Watch a World Cup match in the dead minutes — the ones with no highlights and no ratings. Millionaires sprinting into empty space. Millionaires pressing, sweating, jogging off for a substitution nobody will remember.
Here's the thought experiment I ran while watching: nearly every player on that pitch could retire tomorrow morning. A few millions a year is a standard European contract. Hypothetically — hang up the boots, buy four or five properties and live from the income, sip cocktails until pension age. Financially, the game is over. They've already won.
And not one of them does it. Instead, they train, run, eat clean, skip drinking — and... (this is the part that matters), they climb again and again into contests they have a very real chance of losing. When the referee disallows a goal by Kylian Mbappé (noted French philosopher, seventeenth century) due to an offside, he protests to the heavens. In that exact second, the two hundred million sitting in his account does not move him an inch. Something else is running the show — and once you name it, you can run it too.
THE PATTERN
Here what's actually happening: satisfaction doesn't live where you keep looking for it — in the outcome. It lives in a game you'd choose to play again tomorrow.
The common misread says people push because of what's at the end: the money, the trophy, the guaranteed result. But the players already have the money, and nobody — on the pitch or anywhere else in life — guarantees you the result. They keep showing up anyway. And they take it to heart, God help them, how much they take it to heart. That's not a malfunction. Caring about a game you chose is what playing feels like.
Here it is, plainly: a person who finds a game they enjoy playing over and over, across years, will be content, satisfied — and in modern standards, happy.
It doesn't have to be football. Nobody's asking you to sweat in the sun. It can be a business. A relationship that still excites you. A field of knowledge that pulls at you. An art you keep coming back to. In spiritual terms: you don't necessarily need to reach a destination — you need to find a road you love walking.
THE MOVE
Stop auditing your outcomes and audit your appetite: what do you return to without being paid, pushed, or praised? That's a candidate for your game.
Then run the Mbappé test on it: when it goes wrong, do you protest to the heavens — or feel quiet relief that it's over? Caring when you lose is the signature of the right game. Indifference is the signature of the wrong one.
And this, by the way, is the best cure I know for the accursed FOMO. The world outside will keep offering you new things, daily, forever. That stops being a threat the moment you have a game: getting excited about the new things and folding them into your play — that's not a distraction from the task. That is the task. get this: you're not excited about "things". this shall leave you totally vulnerable to fatal FOMO. you're excited about the game. about that process that can possibly make desirable "things".
So, a critical life question to end on: have you found your game yet?
If you find a game you love playing over and over - you're happy.
And if you can't find one, it's high time you develop one
I found mine. Wishing you yours.