Derek Thompson

I can see, therefore, what a night out with friends does to my body.

What I can't see, what isn't made perfectly measurable,

is how much fun I have when I do the inconvenient thing of staying out too late with my wife, with my neighbors, with my friend I haven't seen in three months and I'm so happy to catch up on.

And if I was the sort of person who over-indexed exclusively on the next morning rendering of HRV

rather than focusing on the feeling of being with the people that I loved, my own life would develop the exact same problems that I think sports like baseball has developed, which is that the metrics have essentially replaced, this I think is the very point of your idea of value capture, the metrics have replaced my values.

I'm the sort of person who says my values are friends, but if I optimize for HRV, my value is gonna be never going out after 10 p.m.

ever.

And so there's this tricky play that I think your book is forcing us to execute here, which is how to live in a world of more easily measured outcomes, but also allow what we most value, even when it can't be measured, to remain the thing that we most value.

Is that a decent recapitulation of what you're grasping at here?

Or is there another way you'd like to put it?

I can definitely testify to the fact that one of the worst strategies for falling asleep is attempting to fall asleep.

I want to pick up the thread with games here.

You have a beautiful quote in the book from Bernard Suits.

Quote, to play a game is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles for the sake of making possible the activity of overcoming them.

End quote.

I love that.

And the way I want to get into games, which is just such a rich territory, is to ask you...

Before we dive into this, to explain the difference between gaming or games and everything else in life.

What is it that makes games separate to the rest of life?

No, it's funny that you said that because you made me think.