I was watching my daughter play a soccer game. It was indoor soccer, as outdoor soccer is moderately miserable to completely impossible in the winter or early spring. The games are quick and everyone has a lot of fun. Someone scored a goal and everyone cheered. As I was taking a sip of beer a confused gentleman sitting next to me asked me what the score was. I looked up at the scoreboard and it read.
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“Oh, many times they don’t score these games. It depends on the referee but usually they don’t keep track.”
He chuckled a bit.
“Well, what’s the point then?”
I explained to him that with the indoor leagues no one really cares, it’s just a chance to play more soccer and have fun. Many times one of the teams is short anyways and they freely change players back and forth to make it playable. Sometimes even a sibling of a different age will jump in that played an earlier game so the players can play. Heck, I’ve even seen the coaches’ play goalie.
He seemed unconvinced and mildly distressed.
“How could anyone play a game without knowing who won?”
I shrugged and laughed.
“I don’t know, but the girls don’t seem to care.”
The game went on with more goals scored. It was fun, but I have no idea who “won” the game. I asked my daughter after the game and she had no idea either.
The next day I started thinking a bit more upon this exchange though, because I feel is central to almost everything I write about here.
Why do we feel the need to keep score?
Life is full of multi-player games that serve no purpose, and we all play them. We keep a mental tally of how well we are doing and constantly compare ourselves to others. Our happiness doesn’t really matter, only the score at the end of the game.
The games are subtle, and oftentimes we don’t realize we are playing them. We see someone’s vacation pictures on social media or read about a family who is living the dream and feel a pang of jealousy or fear of missing out.
They have a higher score than us.
We go to a dinner party and see a house more beautiful and lavishly decorated than ours and suddenly long for a kitchen remodel. If only we could have whiter teeth and higher performing kids than that annoyingly perfect soccer mom who volunteers at the soup kitchen between practices.
She certainly has a higher score than me.
But maybe your teeth are white enough. Maybe your kids are perfectly happy without more scheduled activities. Maybe your life can be complete without the African safari that your sister-in-law just got back from.
Maybe your contribution to the world feels about right if you just stop keeping score.
When I was growing up I was conditioned to keep score by just about everyone – parents, teachers, television. I was taught the score mattered, even when after a losing battle someone would glibly say:
“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost, but how you played the game.”
I could see in their eyes though that it DID matter. It’s funny how no one tells you this after you win. Only when you lose.
I guess how you play the game is just a losers way to keep score.
I measured my success in life on how well I scored in these games. I compared how fast I ran, how high my test scores were, how popular I was, how much money I could make. I had no internal metric on how good I was doing in each of these areas so I looked to others and started competing. The problem with this is the only game that matters is internal. How happy and satisfied are you with life. How true to your values are you existing.
There is no way to look at someone else and know how you are doing with regard to this, and frankly it doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t make any rational sense to try and figure out how happy someone is and then try and run up the score and become happier. This is a recipe for misery. Happiness is internal and there is no score or game to be played with it. You can’t really chase it, only let it emerge.
It’s all about who shows up
It took me a while to learn this, but most of the games I played were predetermined before I even started playing them. Not exactly of course, but let me explain. I’ve won exactly 1 race in my life. It was a 5k and I killed it. I’m not sure if it was a personal best for me, but it was close. It felt pretty great and I was pretty proud of myself.
A couple years later I ran the same race with a similar time and didn’t win. It wasn’t even close. I think I finished 4th or 5th. It wound not have been possible for me to win this race no matter how hard I trained as the people that finished ahead of me were always going to be faster. I could shave a few seconds off my time, but nothing short of performance enhancing drugs and Olympic style training is going to bring down my 5k time by more than a minute. If those 3 or 4 people would have been busy that day I would have won the race.
