How Not To Lose at LEGOs
We’re killing ourselves trying to win at games that aren’t real and have no stakes.
My five-year-old nephew, Connor, once fled in tiny adorable anger from our little pile of LEGOs into his room and slammed the door. His mom went to check on him. Why was he angry? He believed he’d lost at LEGOs. He and I had just moments ago sat down to build with them, but it seemed there was some kind of game he thought we were playing that I had won and he had lost, and now he was crying and throwing things around his room, poor little guy.
There was no game, of course, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t upset. His pain was real even if the basis wasn’t. I suspect a lot of us regularly get upset over losing at games that exist only in our heads, including, perhaps, the game of life in general. I know I do.
Connor’s little tantrum has stuck with my wife and I and we now use the phrase ‘losing at LEGOs’ to refer to any kind of frustration over losing at a game that aren’t real. Naming things is powerful — we struggle to be aware of nameless things, but once we can label them we can see them as distinct.
There are so many ways to lose at LEGOs, it turns out. Most things in life have no real stakes and so we shouldn’t try to ‘win’ at them, since there is nothing to win and nothing to lose! We’re programmed to think of life as having all kinds of…
