We all know that there is a difference between work and play. If you had parents like mine, you probably heard, “It’s work, it isn’t supposed to be fun.” Sometime in the early 2000s, we started to change that, and now with the app-for-everything culture, it is inescapable.
Gamification is the process of adding elements of play to a task or process to drive engagement, such as scoring, competition, levelling, and rewards.
We have discovered that this method can help us overcome some of the hurdles of motivation, habit-forming, and consistency when it comes to tasks. Are you getting notifications from your watch to tell you how close you are to 10,000 steps? How about your writing tools telling you how many words you wrote this month and your accuracy rate, compared to other users? Even updates from your credit card on how much you spent this week and how your credit score changed, all in a nice graph. These are some examples of gamification that have crept into everyday life through the apps we use. Hell, I am not convinced most people would file their taxes if there wasn’t a progress bar telling them how close they were to the end. If you are paying attention, it is easy to see how this way of thinking has invaded the way we think about getting things done.
Reminders and goal-tracking are good things, right? I mean, wouldn’t you hate to only hit 9,788 steps today vs taking a lap to hit the goal? Writing more and more accurately than only 45% of other users is motivating to do better, right? Or, come on, I have told my audience not to ignore their everyday finances in at least 35% of my other articles. This has got to be a good thing. It is in the same way as training wheels are to help you ride a bike — great if you are learning, but they slow you down, limit freedom, and are indicative of a lack of mastery.
The sad reality is that the tools that we use slow down our processing speeds by outsourcing them. If winning the race is the only metric, then it makes sense to get bionic legs and forget training and conditioning. Winning isn’t the only metric, though. Thinking that it is, and outsourcing your ability, is exactly what will have you replaced by AI in the first wave. If you rely on these systems to do your job, the logical move is to have the systems do the job.
It is more than just tools and expertise; it is the actual drive to do anything. If we cannot summon the willpower to just do things without reminders, without scorecards, and without it feeling good and entertaining, we do not have the drive to continue as a species. Too much of life is made up of work to require positive incentives to get things done. Education, careers, relationships, citizenship, and simply existing require us to do things that we do not love or even want to do. The motivation to do them is not that they are enjoyable, but not doing these things with attention and care leads to much worse outcomes.
The ability to do the work that is not fun will be necessary in the rapidly approaching future that we are faced with. As tasks are getting easier to complete, reasoning, creativity, expertise, and human interaction will be needed to guide the systems and maintain any semblance of reality. We have to remember that every data point, every task, and every action has an element that begins and ends in our physical world. If we can’t acknowledge that, we could theoretically launch our entire economy into space in the form of a computer. It could continue to crunch theoretical numbers and generate theoretical results for theoretical problems, running experiments in the image of humans until the end of its existence. So keeping the meanings and impact of our work intact, beyond the scorecards, is the last hope we have.
For example, air traffic control is not simply a collection of tasks; it is a mission that has reason and ethos behind it that guides decisions. Sure, technology and all the trappings of gamification, like live data presentation, are useful, but that data cannot accurately attribute care, creativity, and feel the weight of all the lives they affect. If faced with a life and death situation, we can trust the system to attempt to minimize damage and costs, but the human would wrack their brain and very soul to avoid the situation altogether. Communication with pilots would be passionate, familiar, and empathetic as opposed to robotic orders. Should something happen, the humans would go home and replay the event over and over in their minds, assessing how it was handled and not why it happened in the first place. That is the human offering.
It starts small. Maybe just by acknowledging tasks that must be done and doing them. Cleaning the room, doing the taxes, picking up the phone to call that relative when you don’t want to, but know you should and don’t have any real reason not to, aside from the fact that you could be watching TV instead. The feeling of meaning grows from there, and before you know it, you are able to see the impact you have in your work, aside from just what your boss told you to do. You feel how important your participation can be if you look past the task and the meaningless game metrics fed to you by apps. You start to delete productivity apps altogether as you start to see productivity as impact instead of completed tasks. This can reframe your entire outlook on your life.
We were not put on this earth simply to enjoy it. The feeling of pleasure is the hardest feeling to hold onto, because it actually carries the least amount of meaning of all our motivators. Remembering a moment of pleasure in stark detail is so hard, because our brain cannot log that as a high-importance experience. Hunger, pain, loss, contribution, acceptance, love, shame, forgiveness, growth, belonging, and the weight of responsibility all imprint with lasting memory because they are the important bits. They are the things that our primal instincts seek out because they contribute to our survival as conscious individuals, culture, and as a species.
So stop trying to make the important things fun. They aren’t supposed to be. They are supposed to be meaningful. Pleasure is not your purpose, but doing things that contribute to the well-being of others and simply continuing on. If you are focused on those important things and why they actually matter, they aren’t hard to remember to do and do well. If you align yourself with the meaningful impact, happiness comes — or at least contentment. Contentment is where happiness is born. Realizing that things could stay this way and be enough. No regrets.