Essay 3: The Games of Life
Navigating Transcendence and Self-security
What game are you playing?
Think about what you worried about today. What you’re chasing.
Chances are, you’re playing a game you didn’t consciously choose. The game you’re playing determines whether you’ll flourish or just... live without direction.
In my first essay, I introduced self-security and transcendence as the two pillars of flourishing. But there’s more: these pillars don’t exist in some abstract philosophical space. They emerge (or fail to emerge) as you navigate what I call the Games of Life.
Understanding these games changes everything. It shows you why you feel stuck. Why achievement feels hollow. Why you can’t seem to get off the treadmill. And most importantly, it shows you that the trap you’re in is one you can see: and once you see it, you can choose differently.
The Four Games
These are the four games we’re all navigating:
The Survival Game: Your nervous system’s first priority. Food, shelter, safety, etc. For most of human history (and still for billions), this was everything. When your basic needs aren’t met, nothing else matters.
The Outer Game: Status, positioning, comparison. How you’re seen. Where you rank. Wealth, beauty, achievement, influence, the corner office, the verification checkmark. This is what society tells you winning looks like. For most people living in material sufficiency, this becomes the primary game without them even realizing it.
The Inner Game: Self-mastery, wholeness, integration. Building genuine security from the inside (I wrote about self-security in detail in my last essay). Growth. Becoming the person you actually want to be rather than the person you think you should be.
The Transcendent Game: Devotion to something beyond yourself. Your energy flows outward, not inward. You serve a cause, raise children, create art, build community, pursue truth. You discover that the deepest fulfillment comes not from getting what you want but from giving what you can.
You’re not playing all four equally at any given time. Sometimes survival dominates everything. Sometimes you’re consumed by the Outer Game. But these aren’t sequential levels, they’re ongoing tensions. The question is: which one has the strongest grip on you?
The Outer Game: Why It’s a Trap
The Outer Game gets a bad rep as being surface-level, self-obsessed, and entirely material. It kind of is, but the Outer Game works… sort of.
It works because we evolved to play it. For most of human history, your position in the tribe literally determined your survival. Being valued meant being fed, protected, included. Being cast out meant death. So we developed exquisitely sensitive antennae for social comparison.
The currency of power shifted. In the Survival Game, physical power determined who ate first. Now social power has replaced it. The strongest person doesn’t dominate anymore. It’s the one with the most followers, the biggest salary, the best title.
This ancient wiring hasn’t caught up. Your brain treats modern anxieties with the same life-or-death urgency it once reserved for actual predators.
Neuroscience shows that social pain activates the same brain regions as physical pain. Your amygdala only knows this: low status means death, high status means safety. We’re trying to solve a survival problem with status, but the Outer Game promises fulfillment it can’t deliver. That’s the trap.
Status is Relative
The Outer Game is built on comparison. Status only exists in relation to others. Even if you get the promotion, the income, the body, you’ll find someone else to compare yourself to.
This is different from internal measures of success. You can feel proud of your work without comparing it to anyone. The trap is when other people become your benchmark. That comparison is a never-ending source of suffering.
Parts of achievement are positive sum. Two people can create value together. But when you’re measuring yourself against others, when status is the game, it’s always zero-sum.
The truth is external validation will never satisfy permanently. Which means you can never truly relax. You have to keep defending, keep achieving, keep proving.
As Alain de Botton observes, status anxiety definitely afflicts those who have yet to achieve success. But remarkably, it also haunts those who have risen to the peaks of their profession. Anxiety appears endemic to the state of existence–rather than to the achievement of any particular goal.
The game doesn’t end when you “win.” The anxiety just takes a different form.
It Spreads Like a Virus
The Outer Game spreads through culture like a contagion. You start seeing others’ wins as your losses
René Girard called this mimetic desire. We don’t want things because we actually want them, we want them because we see others wanting them. One person gets the promotion and suddenly everyone wants that promotion. Not because it’s objectively better, but because status is contagious.
The Outer Game amplifies this endlessly. Social media is a mimetic accelerator. Everyone’s performing their best life, which makes you feel like you’re losing, which makes you perform harder, which makes someone else feel like they’re losing. The spiral tightens2.
When you’re stuck in the Outer Game, you can’t see this. The game is the water you’re swimming in. You think this is just how reality works. Competition. Scarcity. Winners and losers. Binary thinking.
But it’s not reality. It’s a game you’re playing. And you can choose a different one.
Why You Can’t Stop
You know it’s a trap. So why can’t you stop playing?
Because without inner security, the Outer Game feels like your only option. Every failure confirms you’re worthless, so you double down: more achievement, more validation, more proof you matter. But you’re trying to fill an internal void with external status.
The Inner Game: The Turn Inward
For most people, the Inner Game opens through disillusionment with the Outer Game.
You achieve “the thing” and feel nothing. Or worse, you feel the same anxiety, the same emptiness, just with better circumstances.
So you start asking yourself different questions. Not “How do I get more?” but “What kind of person am I becoming?”
That’s the shift: virtue and character instead of just outcomes. This is where the work from my last essay comes in. You build self-security. You become secure enough to be honest, to fail, to ask for help. You stop needing constant validation.
But the Inner Game has two traps:
Trap 1: Spiritual bypassing. You use inner work to avoid dealing with reality. Your relationship is toxic, but instead of leaving, you meditate on acceptance. Your job drains you, but instead of changing it, you journal about gratitude.
