whose game are you playing?
are your values ruling the game, or is the game ruling you?
I’m reading an excellent philosophy book: The Score by C. Thi Nguyen. One of his arguments is that scoring systems don’t just measure our values. Over time, they can replace them. The metric becomes the thing we’re actually chasing, and somewhere along the way we stop noticing that it was never really ours, or even tied to things that are important to us.
I looked at my own life through this lens. What I found ranged from silly to concerning.
A light but (negatively) impactful example, also raised by Tim Clare in the Guardian, is my relationship with Duolingo. I set out to *finally* learn more Spanish. I did great at first, actually understanding bits of conversational Spanish out in the wild. But I started to deprioritize the daily lessons because I was busy. By around 270something days, I maintained my ranking and streak doing chess or math modules well past bedtime. A few times I woke in a panic and grabbed my phone to squeeze in a lesson before losing my streak at midnight. In the end, I quit because I’d been captured by a system and still hadn’t learned Spanish.
Duolingo is silly. Most of the rest is not. On the heavy and concerning side, I have spent a lot of my life chasing approval in the eyes of others. I grew up on the east coast, where schooling matters too much. I went to elite schools, collected letters behind my name, and climbed, methodically, the ladder in front of me. By almost any external measure, it worked. I am, right now, at the top of my environmentalist metrics game, earlier than I hoped to be. And still, a lot has been way off. I recently accepted a spot as a commissioner on an international treaty. Long ago, it would have been a dream to have that responsibility. Instead, I accepted the role reflexively, without considering the difficulty having the role would add to my job. My first year as a commissioner was emotionally and physically draining. I’ve spent the last few weeks reflecting that the challenge has not been worth the honor.
A well-designed scoring system is that it’s convincing. It tells you that you’re winning, offers real rewards. Status, stability, the glow of being seen as an authority not in your own right but because of the societally agreed-upon measures you have at your back. I’m not going to pretend these things didn’t matter to me. But I’m now asking myself: whose game am I actually playing?
I recently interviewed Alexandrea Safiq, a salmon scientist and death doula, for this newsletter. She ended our conversation with a statement I’ve been repeating to people since she said it. A healed place, she said, looks like no longer placing your emotional investment in validation from systems that have consistently shown they were built to invalidate you.
Most of the systems I operate in were not built for me. I kept playing anyway, kept optimizing for metrics I didn’t design, kept measuring myself against standards that were never actually mine. I think about this a lot as I pivot my career towards what matters most to me.
I leave you with a reflection prompt:
Think about a goal you're genuinely working toward. Are your values driving how you pursue it, or have you outsourced that to someone else's system? What would it look like to take one step back toward your own metrics?
I’m living all of this right now! I’m learning that recognizing you are living by someone else’s rules is just the beginning. Since I have trained myself to do this my whole adult life, I have a reflex to continue to operate this way. Moving in alignment with my values takes constant conscious energy. It’s like building a new habit. Maybe we need a Duolingo-like app that tells us how long our streak is for living within our values!
First, Happy Spring Equinox! Second, ALL OF THIS. Breaking down the illusion of needing to play the game meritocracy is key during this paradigm shift. Thanks for sharing.