My amazing brother came down to Charlotte to visit a few weeks ago. He's probably the smartest person I know. He has like 8 degrees in an astonishing variety of subjects - if you ask him about anything he knows at least something about it, more often than not a great deal about it. He travels around the globe teaching people about what may be the driest subject ever devised, Risk Management, but he holds his audiences spellbound because he salts his lectures with pertinent analogies and ties in seemingly unrelated topics, making risk management seem like the most interesting and important thing ever. He told me he studied so hard and learned so much because life is a game and he wants to win. I don't know what that means, but I can't stop thinking about it.
I love video games. When I play, I like to win. More than that, I feel a deep, consuming drive to dominate, crush and destroy. My favorite tactic is to sneak and snipe. As long as I stay hidden and kill from an untouchable distance not only do I win, I win easily and decisively. Full-on, ground-level, chest-to-chest confrontation with an enemy that could kill me seems ridiculous when it's so simple to drop them with a shot from hiding. I love the challenge of lurking in darkness and lining up an impossibly long shot - it's not a sure win, but the risk is low and the laws of probability are in my favor. Not so with face-to-face combat, where the odds are 50/50 at best, the risk is poorly managed and worst of all, I might lose. See, it's not just that I must win - it's that I must not lose. If I start losing in a video game, I either upgrade my gear, set it to an easier level or simply stop playing, sometimes forever. The real problem is, this mentality is not unique to my video game play - I feel that way in real life, too. While I'm not convinced life should be considered a game, it sure can feel that way and if everyone else is playing, I can't just sit on the sidelines, can I?.
Life can be a fun exercise if approached with the right mindset. While it's probably healthy to keep a playful attitude, a 'fun exercise' is quite different from a 'game' - games have winners and losers. How can you 'win' life? If 'losing' life is dying, is 'winning' being born? That's too random and uncontrollable to be the endgame, right? We call poor, uneducated, unmotivated, unhealthy people 'losers' and their opposites 'winners' but that seems pretty random too, as well as a capricious and diaphanous social construct. I'm not clear on the rules and if life's a game, it's an exhausting, maddening game to play. Because my heart is rebellious, most days I just want to disengage.
My ripping cognitive dissonance is that while I might not believe life is a game, I'm playing it like a First-Person Shooter. I skirt the perimeter, hide in the shadows, engage from a safe distance, wishing I could not just win but dominate, crush and destroy without direct confrontation, not really knowing what constitutes winning but driven to believe I must not lose. When it begins to feel like I'm losing, I want to quit playing. There's no easier levels to set. If I'm going to win, I'm going to have to follow my brother's example and go back to school. I'm going to need an upgrade. I may not be able to smash my way to victory, but perhaps I'll be willing to engage more often. Is that winning?
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