What Game Are You Playing?

I’ve never been particularly interested in games, and I’m not interested in competition for its own sake. I value collaboration, efficiency, and creating something meaningful with others; it’s how I forge relationships. If I’m going to compete, it’s with myself. I am my own benchmark. It’s not always about pushing through. It’s never about striving for the sake of it.

What concerns me about competition is what happens when the game–and winning–becomes more important than why you’re playing at all.

Most ambition, as we colloquially understand it, doesn’t begin distorted. It starts cleanly: curiosity, growth, a desire for more. Over time, however, if you’re not checking in with your inner directive, something shifts. Results begin to matter more than intent. Metrics replace meaning. Momentum replaces direction. Relationships are impacted, and what we still call ambition starts to feel more like inertia.

At that point, we’re no longer choosing. We’re perpetuating.

Ambition as Drift

The issue isn’t wanting more. We are creative and expansive by nature. Growth is natural.

The problem is drift.

Ambition becomes externally referenced. At its root, ambitio means to canvass for votes. Its very DNA is shaped by reward, approval, and visibility.

The compass is no longer pointing north. It’s facing outward, calibrating itself against external signals and outsourced measures of success. We learn what “works,” optimise for what gets rewarded, and repeat the cycle.

In the process, nuance is lost. Context falls away. We end up with a 'Blinkist' version of ourselves: distilled, efficient, and incomplete.

Gradually, we begin setting pieces of ourselves aside.

Developmentally, Belonging Comes Before Authorship

At one level, this makes perfect sense. Belonging isn’t a luxury; it’s a biological imperative. From early on, we learn to read context, reflect expectations, and fit in (Bowlby, 1969).

Humans are exceptional mimics for a reason. Mimicry reduces unpredictability. It makes us legible, familiar, and therefore safer. It fosters cooperation and inclusion, evolutionary advantages that dramatically improved our chances of survival (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999; Boyd, Richerson, & Henrich, 2011).

Adaptation isn’t a weakness. It’s intelligence. A coping strategy. A survival mechanism.

The problem isn’t adaptation itself. It’s when adaptation runs unchecked.

I see this clearly in my own life. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve turned myself into a pretzel trying to fit in, without stopping to consider the cost, or whether it was even a game I wanted to play, let alone win.

When Adaptation Outlives Its Usefulness

Adaptation was never meant to be permanent. It has a time and a place in our development.

As children, we set parts of ourselves aside to stay attached, connected, and safe. Conformity wasn’t a failure of self; it was an investment in continuation. The strategies that kept us alive became embedded in the architecture of our identity.

Safety and belonging come before authorship. That’s development, not dysfunction (Bowlby, 1969).

The problem arises when those same strategies remain long after authorship becomes possible. What was provisional hardens into identity. What once protected us begins to constrain us. External validation replaces internal authority. Without quite noticing, we trade self-trust for safety.

That trade-off is how we set ourselves aside.

The Hidden Costs of Living Set Aside

The costs don’t always announce themselves dramatically. They are the natural outcome of how we are shaped by our environment, and the shaping never stops.

Sometimes it becomes mis-shaping. Life feels effortful, like wearing an ill-fitting jacket. You feel restless, disengaged, vaguely dissatisfied. The costs surface in relationships that no longer work, careers that feel oddly hollow, or a persistent sense of misalignment despite outward success.

Crises amplify these costs, but they don’t create them. They expose what was already there. Burnout becomes normalised. Chronic stress is expected. Life turns into something to be managed rather than lived.

These are signals that something essential has been overridden for too long. Effort replaces alignment. Ambition is driven by adaptation rather than authorship.

The deeper costs are quieter, and more corrosive. They accumulate until one day you find yourself wondering how you ended up here.

At that point, adaptation has crossed a line. What began as an intelligent strategy becomes self-betrayal.

Attachment Changes the Stakes

It’s easy to speak freely when the stakes are low. When attachment enters the picture, everything changes.

Belonging is not optional. As Baumeister and Leary (1995) demonstrated, the need to belong is a fundamental human motivation, not a preference or a personality trait.

I see this in myself. I’ll speak plainly when there’s nothing to lose. I hesitate when there is. The paradox is this: the closer the bond, the more carefully we tread.

Yet it’s precisely in those relationships where authenticity carries the greatest weight.

If you can’t be yourself there, where can you be?

This is the moment of truth. Reveal or hide. The risks of revealing are obvious. The cost of hiding is less so. It masquerades as emotional maturity, but it’s really disappearance.

Belonging that requires self-erasure isn’t safety.
It’s survival.

Expression Isn’t Enough Without Authorship

Authenticity includes expression. Being able to articulate what you think and feel matters.

Expression alone, however, isn’t enough.

Authorship changes the reference point. Expression guided by coherence rather than outcome expands the questions we ask. Not just Will this land? or How will this be received? but also Is this true for me? and Am I willing to stand behind it?

You can speak fluently and still not be the author of your life. Without authorship, even honest expression is shaped by context, reward, and approval. Over time, authenticity thins, not through silence, but through misalignment (Deci & Ryan, 2000).

The Role of Courage: Replacing Adaptation with Authorship

This is where courage enters, not as bravado, but as transition.

Replacing adaptation with authorship interrupts patterns that once worked. These patterns weren’t arbitrary. They kept you safe, included, attached. Letting go of them isn’t reckless, but it is destabilising.

Adaptation asks, What will keep me safe?
Authorship asks, What is true for me now, given who I am becoming?

That shift rarely arrives as a dramatic turning point. More often, it shows up in small moments: saying what you’d normally edit, declining what you’d usually accept, tolerating disappointment rather than disappearing yourself.

Courage here is quiet and responsible. It’s exercised in conversation, in choice, in the willingness to endure short-term discomfort in service of long-term coherence.

Without courage, authorship remains theoretical. Awareness grows. Insight deepens. Nothing changes, except your discomfort.

Courage is not about becoming someone new.
It’s about standing with what is already true and allowing your life to reorganise around it.

Reclaiming the Centre

Every pathway has a cost.

Staying with the status quo is familiar and quietly cumulative. Reclaiming your centre is uncertain, destabilising, and visible.

Most people don’t abandon themselves deliberately. They adapt. They react. They do what makes sense given the conditions they’re in.

Adaptation is meant to be replaced.

Ambition doesn’t destroy people. What erodes us is building success on a version of ourselves that was never meant to last, when the self remains set aside long after authorship is possible.

The problem isn’t ambition.
It’s what happens when the game replaces the author.

References 

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Boyd, R., Richerson, P. J., & Henrich, J. (2011). The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation. In J. E. Strassmann et al. (Eds.), In the light of evolution: Vol. V. Cooperation and conflict (pp. 119–143). Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (1999). The chameleon effect: The perception–behavior link and social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(6), 893–910. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.76.6.893