52 Aces

Learning, competition and capitalism

philosophy

Losing Games

This is part of my 5 Minute Concepts series, which is designed to help you understand fundamental concepts about subjects like learning, memory and competition in the shortest time possible. Each episode is available in video format on my YouTube channel and audio via my podcast. If you prefer to read, the transcript is below.

Want to know when new content shows up? Sign up for my newsletter here.

Much of what I create revolves around the idea of competing intelligently. My overall hypothesis about competition is that most people do it haphazardly, and expect their own intuitions — mixed with a recognition of incentives — to carry them to victory.

Thinking this way is a serious error. It leads to making the same mistakes over and over again, and creates situations where meaningful learning takes much longer than it should.

What’s more important, in my opinion, is that we recognize just how competitive the world is. Competition exists at all levels of life, all the way down to single-celled organisms. Competition is a key component of evolutionary biology, and there isn’t any form of life on earth that can escape this dynamic.

There’s competition for money, competition for status, competition for relationships. There’s competition everywhere.

Life is competition and competition is life.

With all that being said, there’s an idea that’s just as important to keep in mind: sometimes, you’re playing a game you can’t win — no matter how intelligent you are or how hard you work. When you find yourself in this kind of game, what can be called a losing game, you need to exit that game as fast as you can.

Recognizing losing games like this is a skill in and of itself, one that many people find hard to develop. It’s particularly common in American culture, where we’re constantly told that hard work is the answer to all of life’s problems.

An extreme example I like to use is professional basketball. The first requirement for playing basketball at the pro level is to be very tall, which is something you can’t train for. You’re either born with tall genetics or you aren’t.

This can be a hard pill to swallow for people who don’t hit those height requirements but love the game enough to dedicate their lives to it. Someone who is only average height can spend every waking hour refining their game, doing everything they can to get better, and still come up short.

The problem in this situation isn’t that the player isn’t committed or intelligent enough. It’s just not a game they can win — and there’s nothing they can do about that.

Instead, this same player could find another way to be involved with the game. Maybe they could find work as a talent scout, or a commentator, or a sports writer, and still play for fun in recreational leagues.

Maybe they’re an exceptional programmer or mathematician, and that could allow them to build some kind of technological product that is intertwined with basketball.

Those are all winnable games for this fictional person: they offer odds with large payoffs and none of them have requirements that are impossible to train for.

What tends to drive people like this crazy is the search for glory. They want to do what’s most admired in society, like playing a sport professionally.

The irony is that wasting time on paths like this more often than not generates an excessive amount of unnecessary misery. Most people don’t really know what they want, they just think they know, so they waste their time pursuing goals that other people or society set for them.

That same player who wants to be a player more than anything might find more fulfillment in an auxiliary role than they can estimate.

Instead of wasting years pursuing a professional playing career that ends badly, they should find something else that might even end up being more fulfilling (or even lucrative).

Sometimes you can create the game yourself, and sometimes you have to go play someone else’s game. Either way, you should be doing this kind of analysis on a regular basis. Every now and then, stop and ask yourself: Is this a game I can win?

I’ve failed at this more times than I can count, and it’s cost me dearly on a few occasions. Hopefully you can heed my words and not make the same mistakes I have. Don’t play games you can’t win — find a place where you can play with favorable odds, and then throw yourself into that.

Autonomy

This is part of my 5 Minute Concepts series, which is designed to help you understand fundamental concepts about subjects like learning, memory and competition in the shortest time possible. Each episode is available in video format on my YouTube channel and audio via my podcast. If you prefer to read, the transcript is below.

Want to know when new content shows up? Sign up for my newsletter here.

If you ask most people what they want out of their work lives, there are two answers that appear to be tattooed on the inside of their skulls by popular culture:

  1. Money
  2. Making a difference

The priorities might be switched, but these are the two most common replies. It’s not a surprise that people pick these two, because A) we need money to buy things like food, shelter, and pleasurable experiences, and B) working a job where you feel like you aren’t making any sort of dent in the world is a soul-crushing experience for most non-sociopaths.

Neither of these answers are wrong — they’re just incomplete.

When someone gives these answers, worth asking a follow-up question: What is the common, fundamental thread between the two of them?

A common answer to this question is “meaning.” That’s a little too whimsical for my tastes, as meaning strikes me as an ideologically-charged construct that is borderline impossible to define. Even if meaning is given a quality definition (which I haven’t seen yet, but I’m open-minded), it still misses the target.

Instead, the real answer is (in the vast majority of cases), autonomy. We want to be able to determine how we spend our limited time on this planet. In short, we don’t just want to survive — we want to survive on our terms.

Nothing makes us more miserable than having someone breathing down our necks, telling us what to do every day.

And, unfortunately, that’s what most of us end up doing with the bulk of our lives.

We give up a lot of autonomy in the pursuit of money, which is both sad and ironic given that we’re working for the thing that is enslaving us in many cases. The fantasies about freedom we feed ourselves all seem to revolve around money, and not about autonomy.

This isn’t entirely misguided: within a capitalist framework like the one we live in, money can (at certain amounts) provide a great deal of autonomy.

If you suddenly have 50 million dollars in the bank, you can tell your boss to go fuck himself and proceed to jump into a pool of champagne.

Or you could politely hand in a resignation letter and shake everyone’s hand on the way out of the office. Or you could just never show up, never respond to an email or call, and laugh about leaving your former colleagues in the dark.

That’s the power of autonomy. You get to decide what you do within any given moment, so life becomes a “choose your own adventure” story instead of a constant context switch between what you want to do and what someone else wants you to do.

Making a difference and the search for meaning both fall into the autonomy bucket as well, because both are activities that you judge on a subjective basis. Maybe your definition of making a difference is volunteering at a local animal shelter, or creating a documentary about a local endangered species.

Searching for meaning might involve spending your days reading big, complex books and then going for long walks on the beach. Or maybe it dawns on you that nothing has meaning and you turn into a shameless nihilist.

This is the power of living on your own terms. You get to decide what you want to do. The world is what you make of it.

From this point forward, you should evaluate the different opportunities you have in life based on how they’ll affect your ability to operate autonomously. But, as I’ve been alluding to, this can be a monumental task.

Quite a few people make a trade-off of money for autonomy, and discover that it makes them miserable. Investment banking is a good example of this, as bankers are paid tons of money but often work soul-crushing hours with very little autonomy.

Many of them would likely be much happier making a fraction of their incomes engaging in activities that they actually want to be engaging in.

Working your face off while you’re young in hopes of some autonomy payoff in the distant future is another landmine many people step on. These people look back when they’re older and realize their best years were spent in service of someone else’s desires — and there’s no going back.

I know it’s hard with how competitive the world is now, but try to make an effort to think less about the monetary rewards you might get from doing something. Instead, reorient your thinking towards what you can do that will give you the best chance at living an autonomous life.

You might be surprised how little it costs.