The Last Playthrough
How the story you tell about your past decides whether your future has any momentum
Every generation has a way of framing their struggle to succeed as a cooperator when they see defectors prosper. The ‘50s invented “nice guys finish last”—less about romance back then. The ‘80s gave us “greed is good.” The ‘90s called out being a doormat or people pleaser. Then came self-care and boundaries. All attribute failure to giving too much and taking too little. The libertarians I grew up around latched onto “life is just a game,” mostly hinting that harms you do to others don’t “count” in a fictional world. I think the current framing is “entering my villain era.”
The framing you choose to interpret your life matters. We are narrative beings. You hear this a lot, but it means something very specific. The significance we assign to past successes and failures determines where we allocate future effort. Most of us do not have unlimited resolve to freely apply to whatever task we consciously choose. Even if we did, we probably wouldn’t aim it wisely. We need a story that interprets wins and losses and selects which to weave into the tapestry of our life.
When the story is wrong, it tags the wrong moments as turning points. You get dumped once and decide you’re undateable, so you fold every future interaction into that plot. You crush a presentation and decide you’re a natural, so you idle in middle management as a big fish in a small pond forever. The same life events could be woven into a very different arc: the breakup as proof you are meant for intimacy and this is the start, the early win as evidence you’re capable of climbing the ladder. The story doesn’t change the facts, but it changes which ones get weight and which ones get cut and left on the editing room floor.
Once you see yourself as an editor of your own past, you can also ask what kind of structure you’re editing it into, and how easily the wrong structure can waste your effort. You can burn a lot of time and attention getting discouraged by the wrong failures or overenjoying the wrong victories.
A cohesive life narrative is the best social technology for tagging their importance and interpreting them to create momentum. We need consistent forward movement to enjoy our life as badly as we need it to enjoy a movie. The same mental pathways are activated for both. Without narrative drive, we get bored and go flat in life the same way we do in the theater.
Imagine slogging through a movie that started Act 3 with: all the development in Act 2 was meaningless. Annoyed would be an understatement. You’re liable to walk out, and if you sat through it, you certainly don’t care as much about the conclusion. This is not dissimilar to how we interpret our own story. A life narrative that casts dropping out of college as a wasted half-decade will create a person who feels less able to steer their own story than one who saw it as a necessary step to amass skills, socialize, and cultivate discipline. Ideally the phrase, “If I only knew then what I know now” should be unthinkable. How could you know without having gone through it? If life already feels like a movie in your head, one powerful move isn’t to abandon narrative, but to change the genre.
The non-malicious interpretations of “life is a game” are a recurring theme in literature. The best-known version is probably Alan Watts’ from a live talk. If you could dream any dream, you’d first fulfill your wishes, shortly get bored, then choose interesting challenges with real stakes, not unlike this life now. If you prefer to consume the idea in video form, Rick & Morty did an excellent retelling via arcade game headset.
What I take away from “game” framing isn’t that harms are fictional, but that there is a frame for interpreting setbacks and successes as clues about what’s achievable or worthwhile to pursue. Do not ignore them. Reframe them as powerups or distractions dropped into the level. If one helps you skip ahead, take it and avoid the grind. If a side quest draws you away from the main story with uninteresting, fetch-quest repetition, leave and return to the main arc. Don’t waste effort chasing more of what you already have and don’t need.
To see why this is an upgrade from the usual framings, it helps to look at the bad cosmology many of us start with. A lot of my struggle growing up came from thinking, in different ways, the universe could somehow tally my suffering. If I just wanted something badly enough, it would find the milliliters of neurotransmitter wasted an affront to its poor design and equalize the equation.
This kind of thinking is everywhere. It’s what you were doing in middle school, pining away in your room for a crush. The “rise and grind” cargo cult mentality hides the same assumption: the universe multiplies effort by a hidden “suffering score” to determine appropriate rewards. That might be an internal variable you track to update your behavior, but the game itself doesn’t score based on it. Once the secret suffering multiplier disappears, you’re forced to ask a more concrete question: what, exactly, is this game scoring?
What actions or accomplishments do you believe deserve a high score in such a game? How would you interpret "drops" you receive? For example, in the game mentality, if I were dropped a large sum of inherited wealth, my assumption would be the game did not intend for me to waste my time grinding at generating wealth, but focus on some other objective. If I kept randomly meeting people working on the same strange niche, or kept being offered roles in that direction without trying, I might treat that as another kind of drop: the game nudging me toward a particular questline.
