Life As A Game

Think of your life in terms of performance art, the stage set from your earliest days. You don't see it as a game but it is. The rules of the game are defined from beyond -- your schooling, your religion, your profession. You fixate on the future. Oh, what a good boy am I, or will be.

And then, perhaps, comes the day when you realize no one is really watching your performance, judging you. This notion, far from dispiriting (nothing personal, those audience members are simply preoccupied with their own worlds), is actually liberating. It's the day you can finally, perhaps, claim your own agency, the day you can become more present, the day you can stop performing.

This proposition plays out in our discussion pieces, starting with a six-minute segment by the late English, self-styled “philosophical entertainer” Alan Watts (Alan Watts/Playing The Game of Life), and as further rounded out by David Brooks in a recent Opinion Piece (NYT: Is Life a Story or a Game?). Life is a series of games, you see, all played in the pursuit of what is truly sought -- the insatiable quest for status.

In so doing, Brooks builds on his previous thesis that one’s life can be thought of in terms of two mountains: the first, an ego-based pursuit of worldly success reflected one’s resume; the second, an ego-lessened focus better captured in one’s eulogy (as we discussed in our MM10/7/19) Second Mountain session).

We may blend Watts and Brooks as we discuss whether we are, perhaps, little more than “individual egos in bags of skin” (per the Watts characterization elsewhere) as we navigate our respective life courses, each of us held hostage by our attachments. The game proceeds until it times out or otherwise hits tilt.

Only then are we confronted with (and are challenged by) those things we may deemed to have been the status-worthy objects of our attention: money and things (you will never have enough); body and beauty and sexual allure (you will die a million deaths as you age); power (you will feel weak and afraid); intellect (you will end up feeling a fraud, always on the verge of being found out). What’s left, for better or for worse, is a certain core.

Throw in an upcoming movie night film, My Dinner With Andre, to complement this session (optional viewing for this session, date 8/18) as it depicts a conversation between essentially those two mountains. A changed man, newly awakened to the world and seeing it for the first time, tries to share his excitement with an old friend not so moved. Just know this movie was considered a bit “out there” (meant in a good way) even when it debuted some forty years ago.

But, back to the Brooks piece title question i.e. whether life is a game or a story, you will bear witness in the film to life seen through the lens of extraordinary conversation and storytelling.