Month: March 2025

Systems, culture, and games are all around us. Understanding the key characteristics is important for navigating an ever-changing, complex world.

Systems are formal structures that allow people to adopt particular behaviors in order to operate. For instance, an education system in which a teacher must teach students to memorize when The War of 1812 was to ace a test isn’t the same as teaching students how to learn a subject. Modern-day systems push people to optimize metrics (to be faster/cheaper with fewer defects), follow instructions, and focus on appearances rather than substance. Systems often ignore culture and create tension for those who operate in it.

Culture is “people like us do things like this.” It is a shared set of beliefs, values, rituals, customs, symbols, and artifacts. These are the invisible rules and norms. You don’t show up at the golf course in blue jeans and a T-shirt. That’s not how things are done around here. Culture pushes us to fit in, not stand out, be mediocre, and follow the masses.

(It is worth mentioning here that status plays a role in everything we do. It enables culture. Who’s up? Who’s down? Caste systems thrive because humans categorize (wrongly) other humans and use false proxies to put someone above another.)

Games are either finite or infinite. Finite games have rules, boundaries, winners, losers, and a designated time. We are very familiar with finite games like soccer. But racing to submit TPS reports before Friday at 5 so you can go home on time is another type of game. Infinite games are different in that you play the game to keep playing. When I play catch with a six-year-old, I am not playing to “win”; instead, I toss the ball to entice the six-year-old to throw it back. Humans are biologically wired to play games. Games are much better when you are not set up to lose. Understanding how debt systems work, for instance, and making a game out of it, mixing in the rules and making your own, is a good way to stay out of debt to enable other games–like doing your art.

Costs are hidden with money, time, and attention. Here are some of the costs we tend to overlook:

The costs of maintenance: Buying a boat seems like a good idea until you realize that renting one is better. Boats need to be maintained and stored in order to work. Upkeep, storage, fuel, time, and energy are rarely a factor on the exciting first day of any purchase.

The cost of space: Buying a bigger home means you’ll need to fill it with more furniture.

The cost of opportunity: Owning a phone means dealing with the dopamine machine. When we trade for convenience, we must also acknowledge that we are selling it for attention that could be used to do something else.

The emotional toll: Work, produce, consume has been the industrial model for two centuries. Driving us toward debt or making purchases we don’t want to make. If we are not careful, the things we own can come to own us.

Man’s Search for Meaning teaches us that humans have the extraordinary ability to adapt to any circumstance or environment. Despite our circumstances, we can still find a way to survive, even thrive, in the sense that we can find meaning in suffering.

World-famous alpinist Colin Haley believes we use the word suffering too lightly. (And I agree.) We confuse what Victor Frankl went through with the hardships of climbing difficult (metaphorical) mountains. We confuse what it means to put up with discomfort with actual suffering. Once we can believe that, yes, the circumstances are awful, but like any storm, it passes, we can start treating suffering/discomfort as an opportunity.

The art of “suffering” is found on the edge of dancing with discomfort.

We can’t see other cars coming when we look at our phones. And we can’t drive as well when we are scrolling Instagram. So, why do we think we can talk or look someone in the eye when we have our phones out?

It’s seductive to think we can multitask like this. We do things better when we focus on one thing at a time. We have transitioned from being “on” the phone to “in” the phone.

The outdoor community attracted me because it was full of pirates, poets, beats, outlaws, scoundrels, artists, and impresarios. Today, it has significantly shifted into something else. For better or worse, it is noticeable how much mental health has entangled itself as part of the outdoor community.

People self-identify as climbers or backcountry skiers so much that if they are not skiing steep and deep or climbing some big line, they feel like they are somehow disappointing themselves or the people around them. Another thing I have seen (that I find pretty disgusting) is the spraying of how many people someone knows who have died. It’s almost like a body count. Knowing someone who died is a status symbol now.

No one is forcing people to do these types of Type II activities. And over and over again, I see people doing these things for the wrong reasons, like being in a toxic relationship with someone and justifying it because the sex is too good. For someone who has been in the field for many years, I advise taking a step back. Do these things for the love of doing it. Not because it will make you popular. Not because it will boost a dating profile. Do it because we love it.

Sometimes, we work so hard to create an identity that we forget that these things can’t grow by checking a box. A runner becomes a runner simply by tying their shoes and going on a run. The outdoors are a space for anyone–a space to work through the struggles and challenges we face “down there.” It’s difficult to pinpoint it, but the culture surrounding the outdoor community is experiencing an identity crisis. We lose something when we must document everything we do to snag another moment for the gram. We put ourselves in more dangerous/compromising positions when we continue to do these activities when, deep down, we are not at peace with ourselves.

