#50 - Games vs Real Life
What I’m Watching
Interview with Donnie Yen by GQ magazine. I grew up watching a lot of Donnie Yen’s films, so it’s very cool to hear his take on how they filmed action scenes in the 90s in Hong Kong, the crazy stunts, injuries, working with Jet Li etc.
Resource of the week
I’ve recommended Readwise before but I feel like I need to include it again as it’s made such a difference for me. The premise is simple, it takes highlights from books you read and every day you go into the app where it will feel back a certain number of those highlights at random to you.
It’s using a technique called spaced repetition. We all have a forgetting curve. If you’re anything like me in the past, a month after reading a book I would’ve forgotten at least 80% of it. This way it constantly refreshes what you’ve read so you make the most of your time spent reading. I use it every day.
Quote
Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello encourages us to focus on the message before the messenger:
“Sinners often speak the truth. And saints have led people astray. Examine what is said, not the one who says it.”
Property Market
- Demand is over 50% lower than this time last year.
- The stock of homes for sale is also massively up.
- Average offer accepted discount to asking prices now at £14,000.
- The property market is expected to continue modest declines as the market adjusts to the new mortgage rates, bottoming around summer.
Thoughts
I had my first holiday in a while with some old friends where we stayed in a cabin in Wales and played some board games earlier this week.
It was interesting because there must’ve been about 20+ games all of which I had never played before. As I was playing and learning the rules I couldn’t help but compare games to real life. I think games can teach us a lot about life in terms of strategy, competition, and taking risks but there are some very crucial differences of which the three main ones are:
- Not everyone starts in the same place.
- The rules aren’t clear.
- The rules don't apply the same.
With number 1 you have some people who are born into wealth with connections and a large company waiting for them to take over, while others are born in poverty.
Number 2 would be analogous to you not being a player of one game with one defined set of rules. But you’re in a room where a hundred games are being played at the same time, and the rules are all intermingling with each other.
We’re all told that the world should work in a particular way and to get the most we should behave in a particular way. Much of this is what Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens, calls an imagined order. In the middle ages, religion was the greatest unifier of mankind. It’s also an imagined order. If everyone stopped believing in it, it would cease to exist. Contrast this to a natural order like gravity, if we all stopped believing in gravity tomorrow it wouldn’t just stop working.
Today we have capitalism and limited liability companies as the imagined order that keeps society stable. But as with every order, there are contradictions. Two western values are equality and individual freedom, which by definition cannot coexist. In a capitalist society, if people are given freedom, some are going to be better off. Most people today in Europe and North America would be shocked by the notion of segregating where people live based on race or sexual orientation or religious beliefs, but it’s perfectly ok to segregate people by wealth. It’s rationalised it’s ok because people can work hard to get there. When in fact statistically the vast majority of people in poverty remain so and nearly all of the top 0.1% were born into wealth. Yet a lot of people born into poverty are hard workers and vice versa. The imagined order communicates it’s ok for parts of society to eat better, go to better schools, and have more opportunities.
Like how the church preached peace and good deeds in the middle ages while the Protestants and Catholics killed each other by the hundreds of thousands in the 16th century, today, we see a lot of virtue signalling exacerbated by the availability of social media.
In every human order, including our own: what ‘should’ happen based on what we’re told and what does happen are very different things because they are imagined. Not natural, where it’s predictable.
So I find the only way to figure out the rules is by looking at what makes me different or the unfair advantages I have. Secondly to move and fail faster to figure out our reality, which is changing all the time. Then to identify what game to play as there are some games in life we cannot win.
A bit rambly this week. If you have any thoughts, or feedback even if you disagree (especially if you disagree, love a thoughtful debate) with anything just hit reply!
Next week back to some more handwriting content probably as I gear up work on the free class. More to come!
Have a good week!
Hans