Trap 2: Self-optimization disguised as growth1. You’re doing all the inner work but you’re still obsessing over yourself. You track your meditation streak and feel superior when you hit 100 days. The RedPill movement exemplifies this perfectly: lifting weights and reading Stoicism not for growth but to dominate social hierarchies. This is corrupt motivation.
The virtue ethics question, “What kind of person am I becoming?”, naturally points beyond yourself. Because virtues only make sense in relation to others. You can’t develop courage alone. You can’t practice justice in isolation. Character requires engagement with the world.
The Inner Game is necessary. It creates the security you need to stop being reactive. But even self-mastery can become another trap if it never points beyond itself.
The Point Isn’t to Escape
The Outer Game has its place in your life. The Outer Game connects you with the real world and fills the different needs we have surrounding aesthetics and social belonging. Problems arise, however, when we let the Outer Game become the ONLY game, and we base our self-worth around it.
That’s the integration of the two: playing the Outer Game from a foundation of inner security.
When you’re secure inside, the Outer Game becomes a sandbox instead of a survival arena. You can engage with achievement, wealth, and status without being enslaved by them.
The Transcendent Game: Winning by Being Free
The ultimate move in these games is realizing something counterintuitive: to win is to be free of needing to win by devoting yourself to something beyond you so completely that the games lose their grip.
The Disease of Me
Naval Ravikant has this amazing line:
“Me is a disease.”
Think about what happens when you’re trapped in self-focus. You ruminate, compare, and defend. You worry about how you’re perceived. You replay conversations wondering if you said the right thing.
Me. Me. Me.
It’s exhausting. And it’s suffering.
Buddhism has been saying this for 2,500 years: the root of suffering is attachment to self. Not because the self is bad, but because clinging to it creates a prison.
The Outer Game is “How do I elevate myself?” The Inner Game is “How do I become the best version of myself?” But both are still fundamentally about self.
The Transcendent Game asks: “What if it’s not about me at all?”
The Paradox
Here’s the paradox that changes everything: the less you focus on yourself, the more you flourish.
Psychologist Alfred Adler understood this deeply. He argued that the key to happiness lies in contributing to your community–what he called Gemeinschaftsgefühl (yeah, I have no idea how to pronounce that…), also known as social interest.
It works because when you’re in service to something larger than yourself, you stop being trapped in the anxious spiral of self-concern.
Parents know this. When your kid is sick, you’re completely present, completely devoted, completely beyond self-concern. And paradoxically, you might feel more alive in that moment than you do in months of self-focused achievement.
Austrian neurologist Viktor Frankl discovered this during his brutal time in Auschwitz. Those who survived these terrible conditions weren’t necessarily the strongest or most resourceful. They were those who had meaning beyond themselves: a book to complete, a loved one to reunite with, a purpose to serve.
As he wrote:
“Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.’”
What Transcendence Actually Is
The Transcendent Game can take many forms: raising children, serving a cause, creating art, building community. The specific form doesn’t matter. What matters is the orientation: your energy flows outward, not inward.
This isn’t self-sacrifice or martyrdom. It’s discovering that serving something beyond yourself feels better than serving yourself. You realize your deepest fulfillment comes not from getting what you want but from giving what you can. When you give yourself fully to something beyond yourself, you experience a freedom that self-concern can never provide.
The ego is meant to be utilized, not conquered.
The Complication
Now, here’s where I want to be honest about something: transcendence isn’t the only path to freedom.
Diogenes, for example, lived radically free from the Outer Game by rejecting it entirely. He owned nothing, cared nothing for status, famously told Alexander the Great to get out of his way because he was blocking the sun. He transcended through radical simplicity.
Buddhist monks do something similar. They step out of the games entirely and find peace.
That’s a valid life. A genuinely free life, in a lot of ways.
But most people don’t want that. Most people want to engage with the world, have relationships, build things, experience beauty, create legacy. Most people don’t want to abandon the Outer Game; they just don’t want to be enslaved by it.
So the real question becomes: can you play the Outer Game without being possessed by it?
Yes. But only if you’re playing it from a foundation of Inner Game security, with Transcendent Game devotion underlying it.
Your orientation shifts from getting to giving3.
So What Game Are You Playing Now?
If you’re honest about which game has you in its grip, you can’t unsee it anymore. You’ll catch yourself in comparison spirals and recognize them as ancient software misfiring. You’ll notice status anxiety as a choice, not a fact. You’ll know whether you’re playing the game you chose or the one you inherited.
That awareness is the only real freedom: choosing which game, when, and why.
The games will always be there. My hope is that this framework helps you see them clearly and play the ones that make you come alive.
The rest is up to you.
Thanks for reading. If this resonated, I’d love to hear from you: alex@alxmthew.com. What game are you currently playing? Where do you feel stuck? What are you devoted to?
Notes
[1] I actually have somewhat of a positive connotation with self-optimization, but when I talk about it here, I’m referring to “grindset” culture and for the sake of achieving a worldly means.
[2] Doomerism is what happens when you’re aware enough to see the trap but not courageous enough to step out of it. “Everything is fucked, nothing matters, we’re all screwed” spreads through communities like wildfire. It sounds like realism. It feels like wisdom. But it’s just another trap: a different flavor of the same zero-sum thinking.
[3] While one game may take up your central focus, we are all constantly playing all of the games. There’s no “winning” any of them permanently: you’re always maintaining survival, combating self-doubt, managing relationships. The question is which game dominates your attention.