The goal of the infinite game is to keep playing.

There is no goal, no next chapter, no final level, no end credits.

The infinite game allures because it requires no evolution. It is, at its core, a call to maintain the game as is.

If all we have to do is not lose, then the means to sustain it can be flexible, impersonal, and unthoughtful.

We love infinite games.

I recently ran my first marathon—a grueling experience that left me with far more than just cramped quadriceps and a medal.

For three months, I ran 3 to 8 miles during the week, with Sundays reserved for steadily increasing long runs.

During these long runs, I often questioned why I chose such a time-demanding goal, especially when life already felt sufficiently full and erratic. Yet, I stuck with it, running each week. As time passed, I began to notice a few lessons that applied beyond running.

The mindset required for marathon training mirrors the mentality needed to tackle many of life’s challenges.

These types of people are in some ways the inversion of the auto-critical. Instead of standards for success coming from within, their standards for success are only set based on comparing themselves to others.

To justify this, when threatened with competition, the natural defense mechanism is to pull down or pull back their competition with discouragement rather than progressing by their own merit. The gain becomes one of relativity.

Why worry about motivating yourself when you can close the competitive gap by disparaging others?

This is no argument in favor of complacency. Nor do I encourage anyone to aim for less than their best any given day.

It’s a call for perfectionists, optimization-addicted automatons, and the all-in-or-all-out types to take a breath.

Failing occasionally is natural. Allowing that failure to perpetuate across weeks, months, and years is only when it becomes detrimental.

Critics might argue it’s delusional to treat a life chapter with a defined end date as permanent.

I would argue it’s equally delusional to treat a life chapter with an undefined end date as such.

A year later, I’ve joined their digital ranks. While still a fledgling in the brigade in many ways, I’m beginning to understand where the source of this discontent may stem. It is where many nomads deviate from a path ripe with growth opportunities and instead ravage on into a limbo as meaningless as the one they fought to escape at their domestic desk jobs.

This is the existential, privileged, curious case of the disgruntled digital nomad.

Do not be deceived when the guidebooks tell you that the “Buenos Aires experience” is standing underneath its looming obelisk and attending a tango show, for the most authentic thing you can do in Buenos Aires is wait.

If we continue to let the tastes of others determine which experiences to try, then we are succumbing to a one-dimensional reality limited by the bias of someone else, akin to allowing the title of artwork to restrict our creative interpretation of it. Continuing to take reviews, recommendations, and titles like these at face value will, at best, achieve a life of experiences that other folks would enjoy more than we would.

The human body cannot properly function when in a constant state of food consumption. The brain, equally, cannot properly function when in a constant state of information consumption. This is known as cognitive obesity.