I was 6 when I got my first PlayStation. I played until the TV was the only light in the room. My first game was a crappy Lego racer. Since then, I've probably played tens of thousands of hours.
I keep trying to understand why games feel so compelling while life and work feel dull, confusing, or empty. I thought AI and gamification would help. They do, a little. But games, apps, and tools still do not solve the bigger problem: alignment.
What challenge is worth choosing, how do I make it meaningful, and how do I build systems that help me keep walking the right path?
Alignment gets harder when life is full: work, kids, health, marriage, friends, family, and the routines that creep in when time shrinks.
Right now, the world keeps feeding me information, advice, and options. I absorb it, but little comes out. Even when AI tailors it to me, most of it is noise: more options, more advice, more people selling shit I do not need.
I am looking for high-quality signal: an idea, image, project, conversation, or moment that gives me energy and makes me feel alive. Alignment starts by separating that signal from chatter. Technology can help, but it cannot do the work for me.
1. The Emptiness of Video Games
The fun was real, especially in multiplayer games: OGame, Guild Wars, Halo, Gears of War. Some of my best childhood memories. I played deep into my 20s and 30s. Then League of Legends broke something for me. I would play for hours with a friend, finish four or five long games, and come out in a haze. Empty. Like I had achieved nothing.
After enough games, I started wondering: Why am I progressing in a virtual world instead of my own life?
The only answer was: I am wasting my time.
But games work. They are fun, clear, and responsive. I feel progress. I get feedback. And I want more.
I can't stay there though. Because real life always returns: bills, responsibilities, the world outside the screen.
2. Dull, boring, bland jobs
In many ways, jobs are the exact opposite of games. They are not meant to be fun. People suck at giving feedback. It's a miracle if, on a job, I'd know exactly what to do next (I spent a lot of my time being confused about the next best step and trying to figure it out).
Most jobs are boring. They involve tedious tasks, little reward, or complete overwhelm. I had a project manager job where I discovered automation. I automated a bunch of tedious and stressful task like sending automated onboarding emails or sending automated contracts. I was excited by the prospect of automating systems.
But eventually, I just wasn't passionate about the work. It was the definition of tedious and the people were fun but the culture was unhealthy at times, and I eventually felt apathetic and burnt out. I quit even though they gave me raises and were planning another one.
Work itself is only one layer of the problem. But when I am interacting with businesses, I also mostly feel the experience is crap. People do not design experiences customers actually enjoy using. They don't know how to. They don't care. They want their lives and business operations to be simpler while I still give them money.
So newer generations get stuck between a boring reality and a fun fantasy. As if that wasn't enough, the middle ground is gross as hell.
3. The Grossness of Modern Tech
Social media is the perfect in between. It's closer to reality. If I curate my timeline, I feel like I get exactly what I want. I get insights. I learn from interesting people. I scroll, and I scroll, and I scroll.
With games, I feel like I'm wasting my time but I'm having fun. With social media, I feel like I'm being productive even though it's often a complete waste of time. I've bookmarked hundreds of articles, videos, posts. I've had tabs that stayed open for months without me acting on anything. Most of them are guaranteed complete distractions from what I really need to do. Often I also convince myself it's for relaxation. But it's anything but relaxing.
It all eventually feels gross.
I feel like after eating McDonald's. My stomach is filled, but I am not full. I might do a regular day of work, and any little break I have, I fill it with Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, whatever I'm on. By the end of the day, all those minutes have been filled up by looking at a screen and consuming things that might be insightful. But still, I don't feel full. I feel gross. If I do that too many times and don't disconnect from a screen, from my phone, I feel really shit.
Social media companies are better at designing engagement than most businesses are at designing useful experiences. They highly optimized their apps to hook me in endless reward loops.
I feel like I am moving forward, but not in the right direction. Everyone offers me their best approach. I feel like I have 20 next steps that are supposed to be the right step. It's just a whirlwind of abundance and confusion.
But now, there is the mother of all tech. AI.
4. AI Raises the Ceiling
AI lets me build more than I could before. Wow, I can build websites in one pass. I can scrape hundreds of websites. I can personalize emails. I can build apps I only dreamed of years ago. I can build whatever I want.
But there is still a technical ceiling most people cannot cross on their own, especially if they are not software engineers.
But AI makes me insanely productive, right?
If I can spin up hundreds of agents and move fast in the wrong direction, what is the point?
It is the same pattern, only faster. I feel like I'm having enriching conversations. I feel like I'm moving forward super fast. I've never been that productive before. Much more than I was 2 years ago.
But what's the point if I still feel empty, even after a busy week chatting and building with AI. That is still the problem with AI: it lets me move in the wrong direction faster than before. I can also completely lose myself in random details because I don't know better about specific technical elements of what I'm building.
So I need to understand why I am building something. How does it align with my business, with my customers and with myself? It does sometimes give you the illusion it understands you and what you are trying to achieve. But often it only looks like it understands. It can seem to check all the boxes while missing the subtext, using the wrong context, or failing to read between the lines.
