You Did Realise You Were Inside the Game, Didn’t You?

The hardest things to see are the things you are inside of. Once something becomes the unquestioned environment you live in, think through, speak from and use to make sense of everything, you stop noticing it as a thing at all. A fish probably doesn't spend much time wondering about water. You don't notice the language you're speaking while you're speaking it. You don't consciously study the rules of a game once you've learned how to play. You simply play.

That may be why one of the strangest facts about human life is also one of the easiest to miss.

You did realise you were inside the game, didn't you?

I don't mean metaphorically, and I don't mean spiritually, at least not in the vague sense these words are often used to make life sound more mysterious or interesting than it actually is. I mean structurally.

A game is what happens when a player accepts a set of limitations in order to pursue an outcome.

That is all.

There are rules. There are boundaries. There are pieces. There are constraints. There is uncertainty about what will happen. There is something you are trying to do and something that might get in the way. You enter the field and then you play.

Take away the limitations and there is no game. Take away the possibility of losing and winning becomes meaningless. Take away the boundaries and there is no field to play on. Take away uncertainty and there is nothing left to discover. Take away problems and there is nothing left to solve.

And yet this is the strange thing about being human. We spend an extraordinary amount of our lives trying to escape the very limitations that make the experience of being alive possible.

We want no problems, no uncertainty, no pain, no rejection, no failure and no limitations. We imagine that freedom means somehow transcending the conditions of the game altogether, finally arriving at a point where nothing can go wrong, nothing is difficult, nobody can reject us, our body no longer causes us problems and the future contains no surprises.

But if you succeeded, what exactly would be left?

What would you do with an existence in which there was nothing to overcome, nowhere you couldn't go, nothing you couldn't have, nothing to discover, no uncertainty about how the story ends and no possibility that anything could go wrong?

You wouldn't have found freedom.

You would have ended the game.

And I think this is where we have made a very important mistake in the way we understand our limitations.

We have mistaken the rules of the game for the prison walls.

The Strange Relationship We Have With Limitation

Most people have a complicated relationship with the things that limit them. Their body. Their age. Their childhood. Their personality. Their circumstances. Their money. Their geography. Their responsibilities. Other people. Time. Death.

They experience these things as evidence that they are not free.

And of course, from one perspective, they are right. Human beings are undeniably limited. We cannot do anything we want. We cannot go anywhere we want. We cannot become anything we can imagine. We cannot control what other people do. We cannot stop time. We cannot escape the physical reality of having a body that gets tired, sick, injured and eventually dies.

But the mistake is assuming that limitation and imprisonment are the same thing.

They are not.

In fact, limitation is the essential requirement for play. There is no such thing as a limitless game because the moment there are no boundaries, no obstacles, no objective and no possibility of failure, there is nothing left to play.

Try it.

Imagine a game with no rules, no boundaries, no objective, no obstacles and no possibility of failure. You could do anything, but because you could do anything, nothing would matter. You could go anywhere, but because there was nowhere you couldn't go, going somewhere would lose its meaning. You could achieve anything, but because achievement required nothing of you and failure was impossible, achieving it would become pointless.

The tension would disappear.

And with the tension would go the game.

The whole point of a game is that something is difficult, something is in the way and something is unknown. You don't know whether you are going to win. You don't know exactly how you are going to get there. You have to respond to what happens. You have to work with the pieces you have been given.

That is what makes it a game.

And this is why I think we have been asking the wrong question about freedom.

We ask:

How do I get rid of my limitations?

Perhaps the better question is:

What can I do with the limitations I've been given?

That question changed something for me recently.

The Game You've Been Given

There is an important distinction here, because a game usually requires the acceptance of limitation, yet the human experience is strange because you arrive inside a set of limitations you did not consciously choose.

You didn't choose your body. You didn't choose your family. You didn't choose where you were born. You didn't choose your childhood. You didn't choose your genetics. You didn't choose the historical moment into which you arrived. You didn't choose the fact that you would age or the fact that you would eventually die.

And yet here you are.

Already inside the game. Already playing with a particular set of pieces. Already limited by rules you didn't consciously agree to.

So perhaps the question is not:

Why did I choose this game?

I don't know whether you did.

Perhaps the more useful question is:

If this is the game I've been given, what can I actually do with it?

