Treating life as a game carries far higher risks than you might imagine

A good many of today’s problems arise because of people’s tendency to treat life as a game, in which game plans, tactics, and even dirty tricks count for more than reality. It’s time we all stopped deluding ourselves like this, or the outcome may be worse than we expect.

Games are everywhere. The financial problems currently plaguing investors have come about because, in a period of very low interest rates, banks, hedge funds, and other financial institutions played a deliberate game of “juicing” returns by getting into risky and novel types of investment, smug in the knowledge that they knew how to play and win.

They didn’t. Now they’re suffering the consequences of pretending they knew how to play a game that was almost entirely unfamiliar.

The media regularly replace “dull” facts and “boring” explanations with much more exciting conflicts, suppositions, and so-called “human interest” stories (really little more than emotional ego-trips). They play at chasing ratings and pretty much ignore educating or informing. That’s not today’s game.

Corporate leaders play a game of personal self-advancement by seeking ways to manipulate corporate results to enhance their own earnings, whether by outsourcing jobs, forcing people to work longer hours for no more pay, reducing benefits, “creative accounting,” or cooking the books. Their attachment to �”game plans” works down the organization, until every petty team leader and section boss is doing the same, inventing and playing elaborate games instead of dealing with the dull work of responding to reality.

Games require winners and losers

If business is a game, as it seems to be nowadays, there must be winners and losers. So Wall Street happily drops into the role of a grandstand full of spectators, cheering on their favorites, booing the losers, and betting trillions of dollars on the outcome. Maybe that’s why there are so few real investors compared to the number of speculators. Investors put their money into ideas with a view to creating long-term wealth. Speculators place bets on the outcome of elaborate, but usually short-term, games.

For the investor, there may be many outcomes, from earning great wealth, through periods of ups and downs, to losing slowly but steadily. For the speculator, it is sudden death: the bet either pays off or fails completely. You win a bundle or lose your shirt. No wonder they have no interest in the longer-term. Their fate is being decided here and now, linked to each fresh roll of the financial dice.

All this would be little more than another indication of the workings of what we call human nature, on a par with Roman gladiatorial shows and people sitting around the guillotine during the French Revolution, were it not for this simple fact: in the arena of reality, the universe is not playing anyone’s game.

Reality rules!

The addiction people have to games comes from the illusion of control.

I say illusion, because we do not have any real control over reality. We want to be in control so much that we convince ourselves what we desire is true. But most of the future is down to chance. And because we constantly refuse to accept that we have almost no real control over what happens to us, we invent all kinds of “explanations” and superstitions to maintain our illusions. People almost universally believe that they have far more control over events than is really the case. Try to puncture this illusion and they quickly become angry. It’s too painful to accept that all the game plans and supposed rules of success are little more than childish fantasies.

Games and game plans are not the only examples of inventions designed to maintain our illusion of control. We invent “rules” to govern the future because they give us that same illusion. Playing by the rules—even breaking the rules—implies that the rules are there and govern events. Thus we keep our mental picture that we are in control and able to determine outcomes in our favor.

Yet however much you believe that you can create ways to beat the odds and control the future, you cannot. Like the House at a Casino, the universe always holds the upper hand. Its odds are determined by blind chance, not some human system.

So the banks and hedge funds who dabbled in risky investments, while simultaneously denying the risks, not only sought to deluded other people (pulling the wool over customers’, competitors’, employees’, and investors’ eyes is assumed to be part of the game), they also deluded themselves. They believed they were playing a game they knew and could control. In reality, they were gambling in more or less total ignorance of the odds, the way that their investments worked, and the potential outcomes.

The penalties of arrogance with ignorance

The Buddha taught that all suffering is, at root, caused by ignorance. I don’t think he meant not being educated or knowing facts. What he meant was self-delusion: the constant willingness of people to substitute illusions, designed to satisfy the demands of an ego-driven wish for control, for looking at the unvarnished truth of how things really are.

When you add arrogance to ignorant self-delusion, the resulting mix is so toxic that bad results are inevitable. You may be playing your game, but the universe ignores all human rules and goes on patiently following its own path. Businesses, even nations, be they never so great and powerful, can be brought down in a few years or months. Diseases can decimate populations. Financial crashes—their causes always crystal clear in hindsight — regularly sweep away everyone’s plans. All we can do is try to understand reality and adjust to what we can see, going with the flow of events with no belief that we can control what is obviously beyond our capability to effect.

It’s time we got back to trying to understand reality and forgot all our petty game plans and maneuvers. Give up the illusion of control. Only those who face reality live and prosper in the long-run; those who don’t, fail and disappear. It’s as simple and stark a choice as that.

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