Still, AI is powerful. Recently, I used it to unearth signal in my past projects, memories, and history instead of asking it to generate more options. I'll come back to that near the end, because it's the first use of AI in a while that made me feel more oriented instead of more scattered.
5. Tech: The External Solution to an Internal Problem
Most technology is not designed around my alignment. It is designed around someone else's incentive, or to interrupt me to sell me something.
That does not make every app evil. But it means I should stop expecting a random tool to know what matters for me.
I can't blame anyone. It's hard to know what matters, what's worth suffering for, how I need to surpass myself and what the best next step is. I probably have no idea what it is, so why would they?
When I install a new app hoping it will solve my problem, I eventually meet the same wall: I still have to set a direction, change habits, and act again and again.
AI raises the ceiling. It does not solve the alignment problem. If anything, it makes the need for direction more urgent, because now I can move very quickly in the wrong direction.
It can expand the map. It cannot walk for me. So the next temptation is measurement. If a tool cannot tell me what matters, maybe numbers and metrics can surface insights.
6. A common pitfall: Gamify Life
Once I accept that technology cannot choose my direction, the obvious move is to make life measurable: steps, weight, sleep scores, heart rate, streaks, calories, screen time, work hours, tasks completed, money earned.
Measurement is not stupid. Metrics make vague effort visible, especially when I am drifting.
But a metric is not a compass. It can tell me what changed. It cannot tell me whether the change mattered.
My Fitbit can tell me I slept seven hours. It cannot tell me whether I woke up excited to live my actual life. A productivity app can tell me I finished twelve tasks. It cannot tell me whether those tasks were distracting me from my goals.
Measurement becomes a problem when I start treating it as alignment.
External metrics are only one kind of evidence. A lot of what helps you navigate life is felt: memories, people, places, projects, conversations, and hobbies that light you up when you recall them. If those signals already make you feel alive, why not identify a path that lets you do more of them?
The problem starts when I treat external metrics as the whole picture. They are superficial, and they show only part of your situation. I remember when I had my Fitbit tracker. I had it mostly to track my sleep. I read this book about how sleep is important. I wanted to know how much time I spent in each sleep phase. But it quickly became counterproductive. Especially when I would have a big day the next day. I felt sleeping well was contingent on having a great day. At night, I would experience so much anxiety and anger toward myself when I wouldn't go to bed at 10 pm. I swear it would prevent me from sleeping and make me even more anxious and angry. It was such a vicious circle. I remember being awake for hours because those emotions would keep me alert and self-conscious.
Some mornings I woke up feeling great. Then my tracker tells me, I slept poorly. Suddenly I feel like my day is already ruined even though it actually started great.
Shallow gamification goes wrong here. Points, badges, streaks, and leaderboards can create motion without meaning. They can make me feel like I am progressing while I am only becoming a slave to the metrics.
Feedback is useful until the scoreboard becomes the point.
Then I start optimizing what is easy to count, and the harder qualitative signals get quieter.
I do not want life to become a scoreboard. I want systems that help me consistently choose the correct challenges that matter to me.
You don't want to start thinking, "It's just numbers going up infinitely. Where is this going? Why am I playing this game?"
7. What makes us feel full
If points, leaderboards, and badges are not enough, what would leave me full?
The answer is not more ease. I do not want a life with no friction. I want the right challenge at the right difficulty: work that asks something of me, but does not break me; effort that leaves me tired, but alive.
AI can help me look, but I still have to do the noticing, experimenting, and choosing.
People do not want endless leisure. We need challenge. Challenge is what makes games fun, and it is part of what makes life meaningful. The harder question is which challenge fits this season of my life, at what difficulty, and in what dose.
In other words, what kind of effort leaves me full afterward?
Alignment is hard for technology to solve because most tools remix existing data and give me more of the same. They rarely help me invent a new direction.
So for AI, if I suck at copywriting, it'll help me create average or slightly above average copy. And it's great because it's better than bad copy.
But aligning the problems I tackle with my life, the job I take, the projects I do, and the hobbies I pursue is different. AI can help me think, but I still have to experiment, notice, choose, and do the work.
I need to reflect on myself, try a bunch of various jobs, roles and activities. I need to push myself without burning out, hurting myself, or injuries. It's a hard problem to solve, but one of the most meaningful.
The search for the right challenge is where transcendence, heroism, and game design start to matter. Signal tells me what feels alive, but the path might look absurd to my friends, my family, my coworkers, or even the version of myself that is scared to change. Following it means pushing through my own limiting beliefs and the limiting beliefs around me.
Transcendence is the work of going beyond the limits that currently define me. Heroism is the decision to start authoring my life even when the path is difficult, uncertain, or full of obstacles. Finding alignment does not make life easy. It starts a quest worth taking seriously.
8. Transcendence
Some limits feel impossible because I cannot yet understand who I would be on the other side of them. Who am I capable of becoming as a father, a husband, a founder, a friend, or a person responsible for harder work?
We constantly bump against internal or external limits:
- physical
- psychological
- emotional
- social
- societal
- vocational
- self-imposed
- identity-based
The alternative is bleak: tolerate mediocre work for most of my life, exhaust myself, and try to recover in retirement. Realize it was all pointless and die of inactivity and regrets? I need to use my muscles, my brain, to tackle challenges of increasing difficulty.
