The Death Bed Game
Rules of the Game
Give yourself 1 point when you do something that counter acts one of these regrets of the dying.
- 1 point when you get quality alone time, diving into your own unfiltered, real self.
- 1 point when you spend quality time with your favorite people.
- 1 point when you get in the flow working on something you’re really interested in.
[…]
I’ve been doing this for a couple weeks and I get about 5 points a week. It has shifted how I think about the day.
I don’t take time to myself for granted. I don’t go to work without thinking about how I can do my most meaningful work. I don’t come home without thinking about how I can have the best quality time with my wife and son. I don’t go out with friends without thinking about how I can connect and share with them on a real level.
via Buster Benson
Following on from my last morbid post, here’s another one. This snippet from Buster comes at a time when I’m thinking long and hard about choosing my next job, and how I should choose it. The death bed game is a clever way of leveraging the fear of death for the willpower to lead a life with few regrets.
I can’t help but wonder, however, why it is so hard to do these meaningful, death-bed-points-scoring activities? Why do we need a gimmicky game to do it if it is so great for us? I am reminded of this anecdote from Thinking Fast and Slow:
Kahneman demonstrated the principle using two groups of patients undergoing painful colonoscopies. Group A got the normal procedure. Group B, unknowingly received a few extra minutes of less painful discomfort after the end of the examination, i.e., more total discomfort. However, since Group B’s procedure ended less painfully, the patients in this group retrospectively minded the whole affair less.
via Wikipedia
In Thinking Fast and Slow Kahneman distinguishes between two selves. There’s the remembering self, which reflects and deliberates (eventually on our deathbeds), and the experiencing self that does the day-to-day cooking, living, and experiencing.
Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.
There’s a conflict between the two selves - their priorities are often misaligned. If you’ve ever pushed yourself to keep running when you would much rather stop, you’ve experienced the conflict between your two selves. Ambition is entirely the remembering self’s burden. Pleasure belongs to the experiencing self, and the remembering self knows only it by reputation.
The death bed game as proposed by Buster appeals to the remembering self, while recognizing pleasure and joy belongs to the experiencing self. To be able to remember a life well lived, one choose carefully the experiences one engages in, and then deeply engage with the experience. It’s an interesting attempt to resolve the conflict between the two selves.
But what do I know? This is the remembering self doing the writing.