This is Optimal Living Daily.

Life as a Game by Isaac Moorhouse of isickmorehouse.com.

I'm your narrator, Justin Mollick, reading you articles with a little bit of my commentary at the end,

all in an effort to give us a step in the right direction every day.

So with that, let's hear our next one as we optimize your life.

Life? So with that, let's hear our next one as we optimize your life. Life as a Game by Isaac Moorhouse of Isaacmorehouse.com.

The great storyteller C.S. Lewis says in one of his stories, though I can't remember which,

that some of the most sinister things are those that

look like or pretend to be something they are not. I'd modify this slightly and say that the

worst things are those that actually believe themselves to be something they are not. Life is full of

stories and games. There's not the playing or telling that causes trouble, but when we begin to believe the

game is the reality. Take sports. Imagine if a professional football player actually believed

that the game was life. If winning was not just the artificial end within the construct of the

game, but the actual end in life, you might see things like the scene

in the ridiculous movie any given Sunday, where a player shoots a would be tackler. Players would

hurt or kill opponents regularly, and some would proudly become martyrs just to win. Critics of

sports will say that this already occurs, but if you think hard about it, even the most overcommitted

behave as if they are in a game and that life is something else. The most criticized decisions

like bounties for injuring players or keeping an injured player in are egregious, precisely

because it is so universally acknowledged that sports is a game, and it is improper to treat it like life.

It's harder to see the other games and stories, and games and stories nested within games and stories that we regularly engage in.

Language itself is a kind of game.

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