Some people live as if life were a game,
stacking rewards the way they stack levels.
Step by step they go on living.
But what is there to accumulate in life?
If anything, perhaps only memories and emotions.
And even those are fleeting and temporary.
For human beings, or rather for me,
memory is terribly short, while anxiety settles in deeply and warmly.
During a study group, I met someone in the same line of work.
He worked hard even on Saturdays. He said it was voluntary.
I asked whether that kind of fierce, self-demanding effort could really be called voluntary.
He said yes. Voluntary diligence and industriousness.
And suddenly I felt sad.
Diligence, competition, and voluntariness form a rather bitter triangle.
I keep wondering how voluntary diligence can really exist inside a competitive structure.
In truth, that kind of structure seems possible only in something like a panopticon, a system built on constant visibility and discipline.
There is implicit agreement there, and a kind of participation that looks voluntary. But that sort of voluntariness can never really be voluntary.
For the many who may not be able to raise their livelihood, career, recognition, or rewards, but cannot afford to lose them, that participation feels less like freedom and more like survival.
If I do more work than others, and nobody knows, and it affects neither my performance review nor my resume, and I still choose to do it, then perhaps that is the moment when it can finally be called voluntary.
Life resembles a game in many ways, though games themselves borrow many motifs from life.
But there is one crucial difference:
life begins and ends involuntarily, even if some people try to choose the ending themselves,
while games begin and end almost entirely by choice.
A game can be played alone, but it is often more enjoyable with others. If you keep at it, you gain rewards, recognition from teammates, bigger missions, and enough resources and items to obtain what you want.
In those ways life and games resemble one another, or increasingly do,
but the involuntary nature of life's beginning and end makes all the difference.
In an involuntary life, involuntary diligence feels profoundly sad. Or maybe not sad exactly, but heavy and numbing.
The feeling of being alive even without currency or a high level, of being acknowledged(though on second thought, why must it be acknowledged at all?)
and perhaps someone with whom that feeling can be shared in a healthy way, though even that is a luxury rather than a requirement.
I am not saying we should live carelessly.
If anything, I mean that struggling for survival within a competitive frame may be closer to a careless life.
Like the title of that famous book: maybe what I want to say is, "Just don't do it."
To go a little further, other people may not know what I was thinking, but they can see what I did. In that process, when I become so busy showing others what I have done that I forget why I did it in the first place, inertia takes over. That is what I want to avoid.
This is less a problem of individual attitude than of frame. The way out is either to adjust the frame or leave it. But since most frames are controlled by those who made them or those with power, stepping out of the frame often seems like the most realistic option.
Maybe, or rather no, this is my bias.
A narrow and deep bias that is entirely my own.
And as far as I can remember, that bias was formed by this line:
" "
At times I stop and ask myself what I am like.
I also work because I like it, almost as if it were a hobby. There is no sharp division between work, day, and night.
People say that when you become obsessed with billiards, you see a billiard table even while lying down.
For me now, agentic LLMs and smart contracts are everywhere in my field of vision.
But work that feels like a hobby does not compete.
In fact, that quality can unintentionally leave a person at the level of an amateur.
Maybe I really am an amateur.
But if I do not compete, then the label "amateur" is just a frame, an image, a sign other people apply.
It does not matter that much.
That is how it feels now, after finally realizing I had been hurting without even knowing it.
What matters, I think, is simply being alive.
And while alive, what matters is feeling.
Of course, as we move through that feeling while respecting the feelings of others,
it also matters whether we can step back and watch our own contours, and keep them intact.
Sincerity. There was a time when I forced my own sincerity onto others.
I poured seriousness and attitude into my work
and expected others to do the same, and expected myself to continue doing it as well.
But when I actually met someone in the same profession,
when I found myself looking at my younger self from those days,
System 1 suddenly produced a dense, heavy feeling. Listening to the temperature of his determined struggle, a language too competitive to be called pure will,
I started asking myself again
what kind of person I am.
I looked back once more.
Once more at my emotions, and at whatever emotions I can still remember.
