Intellectual Work

 Sometimes I have a real craving for intellectual work. Sometimes it seems like one of the core problems in my life has been searching for some kind of intellectual work that I could really feel happy with and at home in. Some kind of work that would be really satisfying and like fun at the same time.

Sometimes it seems like intellectual work is less about finding a field and more about having your brain in gear no matter what you are doing. Making a music playlist or teaching classes are both places where I have recently used my mind to do something productive.

But somehow I have something a bit more specific in mind. I feel like at times like these I often reach for chess or go because there are really specific concrete problems to solve. Those can be tactics problems for example. Or analyzing a commented master game. Or working on my opening repertoire. The point is the problems are very definite and most of the problems are discrete and solvable with a little elbow grease.

But sometimes it can seem like solving chess puzzles or like puzzles in video games is a bit pointless. Like what is the purpose of doing this? How does it fit into a larger plan or goal or objective?

I have already sketched out a solution to this problem across my various posts so far.

Basically it works like this:

1. Living life well is the ultimate goal. I want to feel successful. Success is a very complicated question that involves a lot of different aspects of life. In some ways I am successful in other ways I feel like I have barely begun to scratch the surface of what that might mean.
2. Life is a struggle, we are confronted by many problems in life and must struggle to create a meaningful life.
   
3. Life is too complicated to understand from a God's eye perspective. We need ways of making sense of it.
4. Metaphors are a way of making sense of it.
5. We pick the metaphors that work for us based on what we enjoy doing
6. The field that I have kept coming back to throughout my whole life is games. I have done a lot of stuff and investigated a lot of different pursuits. (With varying degrees of success). But the field that I have spent the most time in and that I keep coming back to is the world of games.
7. One of the core elements of games is problem solving.
8. We can use games as a metaphor for life. Life is the ultimate game. Obviously, being good at games is no guarantee of being good at life and vice versa. What I am talking about here is a conscious act of imagination / will to find parallels and to help make sense of these two realms by interpreting them in light of each other.
9. This parallel is a framework for solving problems. Games feel less trivial when interpreted this way and the possibilities of life feel less bewildering when they can be parsed in terms of smaller systems.
10. This is the ultimate intellectual work of the Great Game. Parsing problems in terms of this framework.
11. Life and games are made up of choices.
12. The choices we make are a reflection of our strategy.
13. Our strategies optimally take account of the situation we find ourselves in but also our desire to promote certain values.
14. Strategies are not set for all time but grow and change, sometimes gradually sometimes with sudden upheavals.
15. Strategies should be holistic. This means they should take account of all of the resources and tools available. They shouldn't be one dimensional.
16. But at the same time, a big part of making choices is narrowing down and being specific in order to create a coherent idea. 

 This endpoint is kind of why I feel like scope is a big problem for me. Sometimes I feel like I want to be hyper-specific and sometimes I really want variety. It's also a matter of my mood. Sometimes games feels like an impossibly small world and sometimes it seems like an impossibly large world. Lately I have been focusing on video games as a world that has a great deal of variety but also some limits.

To be continued....