The Game Is Rigged

​Our entire lives are spent looking toward the future. In high school, we tell ourselves that once we graduate, life will be better and we’ll finally be happy. In college, we tell ourselves the same thing. Then it’s our career: once we get the promotion, make more money, or retire, then life will be better, and then we’ll be happy.

We spend so much of our lives chasing happiness in the future that when we finally arrive, we discover it isn’t there. Each time that happens, we become a little more disappointed, a little more cynical, and a little more convinced that happiness is always just one more milestone away.

If you never recognize this pattern, you’ll eventually reach the end of your life, look back, and realize that every opportunity you had to be happy existed in moments you were too busy looking past. If you cannot find happiness today, you will not find it tomorrow. Tomorrow simply becomes another today that you refuse to live.

You—and only you—are creating the rules of the game you call life. When you feel like you’ve won or lost, it is because of the meaning you’ve assigned to those moments, not because life handed you a scorecard. Stop creating imaginary rules that only you are expected to follow.

Most people see life as if they’re standing in front of a slot machine. They pull the lever, hoping this time happiness will appear. Sometimes they win, but more often they lose. Eventually they begin to believe the game is rigged, that the universe is against them, or that life simply isn’t fair. They believe they have no control over the odds.

But they are looking at it backwards.

You are not the person playing the slot machine. You are the slot machine. You are the casino. You are the one who decides what counts as winning, what counts as losing, and what is worthy of joy. The rules you’ve been living by were written by you, which means they can be rewritten by you. The moment you stop postponing happiness for some imagined future, you realize it was never something you had to earn. It was available all along.

You are the Grand Master of your life, you hold all of the keys.