That question changed something for me recently.

I was in Japan.

I had been looking forward to the trip for months. I loved the anticipation of it. I loved getting on the plane. I loved looking out the window and thinking about crossing the seas and going somewhere else. I had this sense of my life expanding out into the world. International travel. Speaking. Consulting. Solving the problem of human insecurity.

And then I arrived.

And I hated it.

My legs hurt from the marathon I had just run. My right foot was swollen. The hotel bed was hard. The pillows were shit. The room was tiny. I hated being herded around tourist attractions like cattle. I felt claustrophobic. I wanted good coffee and couldn't find any near where we were staying. I was tired of being around people. I was receiving voice messages from clients I was sick of working with.

And my wife could tell I was miserable, which naturally enough began affecting her experience of the holiday.

The whole thing felt like a terrible mistake.

Then, at some point, I found a different question.

If this is the game I've been given, what can I actually do with it?

Nothing physically changed. Japan was still Japan. My legs still hurt. The hotel room was still tiny. The tour group were still the tour group.

But the question changed my relationship with the circumstances because I stopped trying to escape the game I was already in and started looking for the available moves.

And suddenly I could play.

I could choose where I walked. I could find interesting streets away from the group. I could ride a bike. I could get lost. I could find weird little bars. I could notice things. I could make something of the experience I actually had rather than continuing to demand the experience I thought I should have been having.

And the trip changed.

Not because Japan changed, not because my body suddenly felt perfect and not because everyone around me became more interesting.

Because I stopped arguing with the game.

I had been saying:

This isn't the game I wanted.

And life had been saying:

Yes. But this is the one you're in.

So the only useful question became:

What can you do with it?

That question might be one of the most useful questions I know.

The Absence of Limitation Is the Absence of a Game

I think many people imagine freedom as the absence of constraint. No boss. No financial pressure. No difficult relationships. No health problems. No obligations. No fear. No limits.

Then, finally, they imagine, they will be free.

But even if you could remove one limitation after another, you would simply find yourself inside another set. The wealthy person still has a body. The free person still has time. The successful person still has uncertainty. The beautiful person still ages. The powerful person still dies.

There is no version of human life without limits.

But more importantly, the absence of limitation wouldn't give you the freedom you imagine. It would give you the absence of a game.

Because limitation is not simply something freedom must tolerate.

Limitation creates the conditions inside which play becomes possible.

The attempt to finally escape every limitation is therefore a game you cannot win, and perhaps that is why so many people remain unhappy even after getting the thing they thought would set them free.

They wanted more money because they thought money would remove the limitation, and then they had money and found another limitation. They wanted the relationship, and then the relationship came with the limitation of another person. They wanted success, and then success came with expectations, responsibility and new problems. They wanted confidence, and then they discovered that being confident didn't mean knowing how everything would turn out.

The limits simply moved.

Because the problem was never that life had limitations.

The problem was the demand that it shouldn't.

There is a huge difference between:

I am trapped by these limitations.

And:

These are the limitations inside which I get to play.

The circumstances may be identical, but the experience is completely different.

One person is standing in a prison.

The other person is standing on a playing field.

The Icarus Problem

This strange relationship with limitation is captured beautifully in the story of Icarus.

Most of us know the simplified version. Icarus and his father Daedalus are trapped, and Daedalus builds wings from feathers and wax so they can escape. He warns Icarus not to fly too close to the sun because the wax will melt.

Icarus flies too high.

The wax melts.

He falls into the sea.

And the lesson we are often given is:

Don't fly too high.

Be careful. Know your limits. Don't get too ambitious. Don't become too excited. Don't overreach.

But there is another obvious part of the story that we seem to forget.

They were trapped on an island.

The wings were the solution.

Daedalus had to build them.

They had to fly.

Yes, flying involved danger. Yes, there were limits to how the wings could be used. But the existence of those limits was not an argument against flying.

The alternative was not to stay safely on the island forever because the wings might fail.

The point was to understand that the wings had rules.

You could fly.

You just couldn't fly indefinitely in every direction and at every height without consequence.

And I think this is the strange deception that many people have fallen into. They are so afraid of flying too high that they never build wings. They have been warned about the danger of ambition, failure, exposure and risk, so they conclude that the safest strategy is to stay where they are.

