The problem with gamifying life
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Why times can differ in your player
Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.
New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. When we play a game, something kind of magical happens. The rules, the constraints, they give us the space to explore freely. Games create little worlds where we can be different versions of ourselves. But when life becomes a game, somehow all that magic is stripped away.
Everywhere you look, life is being scored. Your productivity, your fitness, your popularity, your status. There's a number for everything. And we spend so much time trying to boost those numbers that it's easy to forget what they were supposed to measure. in the first place, if we ever knew.
We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (49 minutes, 7,961 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.
No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.