What game?

Many people want to beat the game and get a one-up on Life. They put an enormous amount of effort into somehow getting ahead of the game.

What game?

Is there really a game you can beat? I think this is an illusion and every moment you spend trying to beat this game is time and energy wasted.

Why?

The answer is sometimes hard to swallow and at the same time can be quite liberating...

There's nothing you can do about it!

The world moves on and you cannot get ahead of it.

It's a bit like the old Grateful Dead song The Wheel says...

"The wheel is turning and you can't slow down,
You can't let go and you can't hold on,
You can't go back and you can't stand still,
If the thunder don't get you then the lightning will.

Wont you try just a little bit harder,
Couldnt you try just a little bit more?
Wont you try just a little bit harder,
Couldnt you try just a little bit more?"

So, what to do? Nothing?

Well, maybe it's not that simple. You still need to continue with Life even if you cannot beat the game which doesn't exist.

Realizing that you cannot do anything to beat the game and must learn to accept it frees up time and energy for other pursuits. Creative pursuits can bring a certain amount of happiness.

So, take a deep breath, forget about beating the game and get on with it!

I'll leave you with a great quote from Allan Watts...

“Then when you wake up one day about forty years old, you say "My God! I’ve arrived! I’m there!" And you don’t feel very different from what you always felt. And there's a slight letdown, because you feel there's a hoax. And there was a hoax. A dreadful hoax. They made you miss everything. By expectation. Look at the people who live to retire, and put those savings away. And then when they’re sixty-five, and they don’t have any energy left, they’re more or less impotent, they go and rot in an old people’s “senior citizens” community. Because we’ve simply cheated ourselves, the whole way down the line. We thought of life by analogy was a journey, was a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. And the thing was to get to that end. Success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing, or to dance, while the music was being played.”