The point is the winner in most of the games we play is determined by who shows up or who we choose to compete against. I don’t race much anymore, but I’m starting to get the itch now that I’m back to running. Racing is kind of fun and exciting. But I won’t play the game of caring about my place because it’s all a matter of who shows up. I will run hard only because it is fun to see what my body will do. Not caring about the outcome of things that don’t really matter (and most things really don’t matter in the big picture) is a super power.
Most of the games we play are meaningless. They are background noise. Distractions. Only play them if they are fun and you are not too attached to the outcome.
Stop keeping score on things that don’t really matter.
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More brilliance… thanks it’s hard to detach yourself from it being a competitive person. But we’re getting better. It’s all about being objectively successful, not comparatively successful.
It’s tough to change the metrics to all internal, and maybe impossible to do so completely, but success is just moving the needle towards more happiness.
Interesting perspective and comments and jibe with my concurrent reading of “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”.
One comment re: running. I had a second running career peak in the late 40’s. I was running further and faster again, and my times were dropping. I was mostly racing against myself. I would set targets, train up, and beat them. I won my age in a 10k in 2013, but more importantly, I was able to get in under a 6:30 mile pace. Pretty blistering, if I may say so.
Then, the decline began. A minor (popliteus) tendon tear in a 20k trail race that fall, and it all unraveled. Joint aches and pains came and were slow to resolve. I would run the same trail races year after year, and my times became progressively worse. Ugh!
This is common. I spoke with a cycling friend a few months ago, a guy who lived to cycle, a fellow radiologist in fact, and he said that while he still cycles, he has removed speedometers and tracking watches and devices. He know that he is not as strong or fast a cyclist and want to continue to enjoy the activity without the constant reminder that he is not as good as he once was.
Ultimately, just showing up might be the final line in the sand. He (and I) show up for activities that most men our age do not, and regardless of the time it takes, we can still get it done.
6:30s is no joke for a 10k. That’s pretty fast. We have a tenancy to compare ourselves to our former self (hey I beat my PR!), which as you point out become progressively harder to match as we age. In some ways I think keeping score against ourselves can be just as insidious or even worse than keeping score against others.
6:30 is fast, very nice.
When I was younger, I was definitely more competitive. Now I’m 55 and I really don’t feel competitive much at all anymore. I don’t know if that lack of competitive drive is from a feeling of satisfaction with life and a feeling of having attained enough or if it is an effect of aging and experience. But I will say, it’s a great feeling to be losing that competitive drive and just be attaining goals because they make one happy.
New sport: Competitive happiness 😉
I like the fact that you were able to notice this. Like people’s comments above, I have also become less competitive as I’ve gotten older. I would like to hear your take on professional sports and our cultural obsession for them. I tend to think that from our working professional culture we currently live in, the natural tendency is to be attracted to highly competitive sports. It is amazing to me the high level of emotion people put into their teams, especially in football.
I used to care quite a bit about sports, but now I hardly pay attention to them (Unless it’s my kids) and I really just don’t care about the outcomes. Sports are this weird form of tribalism which probably made sense when we lived in tribes and sports were a way to do battle without killing scores of people. You put out your heroes and they competed against some neighboring tribe.
Now it is highly profitable corporations and universities hiring/recruiting gladiators from all over the place to battle other corporations and universities in order to garner money from sponsors and fans. On television there are more advertisements than actual game. It seems so contrived and artificial. I just can’t watch anymore unless I completely detach from the outcome and focus on the beauty and athleticism inherent in the games themselves.
It really is about who shows up. Who’s there to do the work. Who is there for you. Who takes responsibility. Who is there to the end, NOT who is there first or who has the most.
We organize our lives around what we measure, so measure carefully 🙂
Comparison is the thief of joy.
Indeed!
It’s funny how no one tells you this after you win. Only when you lose.
Yep, keen point. I’m a pretty fierce competitor, but it’s mostly against myself. I love tracking my workouts on Strava and beating my personal bests. The best I’ve ever done in a running race was 6th place, and that was because there were only 28 total in the race. I’ll never be as fast as those sub 6-minute mile guys, but I love getting personal bests because it means I’m older and faster. And that’s just cool.
