Life Is A Video Game (You Can't Escape The Matrix)

The Daily Grind

00:00I remember waking up at 3 a.m. before school so that I could play video games from Halo three to all of the call of duties to League of Legends. I was addicted, to say the least. Increasing my level in video games took priority over increasing my level in real life.

00:19But I would not change a thing about it. How else would I be able to create this YouTube video? Psychology, metaphysics, self-help, and modern business all point to life being a video game in a metaphorical sense. Of course, I'm not saying that there are a bunch of aliens that created a giant computer that is running this simulation, but it's quite similar as we'll come to find out.

00:40And I'm not completely closed off to that idea. Who actually knows? I mean, this is where you get into like conspiracy theory territory. I genuinely don't believe that there are aliens running our lives, but who knows? And I want to break down each perspective from psychology, metaphysics, self-help business, so that you can make progress towards your goals and fall in love with the process.

01:04Understand how to tap into optimal states of consciousness. Stop taking life so seriously and create your ideal future. Reinvent yourself or the character that plays the game of life and leverage your character to pursue your life's work and earn a meaningful income.

01:20A game is a structured flow of information. Life is information or information, and our quality of life depends on how we process that information. This will be in the next video called Mental Esthetics How to Build a Beautiful Mind. But to give you a sneak peek of what I mean as your body and your mind are very similar.

01:40Metaphorically or symbolically, where the information like you're overloaded with information because you don't have a fast enough mental metabolism to digest that information in the situation that you're in. And so throughout life, the things that you expose yourself, the chaos and novelty that you expose yourself to has to progressively overload with time so that you can handle more difficult and stressful situations.

02:04When we push too far beyond our edge, too far into the unknown, there is too much stimulus. We can't metabolize the experience. Information builds up and creates anxiety and overwhelm. When we shy too far away from our edge, too far into the unknown, there is little novelty that makes life worth living.

02:20Our mind is not stimulated. Information is easy to digest, and we become bored. The conscious mind can process 50 bits of information per second. The unconscious mind can manage 11 million bits of information per second. So as we become more efficient at processing information with the 50 bits available to us.

02:37And what I mean by efficient is that we start our unconscious or subconscious becomes trained to automatically process specific information. So that frees up room to process new information or novel things or new potentials so that you can change your life.

02:52And when you do this, you free up that conscious attention so that you can invest your attention in what you deem meaningful. In video games, you have a map. The light of awareness reveals where you have been and what you have experienced. This knowledge allows you to make better decisions in the future.

03:07The darkness of the map is the unknown, and you wouldn't launch yourself too far from the known. You must slowly puncture the unknown, let the experience normalize through skill acquisition and emotional management and press forward. One purpose of life is to raise your consciousness, and this is only possible by living at your edge, embracing the story of life, the highs, lows, successes, and catastrophic failures.

03:30The most miserable place you can be is in the middle. Before we dive deeper, I have an announcement. I am running the last solopreneur sprints simply because I have other projects coming up. The Sprint cohort style thing is going to move over to the software business that I'm building.

03:45The book launch is it got pushed back and so I'm running the solopreneur sprint. Long story short, if you're interested in creating your niche of one, building a name for yourself and creating profitable career and business opportunities by writing about your interests online and building leverage a one person business, everything that we talk about here, what I see as a great route for people to take to discover and pursue their life's work.

04:07Then check out solopreneur sprints link in the description before enrollment closes. The first perspective we're going to talk about is psychology,

Psychology: How Video Games Make You Addicted To Progress

04:15the optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy or attention is invested in realistic goals and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order and awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else.

04:35That is a quote from the book Flow by Mihai at me. Mihai So that word flow, you've heard about it before, it is the optimal state of consciousness that all mystics ancient psychologists and almost everyone points to when they say, Oh, I feel absolutely amazing right now.

04:52I don't have any worries on my mind. I'm so focused at work. I'm so at one with nature, whatever it may be. It's where you are at, one with being or doing, or when they collapse into one when you are at one with the task. It's called auto telling activities.

05:07Auto meaning self telling, meaning goal, a self-contained goal. In this state, you lose self-consciousness and move through life without a worry in the world. It seems that the key to the good life is investing attention in what we deem meaningful.

05:21But what you deem meaningful is found by investing attention and what you eliminate as meaningless. This process of trial and error, high and low focus and distraction is the natural balance that keeps life enjoyable. But if you get stuck in a low, chaos ensues.

