Life is a game

Many years ago, this one time while I was reading random articles on Wikipedia, I came across some articles about Scientology. Soon I ventured in that direction outside Wikipedia and found this incredible article called "Life is basically a game".

Now this philosophy really made a big impact and it stayed with me because I understood games, having spent large amounts of time in my childhood playing computer games. But I couldn't quite directly use this knowledge. In fact, this reminds me of a book I have. It's almost 100 years old, and it's a treatise on the topic of advertising. While the book has some value, I don't really have much of an interest in the subject of advertising. So I keep it, hoping that some day it will bring me some value. Similarly, LRH's philosophy of the Game of Life stayed with me because I sensed that it had value, but I couldn't use it. Also, in retrospect, I can say for sure that LRH didn't quite get it right. One reason might be that there are claims that LRH was heavily medicated, and this would have affected his writings. LRH likely also had dishonest intentions, and as a result he could have deliberately made up all kinds of nonsense, thereby unknowingly and unintentionally producing this little gem. A bit like the monkeys typing Shakespeare.

In any case, a little gem it was, and this knowledge - this wisdom - stayed in my mind, dormant, a key waiting for the right lock to come by.

With my recent studies in sociology however, I've come to understand that all life is basically a game. And it is possible that LRH's philosophy was the key to me recognizing this fact. Here I will try to outline what I've found.

• All of life is basically a game.
• The vast majority of people don't realize that life is a game.
• The tiny minority of people who do realize that life is a game:
• of these, the vast majority:
• don't know the rules of the game.
• don't know the winning and losing conditions, and thus don't know how to measure their success or failure
• can only guess at the rules, and thus can't know for sure whether they're playing by the correct rules.
• The game never ends.
• A person can never objectively know, and ultimately won't care whether he succeeded or failed:
• but his success or failure will depend on the success or failure of those who came before
• but his success or failure will affect the success or failure of those coming after.
• so most people, even if they are aware of the game, don't care about it.
• Success can easily be undone by those that come after.
• Sometimes, failure (but not utter failure) can also be reversed by those that come after.
• No one will ever know whether the rules they're playing by are the correct rules.
• Those who aren't aware of the game use the strategy of "follow the herd", ie. do what everyone else is doing. This is a strategy that works, but only if the herd is doing the right things, which is most of the time because the herds that remain are the ones that did the right things. (Clue!) Sometimes though, the herd may start doing the wrong things.