Derek Thompson

But attention was, one could argue, pulled away from how to make the overall game more fun.

When I think about that principle in individual lives, I think about the idea that it's very easy using my, and I'm now showing the camera, my aura ring, very easy to see what

what having a drink, especially after 7.30 p.m., does to my resting heart rate and to my HRV.

I can wake up in the morning and look at my iPhone rendering of my Oura Ring data and see, oops, my HRV absolutely frigging sucked last night.

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.