In any fair competitive game, there’s a golden rule: a 50% win rate.
This rate isn’t a sign of failure; it’s the sign of a perfectly functional system. It means you are being “matchmade” correctly. You are being challenged, but not crushed. You are placed against opponents at your effective competitive level, creating the ideal conditions for skill growth.
When your win rate deviates wildly from 50%—when you are on a 20-loss streak—it means the system has failed. The goal is no longer your growth; it’s just “engagement.” You’re just content, fed into the grinder.
But the core problem in a competitive system is that it’s zero-sum. By definition, you cannot increase the proportion of wins for one group without causing a corresponding reduction in another’s. This creates a fundamental, inescapable disequilibrium.
This is a microcosm of a much larger, more painful problem.
Why Losing Hurts: The Gap Between a Game and Reality
In a game, losing hurts. It’s a “monkey brain” status threat. But the consequences are contained. You re-queue.
In life, “losing” has direct, tangible, and often catastrophic consequences. And the worst part, the part that grinds us down, is that these consequences are often arbitrary and disproportionately painful.
This is where the line between a “game” and “torture” evaporates.
A Game is a system you consent to play, where the rules are clear, and the consequences of failure are safe and contained. The goal is growth or joy.
Torture is a system you are forced to play, where the rules are opaque, arbitrary, and the consequences of failure are designed to break you. The goal is subjugation.
I believe we are at a point where many people can no longer tell the difference between life and torture. This isn’t a failure of perception; it’s a predictable result of the conditions imposed on our existence.
The Impossible Demand of Detachment
We are told by spiritual guides and wellness gurus to “detach from outcome” to facilitate inner peace.
But how can you detach from the outcome when the outcome is so extreme?
It’s a cruel joke. Telling someone to “find peace” when they are facing eviction, or can’t afford medicine, or are being systematically humiliated is like telling a player who is being spawn-camped by a cheater to “just enjoy the competitive experience.”
It’s spiritual gaslighting. It ignores the reality of the system. It would be much easier to detach from the outcome if the outcome wasn’t so disproportionately painful.
Fixing the Game
This leaves us with two choices, and neither one is about “learning to play the broken game better.”
- Reframe the Victory Condition (The Inner Work): You must create a new, sovereign game that you play inside the old one. The external world’s victory condition is “Win/Loss,” and it’s a trap. Your new, internal victory condition must be “Growth/Gnosis.” You ask: “Did I act with integrity? Did I learn something? Did I help someone?” In this game, you can lose the external match but win the only one that matters.
- Fix the Fucking Game (The Outer Work): We must become architects of better systems. The ultimate problem is a system that rewards behavior that derives pleasure from inducing suffering. We must design systems that minimize suffering. We must build positive-sum games where all parties can benefit from the exchange, and where everyone can appreciate that benefit.
We cannot just endure the torture. We must find the courage to see it for what it is, and then, as architects of a better world, begin the work of building something new. A game actually worth playing.