Why So Serious? The game of life and how to play

Hello and welcome to another episode of Words With Myself.

One of the key behavioural differences between adults and children is that adults take their decisions and choices much more seriously. For instance, if you were to ask an adult why they are doing what they're doing, they are likely going to have a pretty thought-through answer as to the reasons why.

It might be that they're choosing to go shopping because everyone needs to get fed and the meals need to get made so we need to get the ingredients or it might be I'm going to work so I can earn money but whatever it is that we choose to do we tend to have a reason or backing to that whereas if you ask a child why they're choosing to play with their bionicles they're like because that's what I want to do and it's much more feeling orientated and kind of being in

the moment and of course this is just a natural consequence of responsibility the more you are responsible for the more seriously you have to consider your actions and your choices if you are free from responsibility then you don't really have much of a. Burden even on your own choices because okay it might be you that suffers or you that has to suffer the consequences of your own actions but when you introduce children into your life or your loved ones you

take your decisions a lot more seriously because you know it has an impact on the people that you care about and it's no longer about just thinking about yourself and the negative and positive experiences that you want to have but also the consequences and the outcomes that will come from those decisions and how they will affect the people closest to you or even without kids as adults we have had to deal with the consequences of our actions a lot more often things affect us more for instance

if we get injured the time that we take to heal and get over it is a lot greater the punishment for a misstep or a mistake is a lot greater when you're a child and you're learning to make a mistake is natural it's a consequence of learning but when you're at work and the pressure is on and you're expected to deliver and you make a mistake there isn't the same kind of environment. Allows that mistake to take place in order for you to learn.

Often when it comes to work, those mistakes are detrimental to the business and therefore carry quite severe consequences. It's also just less socially acceptable to make mistakes as an adult. You're expected to know better. You're expected to have all of the answers when you're an adult. And if you don't know something or you make a mistake or you make a wrong decision, people frown upon it a lot more than they would if you were a child.

But what this ends up doing is creating a society of cautious people.

People that are afraid to make mistakes, afraid to grow, afraid to learn, afraid to put themselves out there, afraid to do things that they might not be good at immediately. It creates a society of avoidant people.

People that don't want to challenge themselves because they view and perceive the stakes as being too high and sometimes the consequences really can be high if it means that you risk losing your job or missing a big opportunity that you might only have one opportunity yet but it's also quite likely that the consequences are not that drastic and in fact we actually just have an inflated sense of self-importance and our egos are bigger and we feel a lot more shame for making mistakes we feel

a lot more embarrassed and that is often the true reason why people avoid doing things that are difficult or doing things that they are inexperienced at is because that sting of not being successful not being able to do what they want to do or maybe they are embarrassed to make a mistake in front of others but whether there are high consequences or not, when we allow ourselves to become trapped in our decision making because we are so afraid of the outcome or the potential outcome,

we end up getting into this state where we are living life like we are walking on a tightrope line. As if every decision, every step needs to be really carefully thought out and very carefully planned. And we take the whole affair so serious. It zaps any fun, any enjoyment out of life because we're so concentrated on doing the right thing or the good thing. We're so focused on making those steps and planning our journey and making sure that we're going to get to the other end.

That we miss the whole aspect we miss the whole point the beauty of the journey we miss the enjoyment and then you are left with this life that is simply a to-do list a task list you have a set of chores and a set of responsibilities and a set of tasks that you.

Must complete and you must do all of these with utter seriousness and a complete lack of enjoyment and this is unfortunately how many of us live we don't live in a way that we are playing through life that we are enjoying the game we live in a way that we take it so serious that the stakes to us are so high the thought of something going wrong or making a mistake or losing the money that you have gained this is the anxiety that plagues people the fact that they know as everyone

knows that we are all fallible that we all make mistakes we all have moments where we're on and moments where we're off moments where we're tired moments where we need rest and moments where we have full of energy and we feel like we can do or achieve anything but we have to live and.

Play up to the status quo to pretend like we are robots that we are capable of performing at all hours without getting tired or without making mistakes and we have to be superheroes to our children and infallible to our partners and despite the obvious truth that we are not these people that we are human and that we have vulnerabilities we have weaknesses we have strengths and competencies but overall we are limited in our capacity and it can be incredibly exhausting you can

feel absolutely and totally trapped inside of yourself because you are trying to live up to these expectations live up to these standards that you put on yourself live up to these conditions that you have dictated or taken on because the truth is it matters as much as we think it matters Transcription by CastingWords And it can matter not at all. We can see ourselves as a speck of dust in an infinite universe. And we can see ourselves as inconsequential and unimportant.