But that isn't the lesson.

You must build the wings.

You must leave the island.

The fact that there are limits to how high you can fly does not mean you shouldn't fly.

It means flying is a game with rules.

That is the whole point.

The limits don't disqualify you from the adventure.

They qualify you for it.

You Cannot Play Without Limitation

This is the part that seems obvious once you see it and almost impossible to see before you do.

You cannot experience achievement without the possibility of failure. You cannot experience courage without the presence of fear. You cannot experience discovery if everything is already known. You cannot experience the satisfaction of solving a problem if there are no problems.

The fantasy of a perfect life doesn't survive much scrutiny.

Imagine you wake tomorrow and every problem has disappeared. You have unlimited money. Perfect health. Everyone loves you. Every relationship works. Nothing can go wrong. Every outcome is guaranteed. You know exactly how your life will unfold.

How long would that remain interesting?

Not very long.

All the tension would go out of the game, and without tension, the game would stop.

We already understand this intuitively in almost every other context. Nobody wants to watch a football match where they already know the result and one team cannot possibly lose. Nobody wants to play a game they can win without trying. Nobody wants to read a story where nothing goes wrong. Nobody wants to watch a movie where the hero immediately gets everything they want.

We understand that limitation creates the experience.

And then we forget this when we look at our own lives.

We want the story.

We just don't want anything to happen in it.

The Strange Thing About Being Human

Here is where the idea gets even stranger.

At the most basic level, there is aliveness, and that aliveness is currently happening through an extraordinarily specific and limited construct.

You have a body. You have a name. You have a history. You have memories. You have relationships. You have a personality. You have a collection of stories about who you are.

And because these things are so immediate and convincing, it is very easy to mistake the construct for the whole of what you are.

You forget the distinction between the player and the character.

You become Jaemin. Or Sarah. Or David. Or whoever you have decided you are.

And then you spend the rest of your life defending the character.

This is not an argument against being human. Quite the opposite. I think becoming completely immersed in the human experience might be the whole point.

But there is a difference between being immersed in a game and forgetting that you are the player.

The player has to take the game seriously enough for it to matter. If you are playing chess but constantly thinking, none of this is real, you aren't really playing chess. You have to forget enough for the game to work. You have to care whether you win. You have to become invested in the outcome. You have to experience the tension. The possibility of losing has to feel real.

And this is where I think the human experience becomes fascinating.

Perhaps forgetting doesn't disqualify you from the game.

Perhaps forgetting is the qualifier.

You have to genuinely forget.

The Game Only Works If You Forget You're Playing

Imagine for a moment that you are God.

Not the old man with a beard sitting on a cloud.

I mean the limitless aliveness of the universe.

Everything.

Nothing outside of you.

No boundaries. No beginning. No end. No physical form. No death. No possibility of being trapped because there is nowhere you are not.

What would you do?

How would you play?

You would have a problem.

You have no limits.

And as we've already established, you can't play without them.

So imagine, for a moment, that limitless aliveness wanted to experience a limited game. Structurally, what would be required?

You would need limitation. You would need a body. You would need time. You would need to become one particular person. You would need to exist in a physical form. You would need to be born into a family you didn't choose, a country you didn't choose, a body you didn't choose and a set of circumstances you didn't choose.

You would need problems.

You would need uncertainty.

You would need the possibility of losing.

And then, for the game to actually work, you would need to forget what you were.

Otherwise there is no real tension. You would always know how the story ends. You would always know you were safe. You would always know that the limitations were temporary.

And so you couldn't really enter the game.

The point isn't that I know this is what happened.

I don't.

The point is that if limitless aliveness wanted to experience a limited game, forgetting would not be a malfunction.

It would be structurally necessary.

The strange thing, then, is that forgetting might not be the failure.

It might be the essential mechanism.

You cannot fully enter the experience while remembering you are outside it.

The player has to forget they are playing.

The actor has to forget they are acting.

The character has to believe the story.

Forgetting doesn't disqualify you.

Forgetting is what qualifies you to play.

But You Have Forgotten So Well That You Think You're Trapped

And here is the problem.

The game works.

It works extraordinarily well.

You have forgotten, so well in fact that you no longer think you're playing.