The downside of course is that I put lots of pressure on myself to continue to get better, and the rules of aging are working against me…
My wife seems to be getting faster each year, but I have definitely slowed down. If I compared my performance to the past I would be continuously disappointed 🙂
I’ve only recently come to understand this. I ALWAYS wanted to be the best, but when I look back it’s hard to figure myself out. I just wanted to be awesome (and still do), but couldn’t figure out any other metric than comparing myself to the other guy. Which isn’t dumb, but is indeed a recipe for having joy needlessly stolen from you (thanks Notaradiologist, previous comment). Now I just want to be awesome and not really care how that compares, which helps me want the other guy to be awesome, too. Even if it’s more awesomer than me 🙂
It’s amazing how these slight mental shifts can really completely change how we interact with and see the world.
Sometimes it’s tricky to balance being aware of the ‘who shows up’ phenom with internal definitions of success/personal goals, but I think it’s worth working at. I’d rather be incrementally improving on things that are important to me than keeping up with other people, but there’s a lot of noise in the system.
Agreed. Race times are easy to measure, but many of the things we try to keep score are more amorphous, and at times it is unclear who we are even competing against.
Social comparisons will kill happiness. Avoiding them is a common person-fit activity for increasing the 40% of happiness we can control.
Interestingly avoid social comparison dovetails with avoiding overthinking as a Happiness enhancement strategy, at least in the positive psychology world. Not overthinking as in this post or blogging in general, which is a deep thinking process, but more perseveration.
You say “ It just doesn’t make any rational sense to try and figure out how happy someone is….and try to run up the score”. Your reader comments that “comparison is the thief of joy”. We’re all saying the same thing – stop social comparison.
This is why I don’t have Facebook (except for my blog or watch much TV news.
I do love Strava. I keep an abundance mentality when it comes to running. There are infinite fast miles to go around. Seeing friends train and get faster, overcome injuries, make close friends in running groups, do destination races etc gives me a sense of community, a no brainer for happiness. I’m going for a 5K PR soon. Self-competition but I don’t feel bad when I see a 100 mile per week runner effortless pass me like a gazelle in the first mile. I just watch and admire.
I think measuring and tracking progress is useful. It allows us to re-calibrate and make adjustments. I used Strava quite a bit in the past, it is quite a useful and fun tool, although I would become a little distressed at times when someone would knock me out of the top 10 for a particular segment…that was the old me though 🙂
Why not simply run because it feels good, run faster if you have the energy that day, take it easy if you don’t, run with people for socialization (not necessarily competition), or by yourself (for meditation)?
Personally, I have found this to be a much more enjoyable activity than needing to hit my miles or splits for a particular day and racing others on track workouts. I now avoid mile-markers and strava-like tracking as much as possible and instead head for the woods as much as possible. I come back refreshed (and exhausted) and thoroughly pleased with myself without a clue as to my mileage or who else out there might have run the same loop faster/slower.
Perhaps this mentality is just a reaction to my former competitive collegiate career in a different sport, but I believe it is growth, nonetheless.
For aspiring HappyPhilosophers like myself, this mentality can also be applied to academics: learning to enjoy the learning process, not the grade/ score.
Hello HP,
You were the first physician I ever heard who had a blog. I found you on a podcast. Maybe MadFI? That was Feb 2018 and then I found this guy commenting on Financial Samurai. It was PoF.
Anyhow I simply wanted to say thanks. I really like your writing.
And I run without a watch. I started again this year. I walk, run or crawl and as long as I get out for the day. I am supremely happy. Haven’t kept score for a very long time.
I think this is the reason I like running so much. You’re working against your own times, because it always depends on who shows up to the starting line where you’ll place in the end regardless of your ability or how you trained. Just like swimming, it’s an individual sport where you mainly are competing against your former self and that’s what makes it enjoyable to race.