Some limits feel impossible to overcome and that's when I use the word transcendence. My brain can't comprehend what's on the other side of the limit.
9. Heroism
Heroism is the decision to act anyway: consistent, voluntary, meaningful effort that shapes my story instead of letting inertia write it for me.
Being reactive won't work here. I need proactive action to surpass the limits I feel impossible to surpass. It gives the struggle meaning.
I do not discover myself only by looking inward. I discover myself by meeting reality and noticing which challenges make me more alive.
10. Self-Determination Theory Means Better Games
Once I have a direction and a clear assessment, how does this become engaging? How do we make this fun? What's the strategy?
We already established that external reward can be good for an initial boost but it quickly turns into addiction, harmful consequences or complete disengagement.
Self-Determination Theory, developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, is one useful lens here. It argues that people are more likely to sustain motivation and well-being when three basic psychological needs are supported: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
- autonomy: I choose this.
- competence: I am getting better.
- relatedness: I am not alone.
SDT does not explain everything about engagement, but it gives me a better test than points, badges, streaks, or leaderboards: does this system help me choose, improve, and feel connected?
I still need to measure how I am doing on those dimensions. But it doesn't mean it has to be points, rewards, leaderboard, streaks, etc. Any system we create should support those dimensions in daily life, family, and work.
11. The Solution: Tech and Systems That Help You Be More Yourself
So the design principle should be simple: help me find and follow signal, instead of making life more addictive, data-filled, or optimized.
Better technology would help me identify what has made me feel alive in the past, what makes me feel alive now, and what thread is worth following next. It would not simply serve me more of the same. If I listen to the same band on repeat until it goes stale, or talk about the same subject until I need to go deeper or wider, good technology would notice that shift. It would help me keep pursuing the signal as it changes: the people, projects, ideas, memories, conversations, places, and challenges that make me feel more alive and align with my life.
There is a core I can start to map:
- Traits and temperament
- History and formative experiences
- Strengths and limits
- What gives me energy
- What exhausts me
- What I am willing to suffer for
- What I keep choosing even when it is hard
A personality test is too small. I need better mirrors: systems that reveal patterns I miss and push me toward real experiments.
Being more myself means discovering stable traits, values, and strengths, then expanding them through meaningful challenges.
That is why school career tests and personality assessments always felt incomplete to me. They can point in a general direction, but they do not replace trying things in real life.
Usually I need to interview people, shadow them, try projects, notice what gives me energy, and see what actually fits my traits, my character, my family, my work, and my community.
The goal is to find activities that challenge me, fit my traits, my character and contribute to society (a business, my community, my city, my country, etc.)
Good systems should help with that loop: notice signal, choose a small real-world experiment, reflect on what happened, adjust, and move again.
I need challenges to reveal what works. Nothing better than real action to teach me more than a theory, measurement, or a framework that distorts reality.
Measurement, tests, and reflection help because they reduce the search space. They point me in a direction. Then I still need to take a step, and another, and another.
12. Build Systems That Help Us Embrace Life
The world is getting better at giving me more of everything except direction.
More content. More tools. More speed. More options. More ways to become impressive at things I do not actually care about.
We waste time, attention, energy, creativity, and care.
Better systems should not squeeze more productivity out of people. They should help people find work, projects, relationships, and challenges that resonate deeply enough for them to bring real energy and genuine excitement.
I am sharing this because I am sick of wasting my time playing video games or scrolling online meaninglessly. I am sick of watching other people do the same. I hate that so much technology is built to hack people's attention instead of helping them change their lives. Our focus should be to help them build a great life.
So the first move is small: audit the signal.
This is the first step. Ultimately, I want to find out whether there is a framework here that works more than once: a way to build systems, with technology or without it, that help people find paths toward alignment.
For now, try this: point AI at your archives and current projects. Ask it to list everything it can find that you have done, mark assumptions and missing context, then talk with it. Fill the holes. Ask for the through-lines.
The goal is not for AI to tell you your purpose. It cannot do that. The goal is to use it as a mirror for the evidence of your own life: the projects, people, places, and moments that made you feel alive.
Then test it. Write about what emerges. Talk about it with your spouse, kids, therapist, friend, or someone at work. Put the ideas on your site if that makes them real. Choose one tiny experiment.
I'll want to push this further, it could take a few different forms:
- Games that provoke insight instead of only engagement
- Business consulting that helps teams build more aligned and engaging operations
- User experience work that makes important journeys feel clearer, more human, and more energizing
- Coaching or programs that help people understand their traits, strengths, limits, and sources of energy
- Education that helps people upskill and orient their lives in a direction that fits them
- Funds or support structures that help people act on projects that are deeply aligned with them
I do not know which form is right yet. But I know the direction: build systems that help people separate signal from noise, find what makes them alive, and act.
It might be hard. It might be chill. Who knows. Either way, take a step.
If this resonates, especially if you work on games, coaching, education, UX, business systems, or signal-finding technology, please reach out.