Psychic Entropy

05:35So we need to understand the concept of psychic entropy, because ordered consciousness is what creates degrees of the flow state. To order consciousness is to focus your attention on something external or internal. It can be external like a conversation or task, or it can be internal, like a thought or an emotion.

05:51Both have their benefits and they change the way the brain operates. So there's a test positive network in psychology and the default mode network in psychology and a few other networks that all vary depending on how you're focusing your attention, whether it's an open state of focus or a narrow state of focus.

06:07And I have this concept I call the focus matrix. So I'll throw a graphic up on the screen, but there's unconscious narrow focus, which is like stressed, anxious, reactive, annoyed, unconscious, open focus, which is lost, uncertain, overwhelmed or lack of clarity, conscious, narrow focus, efficient task oriented flow state.

06:24The deep work, conscious, open focus which is present, creative, relaxed or joyful. And so just by understanding this, you can identify where your focus is, how you feel and start to move within the matrix to where you want to feel. If you have some work to do, then you need to narrow your focus on a specific task and use tools to do that.

06:45That's why productivity hacks are so useful is because it's like, okay, set a timer that narrows your mind. Have a goal, create a priority task, break it down into actionable steps. Know what you're doing, narrows your mind even further. Some people can throw in headphones, They put on a hat, they close all the blinds, they do whatever.

07:02That just narrows everything in so that you can you can get into this deep flow state. When we lose focus to a distraction, we increase the chances of psychic entropy. So entropy is that everything tends toward disorder. Psychic entropy is that your mind tends toward disorder, if not focused, or if your mental system is not maintained.

07:22If that ordering consciousness is not maintained through conscious effort or energy. So when we give life or attention to something like a negative thought that creates this puncture in our system or our frame of reference or our focus, and it allows a bunch of negative thoughts to come in, like if you were to imagine you're in a plane and they open the door and everything just gets sucked out.

07:45But imagine it getting sucked out or in to your mind, we can reverse this entropy or create order by something that I talk about doing all the time. This is very practical, where it's just creating the habit of zooming out, gaining clarity and zooming back in.

08:00So when you focus on a negative thought, your mind narrows in on it. It starts to close off. You start to forget about that. Everything is just fine because you're not zoomed out. You're focused on the negative thoughts, and then it starts to multiply and your focus just bounces between them all like a pinball until you realize that.

08:19And then you zoom out, you gain clarity, you think long term, you think about your vision, you think about your goals, you think about everything that's happened to the day you deconstruct the situation, and then you pull from all of that to create clarity and come back into whatever it is you were doing.

Video Games Order Consciousness

08:33And now we have to understand that video games order consciousness and there are things that we can learn from them. The lessons that we learn from video games can be used to enhance our skill, acquisition, learning and self-confidence. Because when you first start playing a game, you have no idea what you're doing.

08:48You go through a tutorial so you aren't exposed to everything at once. You practice at level one. Until that level becomes boring, you are introduced to more skills, traits and abilities to practice with. You progressively overload the challenge you take on until you decide to start playing the game.

09:03There must be a skill challenge match in order to maintain order and consciousness. So here's a graphic I've shown before. On the left you have the challenge level. On the bottom you have the skill level, the top. If you take on a challenge that is too high for you, you get anxious or self-conscious.

09:18If you take on a task that is too low for you, then you get bored or self-centered. And so you must maintain this balance of flow or selflessness in the middle because you start playing a game by learning the rules first. A game represents any situation in life, especially the ones where you lack confidence and can't see yourself winning.

09:36Then you practice the mechanics of the game. There are a series of steps requests that provide education and practice in unison. Remember this when you approach anything new or if you get bored with your current endeavor. If you are faced with a large challenge, then you need to step back, learn and practice at your level.

09:54If you are bored with your current level of challenge, you need to expose yourself to the education of the next level. You need to slowly start to step into the unknown. You need to practice new skills and enjoy the neurochemical cocktail with a double of dopamine as you transcend into the next phase of your life.

10:10So that was the psychological perspective. But let's talk about the metaphysical perspective or how we live in a survival based simulation.

Metaphysics: We Live In A Survival Based Simulation

10:17If you play a video game on your computer, such as Doom or Uncharted, you see compelling 3D worlds and 3D objects. Yet the information is entirely 2D limited by the number of pixels on the screen. The same is true when you look away from your computer to the world around you.

