The Game
“Life is a game, and winning the game isn’t a matter of just learning all day. Books are great, truth is fantastic, academia is beautiful, but if we are living in this utopian society, of which all of us are envisioning and discussing, then - surely - we aren’t just spending our lives in libraries and laboratories. What about celebrating? What about opening a 20-year-old bottle of wine and getting drunk? What about exploring? What about traveling halfway across the world and getting pleasantly lost in a completely new culture and society? What about creating? What about making music, poetry, literature, food, love? What about communing? What about spending quality time with our family and friends, colleagues and acquaintances? What about being? What about sitting in half-lotus position, thinking of nothing, doing nothing, remembering there is just this, just consciousness, we are one, and that’s all there is to it? Surely, learning is an outcome or component of all these other activities. But these other activities, in and of themselves, are truly separate and distinct from learning as such. Imagine we are living in this grand utopia; there is no such thing as crime or poverty, humanity’s carbon impact is net-neutral, technology is so advanced that we have conquered disease - imagine humanity is suddenly afforded a cornucopia of the most precious resource imaginable: time. This imagining in mind, ask yourselves, ‘What are we to do all day with such a surplus in time?’ Some people, such as Plato, will naturally gravitate toward learning. We all have our archetypes, we all have our passions. You cannot tell a scholar to abstain from books and analysis just as you cannot tell a bird to part from flapping its wings and soaring the skies. Yet academia isn’t necessarily the end-all, be-all - winning the game of life isn’t a function of learning, ultimately. Learning is to the color blue what said game is to the entire color spectrum. One color isn’t superior to another, just as one cuisine - say Italian food - isn’t superior to another cuisine. This ideal society will have scholars - those who live to learn. It will have celebrators - those who live to entertain. It will also have adventurers and artists and communors and mystics - those who respectively live to travel and create and socialize and be. To me, it seems winning this game is actually a function of balance - doing all these things in harmony and with excellence.”
There was a long pause. Finally, Musk spoke.
“All that sounds great. But let’s not fool ourselves. How are we going to afford so much time? How are we going to create this utopia? We have spent the past several hours theorizing, but none of the theories seem like a good plan. We need a plan. We need a specific, measurable order of operations that will get us from Point A to Point Z.”
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a new figure entered the room.