I’d also assume my character’s instincts and dispositions were reasonably selected and hint at the high score objective of this playthrough. This is a rational restatement of the religious edict “bloom where you are planted." The world is too complex with too many players for you to excel at something you don’t have a combination of innate talent, excellent circumstance, and desire to execute.
Role-playing games discuss “ability score synergy,” traits that work unusually well together. High intelligence and high charisma suggest a very different build than high strength and high constitution. In life terms, if you’re absurdly good at explaining things, genuinely enjoy long stretches of solo focus, and keep gravitating toward open data sets, that might matter more than your mediocre small talk at parties. The game is quietly hinting at what kind of character you rolled. Lean into it.
My life story admits wildly different interpretations, some demoralizing. In the “game” framing, it becomes something else: a decades-long combo chain built out of curiosity, strange drops, and ability score synergy. Choosing the narrative that best weaves together previous successes also has the side effect of cultivating taste. I’ve learned to recognize patterns, chance meetings, and new technologies that may again combine to assist me in the next level of life.
Once you see your struggles and advantages as designed challenges and drops, it’s natural to worry about wasting them. The desire not to waste struggles inspired a recent bounty I posed for solving one of my long-running issues that might generalize to others. If the game has me grinding away at something trivial for most of my life, maybe it’s a hint. Why was so much gameplay wasted on such a seemingly trivial objective? Can I use my experience or unique perspective to help others?
Decades ago atheist-me scoffed at an article-turned-book going around—Don’t Waste Your Cancer—but I now get it. Game thinking allows GLP-1s to fulfill the dropped-powerup framing in the most agency-preserving way that doesn’t engender bitterness. Midway through, a cure appears for a lifelong struggle? I choose to see that as a reprieve offered by a benevolent architect, simulator, whatever. I don’t appreciate spinning my wheels for three decades, but I’ll take the out. I put up a good fight and had the boss on retreat for many years, but now I’ll take the potion, the knowledge from the struggle, and enjoy the second half on easy mode for that particular quest.
The same applies to my father’s early Alzheimer’s diagnosis. When his decline started, he wasn’t much older than I am now. That means I’d better get started on what’s important to me. If my life’s objective is mental in nature, the countdown isn’t death, but the graph of cognitive decline with age. This is the second most terrifying framing of the issue, but all others are tied for first.
Once you start noticing timers, shortcuts, and odd grinds, you can ask what kind of run would make all of this interesting and not just survivable. The key parameters of an enjoyable life playthrough are difficult goals—not easy, not impossible—that are relatively compatible with your inborn strengths. Look at and listen to your environment, skills, and circumstance. Are you in a highly modern world with specialists in all fields seemingly working toward one problem that you are somewhat surprised the last puzzle piece has not been placed? Certainly sounds like an interesting setup to me. Is the world you're in facing a calamity few others recognize yet you take very seriously? That might be a good life goal.
In the movie framing, this is where you’re trying to make sure Act 1 and Act 2 justify Act 3. In the game framing, you’re trying to make sure the build you’ve been given and the drops you’ve collected are pointed at a boss fight worth all the effort.
If you zoom out even further, whole traditions have been trying to answer the question of why you spawned in with these stats at all. World religions fault along framing life circumstance as either an effect of a previous playthrough or an attempt to earn better starting stats in the next. Karma, reincarnation, heavenly rewards—they’re all, in part, stories about multiple runs.
An interpretation of not being famous, popular, or respected for your work could be simple boredom or annoyance you experienced with it on a previous playthrough. Enduring a life hounded by fame, you might very well request an anonymous run—one in which you could live a life with the same types of accomplishments, but blend in among others, silently doing your work with no worry of the mixed blessing of popularity or acclaim. This can be a source of motivation to continue work you know is valuable, even when others seem to ignore it.
Consider this the last playthrough, tuned to avoid the annoyances of each previous run. If that were true, mis-tagging your failures and successes—treating powerups as trivia and side quests as destiny—would be the real tragedy. Whether or not you believe in extra lives, you still have to pick a frame now, and live inside the story it creates.
Tomorrow, where else might we find game mechanics, and what do they tell us about that world?