Life is a Game that you can learn by learning these rules

Not sure how many folks here remember the game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on the 1st xbox, but I was at the time, seriously addicted to the game back in college.

Part of the fun is that your reputation and actions have a physical effect on the character you are playing - you can go to the gym (in the game) and bulk up your appearance. Pretty cool how they gamified something that is so boring in real life.

Then I had an epiphany.

What if all the effort and time I put in the game, I actually put towards my actual life? In a way, gamifying my own life for the benefit for my life instead of a video game character?

I spent a lot more time doing physical activities than playing video games since.

So I love this idea of treating life as if it is a game. Best epiphany ever.

Another thing that I do - pretend like I observe my life in 3rd person like how I observed the character in the game. Like I have camera over my shoulder while I am doin an incline bench press. It's hard to explain, but dissociating with myself puts me in a zen-like state. It also helps if I am upset and need a moment to cool off. Its a lot easier to disconnect from your ego when you disconnect from it like you are controlling it through an xbox controller.

A lot of what you describe, like constant anxiety, stress, and taking everything too seriously (as if the consequences of mistakes are too grave) may come from childhood trauma, CPTSD or emotional neglect. There are many communities online that discuss these specific things in that context.

You seem to touch on similar themes with your point 7 about societal programming and later with the point about cheating yourself. Acceptance is key in healing from emotional neglect and so is developing self-worth, stopping self-abuse, or "cheating yourself". Specifically through suppressing your interests, self expression, hiding your flaws, and how that both comes out of low self-esteem and reinforces it.

So you are spot on. But this seems tailored to a person who has suffered through this kind of abuse. I am saying this as both someone who has experience with emotional neglect and a video game designer. I think the article applies more closely to the former experience than the latter.

Decent message but way too many video game analogies. Twenty year-old me might have been thrilled, now it’s just annoying.

How long have you been using these rules? Long enough to find the flaws in them or are you still experiencing a sense that life is all figured out now?

extremely trite

I'm going to nitpick two things.

1. If you cheat in business, you might get caught. Or you might retire a billionaire.

2. If we're going to stick with the video game analogy, video games often have difficulty settings. The difference with the game of life is that you don't get to choose your difficulty setting when you start playing. You may not even be aware that there are different difficulty settings until you're pretty far into the game. Some of these things can be adjusted a little bit mid-game, but not all. Not even most.

This is a strange case where a person addicted to something tries to rationalize that being addicted itself is a good thing.