, and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon.’ When we play, we unwittingly say to ourselves ‘Do it again’. As we arrive at the console, court, contour etc., we say to ourselves ‘Do it again’ and we infuse play into our work, our lives. In the face of failure, error, pits; we tell ourselves ‘Do it again’. 

Castronova writes, ‘I love games and have been playing and studying them my whole life. It stands to reason that, eventually, I would start seeing life as a genuine game. It has been a way to process and accept the awful things that can happen in a life. A game perspective on life gives the awful things a place: they are part of the experience; they make the experience good in the same way that reality of unfair losses in sporting events makes the whole experiences of sport genuine, legitimate, and emotionally real. A sport without crushing losses is not good. Neither is a life without any possibility of suffering. Human suffering makes this a serious game indeed. Well worth our time, thought, and passion. Well worth playing. Worth playing well. The game of life matters; it also seems to have been incredibly well designed. The more time I spend thinking about life as a game, the more brilliant its design seems to be. The game is rich, deep, beautiful, and elegant; moving and full of pathos; exciting, exploding with possibility, rich with reward, and fraught with danger; full of vast empty timelines punctuated by heart-pounding moments whose memory lasts forever; and also, a dense web of secrets, absolutely impenetrable, yet with hints and clues lying about everywhere. The game is played both alone and with other. No human person has ever won definitely, yet playing is satisfying to everybody. The game of life is real, and it fascinates endlessly.’

Let’s play!