You think this is all there is. You think the character is the whole story. You think the limitations are evidence of imprisonment. You think your circumstances define what is possible. You think your history defines who you are. You think your body defines what you can experience. You think the words that describe you are what you are.

And so you begin trying to escape.

You try to become unlimited again. You try to get rid of fear, uncertainty, pain, failure, limitation and the parts of yourself you don't like.

And perhaps this is why the search for freedom can become so miserable.

You are trying to escape the conditions that make the experience possible.

It's like playing Monopoly and spending the whole game trying to get off the board, or sitting down to play chess and complaining about the fact that the pieces can only move in certain ways.

The rules aren't the problem.

Without them, there is no game.

You Don't Have to Escape the Character

This is important because I don't think the answer is to become detached from your humanity.

You don't need to float above your life in some blissful state where nothing matters. You don't need to transcend the character. You don't need to become so spiritual that you are no longer interested in money, sex, achievement, adventure, beauty, relationships, success, failure or anything else that makes being human interesting.

That sounds fucking boring.

The point isn't to exit the game.

The point is to play it properly.

And to play it properly, you need to understand something very simple.

You are not obliged to continue defending the character you built in response to the accusation.

You are under no obligation to continue being the person you were ten minutes ago simply because you have spent twenty years defending that identity. You can update the story. You can change direction. You can become interested in something else. You can stop playing a game. You can start a new one. You can change your mind.

You can discover that the character you have been defending for twenty years was built around an accusation made by a child who didn't understand what was happening.

And you can stop defending it.

This is not an invitation to become a better version of yourself.

It is the opposite.

Because the original problem may have begun when you decided that you needed to become better than yourself, different from yourself, other than yourself, in order to survive.

Don't be me. Be better than me. Different from me. Other than me.

The game structure is not another reason to construct a more impressive character. It is an opportunity to stop mistaking a defensive identity for the whole of what you are.

And this is where the game structure becomes extraordinarily useful for understanding insecurity.

Because insecurity is what happens when you forget that the character is a character and begin treating every threat to the story as a threat to your existence.

The Character Gets Accused

At some point in childhood, something happens.

Something hurts.

You are embarrassed, rejected, excluded, criticised, ignored, compared, humiliated or disappointed.

And because you are a child without the capacity to objectively understand the complexity of what has happened, you mistake the event for evidence of something about yourself.

I'm bad.

I'm stupid.

I'm worthless.

I'm ugly.

I'm weird.

I'm weak.

I'm a loser.

An event becomes evidence.

The evidence supports an accusation.

The accusation is agreed upon.

The agreement becomes certainty.

Certainty becomes belief.

Belief becomes strategy.

Strategy becomes identity.

And eventually:

Now you know it.

The accusation has become part of the character.

And from that point onwards, you begin organising your behaviour around preventing the world from confirming it.

You don't want to be stupid, so you try not to look stupid. You don't want to be worthless, so you become useful. You don't want to be weak, so you become invulnerable. You don't want to be a loser, so you become obsessed with winning. You don't want to be weird, so you become acceptable.

And now you are no longer simply playing the game.

You are trying to prove that the character is safe.

You are trying to defend the story.

And the whole game becomes exhausting because you have confused a threat to the character with a threat to the player.

The Difference Between Playing and Proving

This might be one of the most important distinctions I have ever found.

When you are playing, you can lose.

When you are proving, you can't.

When you are playing, failure is an outcome.

When you are proving, failure is evidence.

When you are playing, rejection means someone didn't choose you.

When you are proving, rejection means something is wrong with you.

When you are playing, a mistake means you made a mistake.

When you are proving, a mistake confirms that you are stupid.

When you are playing, the outcome belongs to the game.

When you are proving, the outcome belongs to your identity.

That is why insecurity destroys play.

It makes everything personal.

You cannot play freely while every outcome is being recruited as evidence in an ongoing court case against the character. You are no longer trying to win the game. You are trying to prove you deserve to be on the field.

And those are completely different experiences.

The Courtroom Is Not the Playing Field

This is why I use the language of accusation.

Insecurity doesn't feel like a vague lack of confidence.

It feels much more like a courtroom.

Somewhere, somehow, the character has been accused of a crime.

You are bad.

You are stupid.

You are worthless.

You are weak.

You are ugly.

You are weird.

You are a loser.

And ever since, you have been collecting evidence.

