But really, who is the better player after 10 years? The person who keeps losing while playing the game in 'impossible mode' or the person who keeps winning whi

But really, who is the better player after 10 years? The person who keeps losing while playing the game in 'impossible mode' or the person who keeps winning while playing in 'easy mode'? Hard to say. I think they're both damaged, for lack of a better way to put it. The easy-mode player doesn't know what he's doing, but the impossible-mode player has developed a bunch of a heuristics that are probably counterproductive in a fair game. In a two-player competitive game, this wouldn't be such an issue, because facing more adversity (a tougher opponent) will make you a better player in a theater that is strictly and always competitive. This doesn't apply as well to real life because sometimes you need to cooperate and sometimes you need to compete, and most people who have come up under adversity (which is far from a rare condition) will end up over-competing. You see this in education, too. A lot of people think that Harvard Business School or Yale Law would be hyper-competitive environments. They're not, because it really doesn't matter if you get B's with that kind of brand-name school. The most competitive places are the ones in the midpack where some of the graduates will get good jobs but many won't. Harvard Business School is where people learn how to cooperate with douchebags, in the hope of being invited to join the douchebag class. Whereas graduates of, say, second-tier law schools make fantastic litigators but are never going to become biglaw partners because they don't have the social pedigree. The easy-mode winner learns how to make people like him, which is all it really takes in business, because reliable mediocrity is quite enough. The impossible-mode player becomes hyper-competent but will usually fail socially because he can't get anyone to follow him. He knows exactly how everything works, but his knowledge is fucking depressing. That might explain why a lot of what's currently happening in society comes across as ridiculous, nonsensical or hypocritical to the majority. Clown world. Absolutely. And we live in a world where becoming famous or an "influencer" is all most people care about. I'm a novelist, releasing a book next year. I also burned down my social media platform in 2016 out of an ill-advised protest. So it will be an outlier success if my book sells 5,000 copies in the first year, which is not all that much. (You certainly can't live on that.) Meanwhile, Kyle Fucking Rittenhouse, who has 400k+ Twitter followers, could get a seven-figure advance for ghost-written garbage. This is why you see kids doing those unsafe, stupid "challenges" on TikTok. They're not any stupider than we were at their age, but they've figured out that this is a world in which, if you don't have at least a national reputation, you might as well be dead.