How to Play Infinite Games

How to Play Infinite Games

Here’s the problem. Sometimes, we spend so much time thinking about the goals or the achievements we should be accomplishing that we lose ourselves when we actually accomplish them. Sometimes, achieving the thing that we thought would bring us so much peace, pride, and satisfaction gives us a response that only lasts a handful of days, if we are lucky. 

It’s the wakeup the day after your birthday, when you realise you are still just a normal person who has to do all of the things normal people do. No matter what you accomplish, there will always be the day after, where you come down from the high you were on and return to ground zero. We all know this experience, where something you’ve been looking forward to for so long finally happens, and after the moment is over, you are forced to return to baseline.

This can be a pretty crushing experience. It’s sobering, and you realise that your life is not a movie that ends with a credit roll and a happily ever after, but you are in fact always tasked with something next you need to do.

Every experience you have is finite; your feelings are temporary, and they have an expiration date. No matter how good you feel in a single moment, I can guarantee that the feeling will dissipate and be replaced by another, and another, and another. To illustrate this, I want to explain my experience with two huge achievements I accomplished this year.

The first was graduating uni. This is a dream I’ve had for over 5 years and has been full of trials and tribulations. Countless sleepless nights, assignments, thesis projects, stress, anxiety, everything. I promised myself that if I accomplished this thing and pulled it off, I’d never stop feeling proud and would always honour the work that I’d done. That lasted all the way up until I walked across the stage, got my paper, and then partied with my friends. The day I woke up, I realised that nothing had really changed. Whilst receiving my degrees did mark a huge achievement, it was over. The process had finished. Whilst I still felt good, the immense pride I felt for myself walking across the stage had also dissipated. Life goes on. What’s next? 

After finishing my Ironman, I learned some pretty important lessons. I’d spent so much time visualising this goal, working towards it, obsessing over one day, and trying to calculate every tiny thing that could possibly happen. On the day, I poured everything into getting the job done, and when I finished, I was ecstatic. Then I woke up the next day and things went back to normal. Life goes on. What’s next? 

What’s next is such a brutal thought to have after achieving something that you’ve been thinking about every day for a year, or in the case of my university degree, half a decade. It can feel like a bit of a slap in the face, like this goal you were spending hours and hours thinking of and ruminating on has lost its value. I, however, don’t think that this is the right way to think about what’s going on here.

The hedonic treadmill is a concept to describe this feeling of always returning to some ‘baseline’ set of emotions. Put simply, the concept is that no matter what we experience, any novel emotion eventually becomes our baseline experience, and the significance of what we feel always returns back to some average level.

Think about some of your ‘first’ achievements. First job, first car, first boyfriend or girlfriend. These things feel amazing and mark massive milestones in your life. Unfortunately, they also lose their novelty as our brain learns to adapt to their presence in our life. If you think about it, this is actually quite useful; if we were always in some heightened and excited state, it would be difficult to get anything done. All of these things lose their shine as we begin to grow accustomed to them.

There are some important implications to this idea. A massive one, in my opinion, is that whatever feeling you are trying to chase through the accomplishment of whatever you pursue is likely something you’ve already experienced. If we take the car example, it is likely that the feeling of buying your second, third, or fifth car is very likely to be a comparable feeling to the first time you bought your first, no matter how much better the cars get, as they scale to our new standards. In fact, it's more likely that the feeling of satisfaction we get buying a car, whilst nice, will actually diminish over time, as we grow accustomed to owning cars. The point here is that, just like a drug addict, we build a resistance to these emotions and need to work harder to get the same fix.

I don’t think it's right, however, to view this fact with pessimism. I am a big believer in celebrating milestones, achievements, and accomplishments. That being said, however, it is unwise to fall victim to the idea that “if I just achieved x, then I’ll be happy.” No one single goal is going to bring you peace. It’s the freeway lane fallacy—“just“one more lane.” It won’t solve traffic (strange example; my mum's a geographer, and I’m passionate about road design), and one more goal won’t make you happy. You should always be proud of how far you’ve come and look back with appreciation for what you’ve achieved, but the job is never done. You should always be looking forward, because there is always something new for you to do.   

And this is what the term “playing an infinite game” means. See, these goals and targets are great (as well as necessary for being self-actualized), but they are just things to shoot for. The real enjoyment, the real passion, comes from the act of pursuing better itself. The reason I wanted to train straight after my Ironman is because it’s the process I fell in love with, not the results.   

Games are things we play to reach an end. We choose a strategy within a set of well-defined rules that we think will output the best outcome (this is known in mathematics and economics as game theory). Games, like board games, have fixed ends; they finish when one player reaches a state of play where victory is defined, and then the game ends. My Ironman was a finite game. University is a finite game. They end at a certain time or in a certain state (at the end of the cutoff for the Ironman, or when I graduate or drop out of university), and I’ve either won or lost (finished or dnf'd - graduated or dropped out). The fact that they end makes them finite. You cannot pursue these things forever.   

An infinite game, on the other hand, is something you can pursue forever because it has no end. I love physical fitness, and I love exploring all of the different ways this manifests. I love swimming, I love running, I love lifting, I love bodybuilding, and I’m sure I’ll fall in love with all sorts of other aspects of fitness and movement over my life. But I don’t really care about how good I get at these things, because ultimately this journey has no end. I will always find some small goal to provide an orientation and a direction for me to follow in the short term, but the game itself will always be what I want to do, and as I play this game I will necessarily be bringing my best self out through the enjoyment of being active.   

The same goes for work. I have personal goals for things I’d like to achieve in my career and my work, but at the end of the day these are just objectives. The game itself has no end; it's limitless. And I love playing it because my work is an extension of myself, and I love trying to bring the best out of what I do through the growth I experience by contributing to causes I care about.  

It’s David Goggins who says the meaning of life is you. At the end of the day, bettering yourself for personal enlightenment, the betterment of others, and to be the best person you can be for humanity is the goal. It’s not about why you’d want to play these infinite games; it's about thinking about why you wouldn’t. What reason do you have to not try your best in some endless and meaningful pursuit? 

And like it or not, its not even really a matter of if you want to play in the first place. If you don't choose a game, one will be assigned to you - and its probably not one you'd have selected if you could try again.

If you don’t know what game you should be playing, don’t worry about trying to figure it out or define it. Action is the best teacher in this regard. If you feel like you don’t know much or don’t know what you should be doing, then simply choose the most meaningful goal you can think of right now in your current position. Aim at it, and with everything you have, peruse it relentlessly. You will gain a little bit of discipline, which will develop your wisdom, which will in turn allow you to adjust your direction accordingly to figure out better and better goals to aim at. In a self-improving cycle, you will find that you are able to fall in love with a process. This is what the game is all about.

I will never again underestimate the sheer amount of personal growth and experience you can gain by just choosing meaningful goals and ticking them off. With time, and with enough accomplishments, you will find naturally what game you have been playing by analysing the patterns of what you’ve been perusing. This therefore reveals that the goals you have been choosing and tasks you have been attempting to accomplish are nothing more than guiding lights along a journey that doesn’t really have an outcome, because to play a meaningful game is a reward in an of itself. Rise to the best version of yourself; that’s the best game I can think of.