I want to be good at things. Obviously I would like to be good at art and music and such in order to make good art and to make money to support myself – and, yes, there’s the darker aspect to it, that I described before, where sometimes we improve ourselves just so we can consider ourselves better than other people – but I also just have a need to be good, or to keep becoming better until I find out what good actually is. I want to be an expert. I want to be a pro. I think expertise might be a carrot that’s dangling from a stick that’s tied to the back of our heads, that keeps step with us no matter how fast we move forward – and yet, once you have it in your sights, it’s hard to back down.
I’m not sure where this need actually comes from. Perhaps it’s part of how we’re wired, a need to feel useful, a need to feel that we are contributing to something. Perhaps it’s part of our capitalistic culture, demanding that at any moment we prove our value, prove our worth as an asset. Or, I guess, maybe we just feel a need for a purpose, some sort of guiding premise to our lives, some sort of narrative thread, and being an expert in something seems like the most approachable way to manage that. I don’t know. Whatever.
So, for a certain period of time, a decade or so ago, video games were constructed as primarily a way to feed this need for expertise and mastery with empty calories. For a certain period of time, we decided that all games had to be fun, and that ‘fun’ meant that they made you feel like you were amazing. The standard format of the video game was a simple, easily learned and mastered challenge, presented with a layer of fiction that portrayed it as some amazing and rare skill. Most games are still like this to one degree or another – even a difficult game like Dark Souls is still much easier to complete than it would actually be, presumably, to go on a quest to beat the shit out of an aging deity.
I am very glad that video games aren’t made to this specification any more. If they were I probably wouldn’t be playing them, and possibly wouldn’t be making them. If I was still writing about them, my already-notably-grouchy writing would be far grouchier.
Once you know what empty calories taste like, in terms of expertise, it’s hard to be satisfied with them. You want to become actually good at something, which is much harder than just buying a machine to tell you you’re good at something. Perhaps the most difficult part is that, in order to improve at a skill, you have to accept that you have room for improvement. In order to learn, you must accept that you are not all-knowing. In other words, in order to obtain expertise, you must abandon the idea that you’re an expert.
This remains the case even if you are, in fact, an expert. This part of the process doesn’t change. As Socrates suggested, you must be wise enough to admit that you know nothing – at least, nothing relative to what there is to learn, which is an awful lot.
So we say humility is a virtue. There’s nothing wrong with being proud of what you’ve accomplished – actually, it’s also an important part of the process, because pride is what drives you to define a ‘better’ to strive towards – but being humble enough to know that you are imperfect and can still improve is necessary as well. Know that you can do things others cannot. Know that others can do that which you cannot.
If you refuse to do that, you are trapped, and will never find a place beyond the one you’re at right now.