We're All Keeping Score For Games We Never Agreed To Play

Here's what I've learned... somewhere around my mid-thirties, I realized I was exhausted. Not physically tired - though that too - but existentially worn down. And I couldn't figure out why.

Then it hit me. I was playing a dozen games. Simultaneously.

Games I never signed up for.

Games with rules I never questioned.

The follower count game. The net worth game. The impressive-sounding title game. The "car I drive" game. And here's the thing - I wasn't even losing most of them. I was doing... fine.

Maybe better than fine.

But I felt like I was running on a treadmill in someone else's gym, wearing someone else's shoes.

You know what's wild? We spend our entire lives optimizing for metrics that someone else invented. Your salary becomes a proxy for your worth. Your job title becomes a proxy for your identity. The size of your house, the brand of your car, the exotic stamp on your passport - all these visible markers that we can screenshot and post and prove.

Meanwhile, the stuff that actually compounds... it's invisible.

The depth of your relationships? Can't be quantified.

The wisdom you've accumulated from failures? Doesn't show up on LinkedIn.

Your capacity for presence?

Your ability to sit with discomfort?

The peace you've made with your mortality?

The craft you've mastered not for applause but for love of the work itself?

None of that has a leaderboard.

I think about my grandfather sometimes. That old man was a soldier & then a small-town builder his whole life. Never made much money. No social media presence - obviously. No impressive title. But people would travel hours just to talk with him. He'd remember what you read six months ago and why it mattered to you.

He taught me that attention is the rarest form of generosity.

By modern metrics? He lost every game.

By the measures that matter? He was the richest man I knew.

Look... I'm not saying ambition is bad or success is meaningless. I'm saying we've outsourced the definition of what winning looks like. We've let the visible eclipse the valuable. We're so busy keeping score that we forgot to ask - whose game is this, anyway?

The optimization mindset says: play every game, maximize every metric, leave no edge unexploited. The actualization mindset asks: which games align with who I'm becoming? Which scores actually matter to the person I want to be at the end?

And here's the uncomfortable truth - you can win at life and still have it be the wrong game. You can climb the ladder efficiently only to realize it was leaning against the wrong wall. You can optimize yourself into a corner, Excel spreadsheet perfect, and wake up one morning wondering who you became along the way.

So maybe the real work isn't playing the games better. Maybe it's the courage to stop, look around, and ask.

Did I agree to this? Is this mine?

Because the scorecards we inherit aren't the ones we have to keep.

So, what game are you actually trying to win?