10:31It too has pixels and all information is 2D. That's a quote from Donald Hoffman in his book The Case Against Reality. So Donald Hoffman is a cognitive psychologist and author of the book I just mentioned. So in the book, in the various podcasts that I've listened to, he argues that human perception is a user interface to survive in this world and that this user interface hides the true nature of reality.

10:55Because if we saw the truth, we wouldn't survive because through simulations that have been done, natural selection does not favor those that see the truth or the ones that see reality as it is. And this aligns with psychedelic enthusiasts like Terence McKenna, who say that language is virtual reality.

11:12Perception is a closed system and psychedelics allow you to see beyond our fitness based perceptions. Hoffman also argues that space time is a visualization tool, or that space and time are compression algorithms. They are the operating system of the user interface.

11:26So think of a desktop screen. Subjective reality is like a screen that has been programed to help us see what we need to see and do what we need to do. Every material object is like an icon on the screen that you can move around and play with and possibly delete or lose.

11:42And the screen is it's pretty, it's esthetic. It has properties and qualities, and we should take them seriously, but not literally, as he says. And on the screen, you can click around and perform specific tasks that result in a desired outcome.

11:57These desired outcomes he calls fitness payoffs. And these payoffs are like points in a video game. Through trial and error, we learn how to win and how to evolve. And by winning, your offspring goes to the next level. In real world simulations, the organisms that saw the truth of reality went extinct, like an ant trying to have sex with a glass bottle because it didn't have the perceptions or the survival instinct to meet with another ant.

12:24Its perceptions were distorted and it's also very interesting that different organisms have different perceptions where like a frog can see a completely different range of color than humans can. And so everyone thinks that they're seeing the truth, but in reality it's like we're all playing a game of Grand Theft Auto.

12:40When we look at our computers and consoles that run these programs, they are packaged up nicely. We don't see the wires and diodes that transfer information to create what is on the screen. And even if we did see a window serve our survival, we wouldn't understand it and wouldn't be able to do anything with the jumble of electronics, even further.

12:57We can't comprehend the code that is running the game, and we can draw connections between Hoffmann's theory of this simulation or user interface and things like Nonlocality infinite consciousness in mentalism, idealism, Hinduism, Buddhism.

13:10You can really pull connections between anything, but those are the main ones where to me this feels more right than most other theories of everything. The thing here is, if you were to remove this user interface or human perception with a tool like psychedelics, you would eventually go insane.

13:28And I'm not saying that insane is bad necessarily. Maybe that's the truest thing there is. Maybe that's ultimate reality. Maybe that's ego death. But like when you're trying to operate within the real world or in this survival game, that's not going to serve you very much.

13:42And you're probably going to die sooner than later because you just won't be able to survive. You won't have that instinct. And there is a reason why people aren't on psychedelics 24 hours, seven days a week. We aren't at that phase of evolution yet.

13:55And as I mentioned earlier, with the mental bodybuilding or your your mind not being able to digest that much chaotic information or make sense of it because how infinitely complex consciousness is in and of itself, if we were exposed to all of that, that's like, Man, how would you even put it?

14:12That's like trying to physically eat the universe. That's impossible. That does not mean that you can't understand or have that awareness or have that grounding in it so that you can make better decisions with your life and live in more meaningful life.

14:26And I like to think of this as the mind being a vessel where the human mind is a vessel and reality flows through it. So you think of a projector, the light that the projector emits is consciousness and the film is your mind. The light shines on the film and displays a spectrum of the experiences that humans have.

14:45It frames our perception. The film is our perception. That's the user interface that we're operating within.

Self-Help: How To Reinvent Yourself (Your Character)

14:51So the third and more practical perspective for life being a video game is the self-help perspective. Life is a game that gold acquire skills, gain experience, unlock new levels, and eventually get to a point where you have the resources to do whatever you want when you're operating.

15:06Frame is focused on the process that will actualize your future. Your focus is impenetrable and you live in a world of your own design. The difference between a video game in real life is virtual risk versus real risk. The sameness between a video game in real life is learning practice and becoming a dopamine junkie video games have tutorials, professions, quests and an unknown to explore.

15:27Real life has childhood, career paths, responsibilities and potentials that you are unaware of. But once discovered, can drastically change how you think, act and work. Once you understand the significance of the patterns illustrated between video games and life, you can begin to correct your behavior in a way that is conducive to your future.

