What Games Are Worth Playing?

There's a reason why adults socialize children out of the "why" game: it's annoying.

We'd like to think our knowledge rests on a solid edifice of facts, but keep asking "why" and you'll quickly find yourself at an "I don't know." Concepts can only be defined in terms of other concepts, like a web hanging over our experience, and being reminded of this is uncomfortable. Like manually breathing, or noticing how your tongue sits in your mouth.

For many, this discomfort fades quickly as their attention flutters off to something else, but I will admit to an obsessive character. My attention paces in circles, fixating on what I don't understand. The "why" game is compulsive, and the uncertainty is nauseating. I eventually learned not to prompt adults with upsetting questions, but to retreat into systems and rules. The "why" game could be dominated—I didn't have to content myself with "I don't know" or "God did it."

Naturally, I was an insufferable teenager.

Like many other special science boys, I gave up on the prospect of "going outside" and found refuge in online communities. For me, it was the rationalists, not in the Enlightenment sense but in that distinctly Californian strain of utilitarian self-optimization and AI hand-wringing. I believed in the "power of intelligence." I was ready for "systematized winning." The system felt clean. Obvious. Morally necessary, even. We can think of life as a game (or a series of games) insofar as we have preferences over the possible outcomes. Humans are biased and optimize for the feeling of winning (or not losing), but through diligent practice in overcoming these biases we can optimize for actually winning. Simple.

But this doesn't tell us what to value, only how to be consistent about it. The "why" question is still there underneath all the systematizing. There is, of course, no shortage of attempts to derive an "ought" from an "is," or at least from simple moral axioms. Pleasure is good, suffering is bad—this is the obvious position, and it follows logically that one should strive to maximize pleasure and minimize pain across the universe. But we can ask again: why these values?

I'm not going to challenge the validity of the arguments. They are impregnable. But the "why" game doesn't end in arguments. We can keep fumbling around the conceptual web all we want, but there will always be this irreducible gap between explanation and brute phenomenology. What is life supposed to feel like?

Paring down the "good" into the "quantifiable" feels comforting. That sinking uncertainty is diffused into calculation. But this is homework—the problem is well-defined, and it's just a matter of the implementation details. Why should my life be homework?

The framework simply begs the question: it's how you maximize utility. But what are the stakes? Why do I care about maximizing utility if I'm going to die? Where does that utility go? Am I going to get a good grade on life? Decision theory says nothing on the subject of death except that it shouldn't happen. Meaning is just a consumption good, and dying as obviously bad because you can't consume anymore. Hm.

Perhaps life is just a game of regret golf—the ultimate bourgeois pastime, fit for the manicured greenery of our comfortable existence. Should we just cut our losses and kill ourselves?

We can. But while we're here, shall we try something else first?

It's tempting to swing to the other extreme and just give up. Maybe if you do enough shrooms you realize that SAT prep was deeply traumatic for you, and your true calling is becoming a podcaster or living out of a van, but let's not throw the existential baby out with the bathwater. We can do better than "just vibing."

As Kierkegaard put it, "life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." The uncertainty is the entire game. I'm going to seek it out.

Now, uncertainty isn't the same as risk. We can trivially manufacture risk by playing a hand of blackjack, or jumping out of a plane—the odds are known, even if the exact outcomes aren't. But gambling for its own sake is just as spiritually empty as avoiding risk entirely. I want the unknown unknowns—the outcomes I didn't know were possible. How can I expose myself to being meaningfully wrong?

Most games we play ask very little of us—they can be paused and resumed at our leisure. But games of love and war demand commitment. In staking ourselves on a declaration or a cavalry charge, we create an irreversible point of departure. There's no optimizing our way out.

This is my game. Call it a romantic project. I can live with the uncertainty, but I can't live with not playing at all.