Two quotes from Jack Kerouac in The Dharma Bums bring some perspective:

“The whole purpose of mountain-climbing to me isn’t just to show off you can get to the top, it’s getting out to this wild country.”

And

“Dammit, that yodel of triumph of yours was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I wish I had a tape recorder to take it down. Those things aren’t made to be heard by the people down below.”

The circle of now is enormous. We have a constant need for maintenance: hunger, thirst, temperature, emotions. This can spike our need for more, and more right now can appear to be the right answer.

However, investing in tomorrow is a great way to build a life of significance, purpose, and meaning. Too often, we are seduced to trade tomorrow for today. After all, there’s no telling if tomorrow will come.

Constantly, we are faced with the choice of making things better tomorrow or taking what’s in front of us today. The ones who appear the happiest understand how to balance and invest in something that could pay out in the future. Perhaps, for someone else to enjoy that isn’t even here yet.

Angels and demons are not useful in the story we tell because we can’t see them. There is no evidence to support their interference with our lives. And yet, they still persist. Because that is how powerful a story can be. Ideas rarely need evidence. What they need is to evoke a powerful enough emotion within ourselves. Over time, ideas can even insulate themselves: classify themselves as sacred, have laws around them, become addicting…they persist only cause of our beliefs. These ideas clearly need humans to survive. But do humans need ideas?

Some aspects of tension I am thinking about:

The Marshmallow Effect: The Marshmallow Studies showed us that putting off the now for later has enormous psychological benefits. Of course, if you live where marshmallows are not readily available, taking what is in front of you may make a lot of sense. The analogy is still useful. Being faced with tension and learning to dance with it is a much better approach than someone who constantly wants to have it resolved. However, we must understand that there is context in every decision people make. If you lived as that person lived, learned what they learned, and were immersed in the culture they lived, you would make the same choice, too.

Discomfort: No one ever says we will go through this life without dealing with tension. Often, the adult temper tantrums we face are precisely because of this tension. “I didn’t get what I wanted” isn’t as healthy an outlook as “I didn’t get what I wanted today.”

Weaponized: This tension is now being used against us. Whether we want the tension of doom scrolling to go away by continuing to scroll or to pornography and online gambling, that tension is always present in our culture. And with our dopamine-hit culture, which we have prioritized and added to our world of convenience (one-click shopping), we have a massive problem dealing with tension as it arises. Having a smaller capacity to deal with tension and shortcut the reward dopamine system is causing severe harm to all of us.

Magic Tricks: A 6-year-old sees a magic trick in wonder. A 12-year-old will bug us to show them how it is done. We know magic isn’t real. And neither is theater. But if we are unwilling to suspend disbelief, we will never leave room for surprise.

What do I do next? Our culture prides itself on doing what we did yesterday to spec, doing what we did faster and cheaper. Following the simple set of instructions is a great way to build Model Ts but not create a life of significance. We can’t make art this way. Art isn’t based on following the industrial model. Art is following your hunches and seeing where they take you.

Shortcuts: Shortcuts are great. I love shortcuts. When there is a faster way to fill out a TPS report, let’s do it. However, I had heard that the average time someone spends on the Utah Avalanche Center’s website to read a daily report is 8 seconds. We have developed the attention span of goldfish. Wanting the answers instantly. Don’t show me how to fish, just give it to me. How can we become experts in anything if we can’t hold our attention span long enough to read a book?

There is clear data that the use of smartphones is bringing down literacy scores across the globe. The problem is that most Americans were already reading at a 6th-grade level, and on average, college graduates read only one book a year. This is a serious problem. Our attention has been mined and hacked to the point where we cannot hold the suspense long enough to figure things out. Now, we are introducing AI. What is that going to do? It is obviously a fantastic tool that can synthesize all the information we have to get an exact answer to complex problems. But if we use it to create more convenience in our lives, we will miss a gold opportunity towards something better.

There is a boundary between self-reflection and external factors. If an oracle came down from the clouds and showed us how many of our problems could be fixed by our own hands, we would become eager to look in the mirror and ask what else could be changed?

Humans are emotional creatures and constantly get in their own way. If we reach out and try to fix this, but it still doesn’t work, something can still be done within ourselves.

And that is all we can do. That doesn’t mean it is easy. But it could be the best that can be done. Self-awareness can lead to better action–when the opportunity presents itself.