15:44No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it. Albert Einstein. To raise your consciousness, you must raise your level of mind. To raise your level of mind, you must open your perspective. To open your perspective, you must identify problems, take on the challenge, acquire the skill, and receive the knowledge necessary to transcend your previous identity.

16:04With each level of mind, your identity must change the knowledge, skill, belief and experience you order in your mind as self determines the opportunities available to you. At level one, you have access to opportunities slightly above your level.

16:17The opportunities you can register in your awareness exist on a spectrum. As you level up, you still have access to all of the opportunities underneath you and those slightly above your skill. It is a massive disservice to your life to distract yourself and never see what you are capable of.

16:32We need to understand how to create our own games. If games have a desired outcome, winning a path to get their progression and habitual actions to take priority, then we can create games out of any situation in life. This universal principle of purpose, process and priority is the underlying framework of human behavior.

16:51If you don't have a goal, you don't have the vision. If you don't have a path, you don't have clarity. If you don't have a task, you don't have focus. Most of your problems in life can be solved by understanding and applying this principle to create a game, you need a hierarchy of goals that frames your attention.

17:05As an example, a ten year goal that allows your vision to blossom. Yearly goals, monthly goals, weekly goals, all of which are loosely held in the back of your mind. These should not be your master, but your guide. Only from there can you align your daily education and labor moving actions with them.

17:21You're overly focused on the negative parts of life because you haven't built positive responsibilities that demand your focus. The more attention you invest in your goals, the stronger their gravity becomes. And lastly, for the self-help perspective, we need to know that all change is behavior change.

17:38To change your life, you must change your actions to change your actions in the right direction. You need a plan. There isn't any other way. And if you don't create your own, someone will create a plan for you to stick to the plan. You need a system systems or organize behavior changes.

17:52To create a system, you must attack your goals, embrace the nature of trial and error, double down on your successes, and persist until success becomes the default state in each area of your life. Health, wealth, relationships, and happiness.

18:05If you have made it this far, congratulations. You made it past three perspectives Psychology, Metaphysics, and self-help. And now the most practical perspective I can give you is the business perspective or the new digital society.

Business: The New Digital Society

18:17Eventually, everybody will be in the creator economy. From Naval Ravikant, the world is shifting from corporate dominance to individual power. Thanks to technology, this is reflected in nature through the principle of division and unity. Everything divides and reunites over time.

18:33This is also social gaps in entropy, or that nothing is permanent. In the Renaissance era, the economy favored the multiday tension, the polymaths, the artists who refused to limit their abilities the thinkers, creators, designers, builders and individuals who took responsibility for their mental, physical and spiritual development In the digital renaissance we are going through.

18:52History is repeating itself. We can learn anything, do anything, and become anything. Thanks to the vast and rapid information expanding at our fingertips, the expansion of the mental plane of existence through the Internet has created a field of infinite potential.

19:05Communication is no longer local, commerce is no longer local friendships are no longer local society is no longer fragmented. The creator economy is virtual reality. Your personal brand is your character. Online business is the game and progression.

19:19Networking is how you build a powerful tribe. Purposeful products are how you make a living. The intrinsic philosophy you cultivate throughout your journey is the marketing firepower that attracts those like you. You are a part of the creator economy right now.

19:32The question is which side are you on? Are you engaging in the mutual benefit of value exchange product for money, or are you draining your attention, overloading your mind and wasting your creative ability by not producing anything in return for the value you are taking?

19:46Business is arguably the most spiritual endeavor you can take. Business is how you train your spirit. It is how you get better at contributing to humanity, something greater than you spirit. And of course, my favorite way of framing this is the one person business or just turning yourself into the business.

20:02So a graphic that you can screenshot, but we're going to go over each of these how goals turns into brand, how problems turn into content, how systems turn into product, how benefits turn into marketing. And a classic quote from Alan Watts that I love is that sensible people get paid for doing what they enjoy doing.

20:18First, let's talk about brand

Brand – You Are The Most Profitable Niche

20:20or that you are the most profitable niche. Your brand is your online avatar. Strong brands have vision, a big irrational goal that they are leading their followers toward the gravity of that goal and the energy displayed along with it is what attracts people to you.

20:32Your brand is your highest version. It is who you are becoming. It is your guiding light toward a better future that allows you to align your actions with goals through a tangible vessel that others can benefit massively. Your job is to display who you are in your profile, picture, images, bio and website.

