Ever feel like you're winning at life on paper, hitting your steps, your salary goals, your sleep score, and somehow still feel worse? This episode explains why.
I sit down with a thinker who's lived rent-free in my head for five years: C. Thi Nguyen, a philosophy professor at the University of Utah and author of The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game.
We dig into a phenomenon Nguyen calls "value capture." The moment you start chasing a number, the metric quietly takes over the goal you actually cared about. He walks through vivid examples like how his weight tracker made him eat worse, and why a friend quit rock climbing because it lowered his step count. From there, they zoom out to how this applies to playing video and board games, and how you can in fact use metrics and 'games' to make your life happier, so long as you don't get obsessed. We also discuss longevity culture, and the single question a student wrote on her phone that pulled her out of five years of depression: “Is this the game you really want to be playing?”