The modern gamified life

Progress, metrics, games, status signaling, and a way to navigate a world filled with these

The world is full of disappointing truths. One of them is- anything that can be measured, will eventually become a game. Metrics are what we measure. They are actually an effective way to abstract the complexities of the values of an object. If the metrics are good, then that object is good.

With technological progress, we built more and more objects, and technology allowed us to create more metrics, and so on. All of this gradually led to the culmination of the present state of the world. A world where we look at everything from a lens of metrics.

As far as you are applying metrics to justify the purchase of your mobile phone or a speaker, it's probably alright. What if you start applying similar kinds of metrics to people? People with more than a million Instagram followers are class A, those between a hundred thousand and a million followers are class B, and those further below are class C. The world starts feeling very weird.

Today, we don't just apply metrics to judge objects but also to judge people. Pre-Internet, the only status signaling metric was money, which was kind of a private affair. Contrast this with today, every platform from Twitter to Tinder, from Reddit to ResearchGate, from Parler to Pinterest assigns a public metric to you that signifies a social status.

With social status signaling, it becomes inevitable that people get split into smaller groups. In a world that is already so divided, introducing another dimension of division doesn’t solve any problem for sure. I’m not saying that these innovative new platforms and systems are inherently bad, but they behave in a very messed-up way and introduce new divisions.

All of us optimize for these games, given a choice to have half an hour with a prolific professional in your line of work or a popular Twitter influencer, you'd almost always choose to interact with the influencer. Why? He has higher social metrics and thus talking to him increases your social status.

Metrics introduce hierarchy, hierarchy introduces games. 

Now, the extent of the impact of these evolutionary changes boils down to two things (very simplified view)- social perception and your own philosophy. 

If you are mostly outward-looking, you will care about external appearance and metrics. You will prioritize people with high metric values and ignore ones with low metric values.

If you are mostly inward-looking, you will try to skip the illusion of metrics and try to understand the human in front of you. You will prioritize connection over utility.

In a world full of calculated games, the best one to play is the one that requires no scoreboard in the first place. But is this practically possible? Probably not. What appears more feasible is to nitpick the games that you want to play.