20:47Your style shapes your design and your vision shapes your bio. Your goals Shape the content, product and marketing you create under your brand hierarchy. The second thing is content or lessons learned.

Content – Lessons Learned Completing Quests

20:59Completing quests. Your content is the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, opinions, lessons and advice you acquire as you pursue your challenging hierarchy of goals. Do you see the power in this writing has changed my life. It has brought self-awareness, self understanding and the ability to organize my thoughts or order consciousness to make life more enjoyable.

21:18This is the driving factor of why I created my course. Two hour writer to teach you what is arguably the most valuable skill, high impact writing, and something that will never go out of style, even with the emergence of AI because you don't need fancy content frameworks and templates.

21:32These help, of course, but the best content doesn't come from these. The best content comes from energy transfer. As you acquire knowledge and skills through your education and your learning and just experiencing life, there are going to be things that register in your awareness more than others, the things that cause excitement or increase dopamine, the novel ideas, the things that you see useful viewing from the lens of your vision.

21:55If you don't have a vision, you can't do this. You need a vision or a goal in an active problem that you are solving. So you can filter good information from bad. And when you do find the good information, you feel it and you note it down and then you share it with other people online and not alone, since it causes excitement in you, it's going to cause excitement in other people.

22:13If you get that content spread and know how to grow. And it's that simple, that's how you attract a like minded tribe.

Product – Systems For Behavior Change

22:19So after brand and content, you need a product or systems for behavior change because the best products spark positive behavior change. Behavior change is reflected in the internal markets of business, health, wealth, relationships and happiness.

22:32So write to yourself. Build for yourself and sell to yourself. Create a product or service out of the knowledge and skills you've acquired on your journey. Something that you would have wanted or something that would truly benefit your life.

22:43Right now, there are individuals in the creator economy that sell literally everything from courses to software to cotton pants because they're afraid of the chemicals in the polyester pants and blue light glasses, planters, coaching, kitchenware, shoes, anything, just a product or service that people actually need in their everyday life.

23:02That is the thing here is how are you going to make people healthier, happier, wiser or wealthier with the knowledge that you gain by pursuing your goals and figuring it out for yourself? And people will object here and tell you to start a real business.

23:15What they mean is I am fabricating problems that don't benefit humanity. Don't start a business around real problems that will raise the collective consciousness. People who have a poor relationship with money will think that marketing and sales are evil.

23:26They don't understand that the exchange of goods is human nature. It's been around forever and that means something. Money is neutral until you put it in the hands of good or evil. Consistent progression toward your conscious goals ensures that you lean toward good.

23:40When you solve your own problems and sell the solution, you can guarantee that those problems exist on the cosmic scale and rest well knowing that you're making a difference. The last is marketing because you need a brand to build leverage and a readership you content to also nurture and build that and you need a product to monetize.

23:57But then you can't monetize

Marketing – Cultivating An Intrinsic Philosophy

23:59if you don't know how to market or promote yourself. So it is wise to study marketing and sales, see either of my $1 million skill stock videos, they are evergreen skills backed with psychological and metaphysical principles of value exchange.

24:11Of course, there are tainted aspects of those skills. People who lack moral development will use them for evil. But like money, these skills are neutral until wielded. So invest in education around these, but do so to note patterns and principles that shape your articulation and persuasive ability.

24:28From there, use an intrinsic philosophy that you cultivate while you're playing the game. Goals imply problems and problems and play struggle. You will struggle on this journey, but the lessons learned are what increase your level of mind. The reasons or whys behind your pursuit is how you promote the product you create to the people you've attracted.

24:45Why did you start training in the gym or fixing your health? Why did you improve your relationships and social life? Why did you increase your wealth through business skill and professional pursuits? The why is what creates emotion in your readers.

24:56From there, you can learn tactics to test on your business, to increase revenue, but don't lose your soul in the process. That's it for this one of my friends. Life is a game. And of course, solopreneur sprints. The last one is running and enrollment will be closing soon.

25:11So check out LinkedIn description for that. If you want to build your brand really with what we talked about in that last section of this, which is build a brand, learn to write content, learn to create a product, learn to market it and aside from that, there's two are writer and digital economics, both courses with high value skills that you can learn free stuff.

25:28Check out the links in description. Thanks by.