Dreams and Pleasure

Imagine you were a person who could dream anything they wanted to dream. Literally anything. You could close your eyes and you were immediately enveloped by your uttermost pleasures. Crimson sunsets and a musical breeze, casting warm ecstasy over your orgy-filled chocolate spaceship… insert your own fantasy here.

In this thought experiment (courtesy of the philosopher Alan Watts) you could control time whilst in this dream. You could turn minutes into millennia if you so wished. You could live undying and near infinite pleasure for as long as you wanted. But, there would come a time, after a few thousand millennia perhaps, when you’d get bored. You’d want a little surprise. You’d want something to happen where you didn’t know the outcome.

So, in this ocean of bliss, you’d conjure something new, something random – an issue, a challenge to overcome. And surely, you’d work the problem out. And soon, this too would become boring. So you’d introduce more surprises, more uncertainty. And the cycle would continue and you’d keep adding more uncertainty until eventually, you’d end up in a place where your dream had more or less exactly the same level of randomness and uncertainty that your life has right now.

This is not to say that terrible things don’t happen. Suffering is real for people all over the world. But this thought experiment is interesting because it challenges the idea that, in the long term, happiness can co-exist with routine.

Break The Routine

A common way to break our everyday routine is by playing games. We can set ourselves specific goals. We can set something new to attain and aspire to. Motivation is derived from avoiding pain or gaining pleasure. This is as true for board games as it is for real life. And goals – winning, or at least, not losing – help us do this. Do you want this new car? This house? This watch? This way of life? Set a goal.

There are countless ways to achieve a goal and some of the most useful tips are based around breaking that goal down into smaller pieces. How do you eat an elephant? Eat a little bit at a time. People don’t summit Everest by getting up off the couch, booking a flight, popping on some green boots and working out the rest out as they go. There’s an incredible amount of work that goes into it beforehand.

They climb little mountains. They learn from these climbs. They climb bigger mountains. They build and grow. Eventually, they develop the knowledge and experience and finally, they are ready for Everest.

But what happens if they fail? And equally as important, what happens if they succeed? After all, there is only one Everest. If this is you, and you’ve spent ages learning how to climb Everest, are you really the type to rest on your laurels? Are you doomed to a life of tepid motivational speaking for distracted corporate clients? They don’t care how you climbed Everest and what you learned about yourself at the top. If it doesn’t directly help them hit their target, their attention is diffuse at best.

If this route doesn’t appeal, then it seems like the only option is to find a new Everest – some newer, greater goal to conquer. And so the cycle repeats.

An own goal?

There is another way. James Carse was the director of religious studies at New York University for over 30 years. In his book Finite and Infinite Games, he posited that goal setting was actually a negative trait. For him, goal setting was counterproductive. It became an endless short-term treadmill. It didn’t matter how high the mountain was, to remain motivated and avoid the drudgery of routine, you needed an even higher mountain to conquer next, otherwise, you would be doomed to self-perceived mediocrity. In his mind, the game didn’t end. It was infinite.

For Carse, life was about constantly improving. It didn’t matter how you improved, whether it was in pursuit of a specific goal or just generally, whether it was cycling 100km to beat the 95km you did last Tuesday, or if it was learning a new chord on the guitar. Each little step gravitated towards being better at life, rather than besting a specific and ephemeral goal. What he promoted was a change of mindset.

People in both of these camps can achieve the same things. The difference is that when someone who believed in Carse’s doctrine climbed Everest, it was in pursuit of a higher purpose. They weren’t immediately back at proverbial base camp as soon as they’d summited.

Finite games are ones we play to an end state. Chess, Connect 4, Catan, Craps – to cover a fraction of one letter of the alphabet. But also promotions, new cars, watches, houses, handicaps – all end. Finito. Fin. Nada mas. We need to start a brand new game to be able to play again.

But the things we learn when we play an infinite game inevitably help us in life. Tolerance, resilience, compassion, love; win or lose, exercising these muscles is always an experience worth having – they inexorably help us in whatever comes next.

James Carse was the director of religious studies at New York University for over 30 years. His most famous work, Finite and Infinite Games, is summarised eloquently here: https://fs.blog/2020/02/finite-and-infinite-games/