> Well, one of the core measures of a well-designed game (for a given player) is the felt experience of immersion, or flow. Specifically, an immersive game should hold the player in the flow channel at all times.<p>In life, that's not the case. We sometimes choose to do things that are frustrating or boring, because they must be done. Because they're worth doing. Not everything needs to be entertainment.<p>> Instead, I want to play an infinite game<p>That's why I came to believe in reincarnation, actually.<p>Life on its own can seem pretty meaningless -- you can try to learn all you want, achieve your wildest dreams, and then we all die and in a few centuries will be utterly forgotten.<p>A bit like how a single game of rock, paper, scissors is not especially interesting. There's no real strategy to a single game.<p>But <i>repeated</i> rock, paper, scissors, there are tournaments in that, computer engines, there are several strategies and ways to exploit other strategies. The "optimal" play (always random) is guaranteed to end in the middle of the pack. There's much more to think about.<p>So I choose to <i>assume</i> reincarnation exist (with no possible way to communicatie between lives). And now what I do in this life may influence my next one. Everything has more meaning, just by a simple assumption.
After being a father, now I see life as a recursion, a recursion to pass on life. On micro-scale, it means being good parents, to pass on accumulated wisdom, or the lack of, to children. Then scale the recursion to extended family, community and maybe whole humanity. I've internalised the feeling that things that help the recursion are things worth doing, and the smaller the scale, the stronger the feeling is.
> I want to understand everything (…and how it all fits together.)<p>I have this personality trait too. I suspect it was very beneficial in evolutionary times, when it was possible to learn everything that was known and <i>then</i> start using that knowledge. But in the modern world it becomes a bit of a personality flaw: you just learn and learn and learn, and then you die. :)
On the topic of “thinking is analogy”, the book “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson is an excellent and foundational read. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphors_We_Live_By</a>
Understanding is a purely artificial/subjective concept. "Understanding" only exists if there is a conscious observer, and "understanding" means whatever that observer wants it to mean. A lot of people have found full understanding in religion. It takes off a lot of the stress from not understanding.<p>You may call this understanding of understanding meta-understanding.
The Ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle puzzled over the same observations.<p>Aristotle called your topic “First Philosophy” because it studies the primary substance that underlies everything.
This piece is highly aligned with my way of thinking about learning as I wrote in Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. Exciting to see another buccaneer’s take on things.