Evidence for the prosecution.

Evidence for the defence.

Every interaction becomes relevant. Every failure is dangerous. Every rejection could confirm the charge. Every success offers temporary relief.

You are not simply living.

You are defending yourself.

But here is the absurdity.

The original crime was never established.

A child experienced an event. The child mistook that event for evidence. The evidence supported an accusation. The child agreed with the accusation and then spent decades treating that agreement as knowledge.

The accusation became certainty.

Certainty became belief.

Belief became strategy.

Strategy became identity.

The entire courtroom was built around an accusation that was never objectively examined.

And perhaps that is why the whole thing becomes funny once you can see it clearly.

You have been defending yourself against an idea.

An unreviewed idea.

An unexamined idea.

An unconfirmed idea.

And because you forgot where it came from, you mistook it for reality.

The Way Back Into Play

So what do you do?

You don't need to become limitless. You don't need to remove every problem. You don't need to become fearless. You don't need to finally construct the perfect life.

You need to see the game.

You need to see the character.

You need to see the accusation.

And most importantly, you need to remember the distinction between the player and the story.

That doesn't mean denying your limitations. It means understanding what they are.

You are in a body. Fine. That is part of the game.

You have a history. Fine. That is part of the game.

You have problems. Fine. That is part of the game.

Other people can reject you. Fine. That is part of the game.

You can fail. You can get hurt. You can lose. You can die.

That is the game.

The question is not whether you can remove these things.

You can't.

The question is what you are going to do with them.

And once you understand that, something remarkable becomes available because you can stop treating every limitation as a disqualification and start asking:

How does this limitation qualify the experience?

What game does this make possible?

What does this obstacle give me to play with?

What is available here that would not exist without this particular constraint?

What can I do with the game I've been given?

The Rules Are Not the Prison

I think this might be the fundamental mistake.

We have mistaken the rules of the game for the prison walls.

We see limitation and assume we are trapped.

But limitation might be the thing that creates the possibility of freedom.

Not freedom from the game.

Freedom inside it.

The freedom to move, choose, respond, create, experiment, change, fail, begin again and play.

You don't need a life without limitations.

You need a game worth playing.

And perhaps that is why the things we call limitations can sometimes become the most important parts of our story. Not because suffering is secretly good, not because every hardship was meant to happen and not because there is some divine being somewhere arranging everything for your personal development.

Sometimes something terrible just happens.

Sometimes the game is unfair.

Sometimes you get dealt a shit hand.

That doesn't make the hand imaginary, and it doesn't mean you have to like it.

But once the hand has been dealt, you still have cards.

And you still have a move.

You can spend the rest of the game arguing that you should have been dealt something else, or you can look at what is actually in your hand and ask:

What can I do with this?

You Must Build the Wings

So build the wings.

Leave the island.

Try the thing.

Start the business.

Write the book.

Go somewhere.

Ask the question.

Risk looking stupid.

Risk being rejected.

Risk failing.

Risk flying too high.

Because yes, there are limits.

And yes, you might discover them.

The wax might melt.

You might fall.

But the fact that the wings have limitations is not an argument against building them.

It is an argument for learning how to fly.

You don't need to escape limitation.

You need to play within it.

That is the whole game.

And perhaps the strangest thing of all is this.

You have already forgotten enough to enter it.

You are here, in the body, with the name, inside the story, taking it all terribly seriously. Getting hurt. Falling in love. Trying to win. Trying not to lose. Building things. Breaking things. Defending the character. Protecting yourself from the accusations. Trying to figure out who you are.

And now, every once in a while, perhaps you get to remember.

Not enough to leave the game.

Just enough to play it better.

Enough to realise that the prison walls might be the boundary lines.

Enough to realise that the limitations might be the rules.

Enough to realise that the character can change without needing to become better than itself.

Enough to realise that losing does not mean you are lost.

Enough to stop proving.

Enough to start playing.

Because the game only works if you forget you're playing.

But once you've forgotten completely, you might spend your whole life trying to escape it.

And that would be a terrible waste.

So perhaps you don't need to wake up.

Perhaps you don't need to transcend yourself.

Perhaps you don't need to remember everything.

Perhaps you just need to remember this:

You did realise you were inside a game, didn't you?

And now that you know, what are you going to do with it?