20-24: games and meaning

Even when I was a child, I never enjoyed playing the game LIFE: something always bothered me about its adherence to children and paper money as final arbiters of worth. But more disturbingly to my self, I was never able to propose an alternate set of rules which were clearly superior:

No, we should decide who wins depending on which plastic car had the most fulfilling life.

Fast forward a decade or so and I still struggle with this question. I now realize that everybody plays games in life and that in the final tally, everyone marks their own scorecard. Even though the rules are still arbitrary, how do you play a game if you’re ultimately scoring yourself? In other words, we’re all betting our lives on something, on some rulebook and brightly flashing scoreboard. Every meaningful argument has related to the games we play: when you invest in a structure for your life over the span of decades, the cost of dismantling that structure is your ego.

Time forces us to choose our game early. The only way to not play is to become an object, catatonic in the extreme. Even the act of inactivity is a decisive choice. Some build their self-esteem or score by becoming the finest skydiver or best father. Others choose to invest in music or society. Even in religion, where ostensibly the reins are in other hands, one still keeps score of one’s spirit. Buddhism is keeping tally at how well one refuses to keep tally. In my case, I’ve chosen to pursue personal growth or self-discovery: treating the mind, the soul, and the psyche as works of art, points as masterfully placed experiences, gameplay as boundaries of thought.
This begs the question of Platonic idealism. Surely, we scream, there must be some ultimate; some final objective view; some way of judging:

What I want most in life is not to win but to know how I’m being scored.

This brings us to meaning. While everyone has games and ego, only the truly exceptional have meaning. Meaning, to me, is the existence and discovery (ultimately synonymous!) of a way to transcend the score, the spectators, the game. (No, for the record, I’m not satisfied with this definition.) Perhaps truly caring about others’ scores is Nirvana. I don’t know. Try asking your local priest or poet: they’ll give you something, at the very least.

What I’m ultimately hedging on is my game as the fastest one to find meaning. To me, if one must solely choose one object to foster, idealize, obsess over, shouldn’t it be the mind? The mind is ultimately where new discoveries are made. I may not know much, but I am at least certain that the old is not working. So I guess for now, meaningful means stick to the game faithfully and beautifully with higher hopes than what is practically necessary.
I do need to come clean at this point. In really looking back at my childhood games of LIFE, perhaps I am idealizing my experience. I do remember that, for some reason of fate (or my cousins cheating), I always ended up as the goddamn garbage collector. I hate losing.