For the love of the game
On work and what drives us
“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing.” — Lawrence Pearsall Jacks
What would it mean to actually live like that?
This quote moves me because it points toward something I’ve been trying to articulate for a while: the idea of doing things for the love of the game. Not for money, not for prestige, not for anyone’s approval — but for a genuine love of the work itself. The kind where the doing itself is the point, and where the work done well is its own reward.
The phrase ‘love of the game’ is often employed in the context of sports, used to describe the player who plays for enjoyment, with no reward sought beyond the act of playing itself. I think it applies just as well to the games of life.
The first game: vocation
To the extent we get to choose our vocation — and I recognize that’s a real privilege [1] — I think there’s something powerful about orienting that choice around one question: What could I do just because I love doing it? For me, the answer has slowly come into focus around mental health and empowering individuals: understanding how people live inside their own heads, where the sense of self resides, what shapes identity, and how much of who we are exists in relation to others rather than as individuals. It’s why, when I arrived at college, I found myself drawn to the Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Anthropology departments — places where I could ask questions about our mind from both life science and social science perspectives, respectively. They were fields I wanted to study for the sake of the subjects themselves.
I find myself most at ease when I’m helping others. That, to me, is worth waking up for. As I move on from undergrad, I hope to pursue work at that intersection — questions about the life we live inside our heads, paired with a commitment to helping people live better within it.
The second game: life itself
There’s a broader game, too — the strange, unique, and wondrous phenomenon of being alive. How do we win this one?
While I can only speculate, it seems like the less I ruminate over myself — what I have, what I lack, what I want, what did or didn’t happen to me — the better I feel. The more I turn outward, toward other people, friendship, and service, the more fulfilled and at ease I find myself. The afternoons I’ve spent actually sitting with someone having a difficult day feel tremendously better spent than those I’ve spent solely on myself. Interestingly, this has been most evident to me on my harder days: when I’m feeling down, I’ve found that helping others — more than most other things — has the potential to help me feel better.
A standard worth holding
When I look back at my life one day, I hope I can feel that my choices and conduct were driven by something authentic. To that end, I strive to craft a life that I can live for genuine love of the game.
[1] It is important to recognize that being able to play for the love of the game is a privileged position to be in — one contingent on financial resources, circumstances aligning in our favor, and more. To the extent we are able to make this a possibility for ourselves, I hope we can craft lives we live for the love of the game itself.