Winners and Losers

Illustration by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

We live in a society that has become increasingly transactional, functioning almost exclusively under a quid pro quo sensibility. Tit for tat and this for that. One for me and one for you. All for one and all for me—and so on. 

At a certain age, a person starts becoming reflective about their life, about who they are and what they’ve done and what they’ll leave behind. This is a bit of a complicated question in an increasingly transactional world. The impact of a life is not evaluated as a simple zero-sum game.

Players compete for finite resources in a zero-sum game—one person’s win is always another competitor’s loss. Chess, poker, and Risk are examples of this type of transactional competition. Other than winning, there is no gain, no growth in the gaming process that benefits anyone but the winner. There’s nothing more than the game itself. At the end, it is winner take all—whatever the gamers started with. 

A human life is more than a zero-sum game, a win-lose situation, although that is definitely part of the equation. There’s no beating the house. At the end of our lives, there is only one winner and he—if it is a “he”—never loses. It’s a rigged game. How and where and when we spend our time on the planet is of little consequence to the house; they know they’ll get their ante back in the end, but it is great consequence to all of us.

How, when, and where we spend the years we do have might not matter to the house, but it is of great consequence to ourselves and others, although there are those who waltz through life as if they had all the time in the world. They fritter their time away as if they were lying in a sun-drenched field and pulling petals from a daisy

When we’re born, we have all our lives in front of us, a wonderful gift that must be returned at the end of the game. During this time, we can choose a myriad of paths. We might choose to explore the wide, wide world, or we might choose to stay close to home. We might choose to chase the dollar and spend of lives making and hoarding money, or we can choose to share our time and resources with our less fortunate neighbors. We can revel in the simple beauties and pleasures of the natural world, or we can accumulate mountains of goods (which we must sometimes have to store in rental spaces). We can live inside the dark cloak of fear and hide from our demons and nightmares, or we can bravely face the adversity that is always, always part of the game. The choices facing us as are myriad and not necessarily exclusive. The game is not played on a black-and-white board. It is multi-dimensional chess.

We have it all at the beginning. Energy, enthusiasm, wonder, optimism, and the thrill of discovery rule our existence, but then, as the clock keeps ticking, we lose more of these qualities to the mills of time. We slow down, we become jaded, we get tired, and we get bored. We distract ourselves, we amuse ourselves, and we fool ourselves, and—before we know it—time’s up.

There is no earned benefit in a zero-sum-game, just gain or loss, but in the game we’re all playing right now, there is a residue, leftovers built up from our experience and life’s work. We don’t lose everything—not completely. Part of us is left and given to the loved ones we leave behind or maybe even to the world at large. Whether that residue of our lives is negative or positive or neutral is largely dependent on how our lives were spent. 

Dolly Parton left behind her Imagination Library, giving millions of children the chance at a better life—along with her many, many other gifts. Abraham Lincoln left behind his legacy of freedom and racial equality, having abolished slavery from this country. 

Conversely, Joseph Stalin left behind death, pain, and suffering almost too monumental to comprehend. Adolf Hitler left us with the chilling realization that under the right circumstances, a logical, civilized, and moral people can be swayed to tolerate and commit the most heinous acts imaginable. 

They lived and they died. That’s the zero-sum-game. They came from oblivion and—as far as we know—returned there. Their chosen legacy is what they left the world, the legacy that will stay with future generations for years, or, in some cases, forever. And so this begs the question. What did we give during our life? What did we take away?

This is the marrow of self-reflection. The question of what sore of world we leave our progeny is the one concern that should hang over all others. A person may have accumulated more money than God, but what use is that to her on her deathbed? Conquering continents and kingdoms may bring power and glory, but what use is that as you breathe your last? 

Raising a family may seem one of the humblest of accomplishments but leaving behind a generation that shares solid values of responsibility, hard work, courage, and self-sufficiency leaves a greater and more positive mark than a name emblazoned in three-foot gold letters on a skyscraper—particularly if that name signifies greed, cruelty, corruption, and mendacity. That is a statue that will surely be pulled down someday, a name that begs to be sponged away. 

The greatest mark we can leave behind is our work toward the betterment of the human condition. Doctors, teachers, first responders, servers, nurses, scholars, social workers, and engineers who work to save or enrich lives are the ones winning the game, not those who scrabble, scrape, steal, bully, and coerce others are far richer than the billionaires who sold their soul for yet another scrap of gold.

The Trumps, the Bezos, the Musks, and the Ulines of this world will enjoy their transient gains and passing victories, but when their time is up, their fortunes will mean little or nothing to prosperity. Their names—even if they are attached to a building—will mean next to nothing to the next generation. 

Who remembers Cornelius Vanderbilt (other than as a trivia question concerning Cooper Anderson) or John Rockefeller or J.P. Morgan? Yes, they were rich, they were at the top of their game, but ask any schoolchild who they are, and you’ll get a blank stare. Ask about Dr. King or Abraham Lincoln or Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela and you’ll get a different response. Not that recognition was their goal. 

The quality of life enjoyed by American citizens was not improved by the avaricious millionaires, the Scrooges of our age. On the contrary one man (specifically our current president), has not only degraded the American standard of living, but he has also been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children and has sickened thousands more. 

Our time here is short and memories of us will be even shorter. The paths we take and the good we do will follow us. Whether this good is exemplified by our family traditions and values or whether our daily work helps others, or whether we write the great American novel, or cure cancer, the goodwill we earned which will be disbursed when we are gone is the result of our determination to transcend the rules of the zero-sum game we all play—and that we all lose.