We're All Auditioning for a Game Show We Never Signed Up For

Most of us are living our lives like we're auditioning for a game show that we didn't even sign up for. Every single day we wake up, we spin their little wheel, we follow the rules, and we hope that this time the universe rewards us with something. Maybe it'll be a car, but maybe it'll just be a less disappointing Tuesday. The game we're playing is rigged, and we all know it. The rules are designed to keep us exactly where we are, spinning those same little wheels and chasing prizes that are completely out of reach, or they are things that we wouldn't have even wanted in the first place. You did everything right. You went to school, you got the degree, you took the job, and you smiled at Susan during the holiday party. You even followed all of the advice to a tee, and yet here you are Googling "Why isn't my life going anywhere?" You know what, that's not your fault. The reality is the rules we live by are completely made up. They're arbitrary. They're like having a dress code for a zoom call. I'm at home. Why do I need that? I find that restrictive, and do you know what? The people who made that rule wouldn't know how to unmute themselves on the call anyway. So why do I have to listen to them? The rules aren't just holding us back. They're draining us. They're making us think that we're crazy. That we're the problem. When in reality, the problem is the system itself. And you know that there are some obvious rules. Some that we should probably follow. There are things like don't steal. Fine. Don't be a jerk. Don't cut in front of a kid in line at Disney World unless your goal is to make them cry. But there are also rules that are unspoken that we're still expected to follow and believe are true. There's rules like hard work will make you succeed. That's a classic. It's on every single motivational poster in every break room across the world. But hard work is not a guarantee for success. If it were, then you know how the world would work. It would be the teachers, the nurses, the single moms working to jobs who would all be making seven figures and running the fortune 500 companies. But that's not how it's going. It's some kid in his basement who invented an NFT, who's selling a cartoon monkey, that's laughing his way to the bank. That means that hard work has absolutely nothing to do with it. And it's not even just work either. It's everything. We're told that we should stay in our lanes. Like the lanes we've been assigned are actually headed anywhere. We're told to be more realistic as if being realistic ever inspired anybody to do anything extraordinary. And we're told that we can be whatever we want if we just pick ourselves up by our bootstraps. But that's fine if you have boots. But what if you don't. Or what if somebody stole your boots, sold them on marketplace and just left you a comment saying you need to work harder. At this point it is starting to feel like the rules were supposed to follow are just urban legends passed down from generation to generation. Back in the day it was the Boomers who were told that you can just get a good job, by a house, and you will be set for life. And you know what? That kind of worked for them. They worked because back then you could actually afford to buy a house and support a family on a single income. Back then the rules offered for the form of stability. They offered a comfortable life. But now, buying a house is so far from a reality for most young people that it just seems like a joke. The world has changed but the rules haven't. And then after Boomers came Gen X and the Millennials, and we were told that we could still pretty much have everything we wanted. We just needed to hustle a little bit harder and to grind every single day. And where did that get us? It made so many of the people that I know completely burnout. As an entire group, we started romanticizing the idea of self-care like it was a luxury. But self-care is not a luxury. It is a basic human need. The hustle culture promised us some form of freedom but it just turned into another trap and it's a trap that left us completely exhausted and most of us questioning whether any of it was actually worth it. And now we do have some new generations that are doing things differently. Generations that are starting to say "Screw the rules. If it's not going to work for me, I'm not going to play anymore. I'm just going to stream the whole thing live on Twitch." And you know what? I kind of respect it. At least they're not just suffering quietly. They're challenging the system. They're finding new ways to define what matters and finding ways to embrace who they are. And I think there is something that we could all learn from that. For too long, we've been sold this image of success. We're told that the things that we want are a big house, a fancy car, a job title that makes us sound more important than we actually are. But who is it that decided that? Why is it that success is always tied to money, status, or material things? For some people, success is just having a quiet life. For other people, success is creating something that they're passionate about or something that's meaningful and for some people, success is just eating an entire pizza without feeling like a failure. And let me tell you something, all of those things, a house, a quiet life, a pizza, those are all equally valid things. The problem is that we've let somebody else define what success is for us. So now, we end up feeling like failures when we don't want the things that were told were supposed to want. The rules don't work because they were designed for a world that doesn't even exist anymore. So if the rules aren't working for you, then you have absolutely every right to question them. Ask yourself, who does this rule actually serve? What happens if I don't follow it? What happens if I no longer play by the rules and most importantly, does this rule that I'm supposed to follow get me any closer to the life that I actually want to live? You need to stop asking yourself what the right way to do things is and to start asking yourself, what's the right way for me? And if that's scary, that's a good thing. Because the people who ultimately succeed, whatever success is for them, they aren't the ones who follow every rule. They're the ones who know when it's time to break them. We all know that the rules are made up. We know that the prizes are meaningless, and that the game is rigged. So why not just make your own rules? Decide what winning looks like for you. Be the one who steps off the broken escalator and makes their own path. Because in the end, the people who thrive aren't the ones who just play the game, they're the ones who change it.