And with this line of thinking, we can liberate ourselves from the seriousness of life. We can see that nothing is as important as we think it is.

We are not in control of anything. even if we do our best to stay healthy and stay alive something can take us out at any moment in time no matter who you are or where you are we can see that soon enough and over time nothing matters everything dies everything erodes everything changes and no one thing is that important it doesn't matter how long you live in the history books because sooner or later you're going to be forgotten and it

doesn't matter how many people are in your life because truly.

We all die alone in that individual experience there is no attachment to anyone or anything you have to undergo that process entirely on your own but once you start fixating on certain conditions and certain criteria and certain limitations you can see yourself as this one organism that is at the center of the universe that has a time limit on their life and must experience everything in the best way possible exactly as they want all the time an organism that is in control of

its own life one that makes choices and decisions for the future the one that takes life seriously and demands they be taken seriously but that doesn't make it true you may see life as finite you may think that the beginning is when you're born and the end is when you die so you're going to take those years that you have much more seriously because you're going to think that that's all that you've got so you decide that you want to make that an important life a special

life not something that is like all of the others so you work on crafting a personality an identity you work on crafting who you are and because you've been doing that for so long you've been working on this person and this identity and your abilities and your skills and your accolades. You then take that very seriously because this is your life and you have put. All of your time and energy and effort into making this important but that doesn't make it important.

It's all a fabrication of your own doing and that's okay. It's okay if that's how you want to play the game but that doesn't mean that it's not a game. You don't get to escape the truth, you just get to believe in your own one.

If you convince yourself of this importance and that life has meaning and that everything that we do is serious and do or die and it's very important to carry on living and to be doing certain things that make us good people and that's perfectly fine to play the game in that way but if you are tired if you are depressed if you are not feeling like you are living life with enjoyment or presentness or gratitude you feel like you're just going

through the motions and ticking things off or believing that we have to amass a certain amount of wealth or complete a certain amount of objectives in order to be important or worthy of love. Maybe you want to be immortal and you're looking for a way to live on through history and do something that is worth people talking about and that's how you preserve this life. But anyone who embarks on this journey will at some point realize that it's never enough.

There's never enough things that you can do never enough experience to be had it's always wanting more things are never bright enough or loud enough or exciting enough and if you do find something that you really like and you keep doing it then it becomes dull and it becomes less interesting and then you have to find something bigger something more exciting a challenge that is even more impossible, or a feat that is even more rare.

It's always pursuing and chasing more because rather than playing in life, rather than experiencing and enjoying it, we are focusing all of our attention on controlling, on trying to guarantee a certain outcome. We set our sights on something and then force our will onto the world.

And in order to do this we have to sacrifice a lot we have to sacrifice a lot of the present moment as well we can't just do what we want to do we have to do what needs to be done to get the thing that we think that we want and sometimes we can fool ourselves into thinking the thing that we want is more amazing or better or more exciting or will fill us with more joy than it actually can ever provide because the truth is that living the life, being in the present moment,

enjoying your days, playing, having fun. Experiencing joy, those are the things that are making life worthwhile and while doing things and achieving things can be amazing and a wonderful use of your time, taking it so seriously will only erode from that amazement will only erode from your experience because you will view the things that you do as more important than how you experience them you'll put more emphasis on result than experience and because of that it ends up making you or

forcing you into making certain decisions and avoiding other decisions because we are trying to control parameters we're trying to control the outcome therefore we must restrict the actions that we take the input that we have even when that result could be completely random we feel like by entering the lottery more often we are controlling the result of making it more probable that we will win and of course it's going to be more probable than if you don't do the lottery but you

are still playing a game of chance and life is a game of chance sometimes things that you want may come your way and sometimes they won't. There are times where things will go well and times where things will go bad. And rather than trying to control whether more good things happen than bad things or the things that we want happen and the things that we don't want don't happen, we can try to live a more present experience to maybe set an intention.

Say, I want this, you know, or I would like to experience this in life, but not control our lives to the point where we're trying to guarantee that outcome because life truly is a game and it's meant to be played it's not meant to be procedurally followed it's not meant to be done in increments it's meant to be played to experiment the very purpose of life is to play thank you for listening.