The STACK Game, A Metaphor For Life

One week ago I was sitting in bed searching for a way to mindlessly entertain myself. I was pretty tired and didn't have the strength to play a game on my computer so I decided to find one on my phone. After searching through the app store a little while I came across a game named STACK.

I played stacking games before and found them quite entertaining. The first reason I downloaded the game was because of the color scheme it had, elegant and simple. You start off with one color and as you continued stacking, the colors change. The nuances of the colors were beautiful and somewhat soothing.

As I sat in my bed, tapping on the screen to stack square plate after square plate, the music playing in the background made me feel like a Buddhist monk in some form of meditation. Again it had a very calming effect. I must admit I didn't play the game for hours or any chance I got, unable to stop, but I enjoyed the 15 minutes I had spent on it and it actually got me thinking about how this game resembles life. To explain how I got to this conclusion I must first explain the rules.

You start the game with an already stacked pile of square plates. The point of the game is to evenly place another plate that is floating above your stack, on top. If your margins do not perfectly align then the portion left out will be cut off and you will have a smaller piece on top of your pile. The game is over when your pieces get so small that it's almost impossible to place them one upon another.

The perk is that when you evenly stack eight pieces, the eight piece gets larger and so do the other ones stacked evenly upon that one until you reach the initial square size. Of course if you don't then your piece will be again cut off.  It's also cool than when you neatly drop the pieces, you get the "Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si, Do" notes, one for each piece.

Now that I explained the rules, there is one specific thing that I often stumbled upon that I want to talk about. Of course it's satisfying when you do manage to perfectly put one piece on top of the other but it's not that fun when a part of your plate gets cut off when you were about to place the eight perfectly stacked square and have it grow bigger. But why did I miss when I was about to make a perfect eight? And this kept happening. It was like the eight piece was cursed or hated me and wanted to torment me. We often come so close to success but somehow we fail miserably right at the end. Why is that?

Well psychologists have an explanation for that. To win at this game, or at any other thing in life you need to acquire a certain skill that through repetition becomes better and better. When you use a skill, like hand eye coordination in this case, over analyzing under pressure often leads to the disruption of the certain skill. Your brain is like a supercomputer that learns to do things semi automatically. Let's think about breathing. Breathing can pass from being an automatic reflex to a voluntary action when you concentrate upon it. That's almost the case with learned skills. When you do them enough times they become an automatic sort of reflex. This automatism lets you do the job better than if you would analyzed it.

When you start intensely focusing on something, while under pressure, you sort of overwrite the brains subconscious controls, bringing them to a conscious level. And that's when you screw it up. In this case you subconscious brain is better than you. I know it's not always the case, but this time you should trust it. I know I often come across this problem in my life. Many times I've been almost there but never reached the metaphorical podium.

Another reason for this is how we perceive loosing and winning. People who hate loosing more than they love winning are less likely to choke. And it makes sense. If you focus more on not being the last than on being the first, any win you will have just comes as a pleasant surprise. On the contrary, if you think about winning too much the likelihood of you choking is much greater because of the pressure of being the best.

What other reasons do I have to compare this game to real life? Well you could see each plate as one of the challenges in life. Some of them we overcome well enough, but others give us trouble. If one of your pieces gets cut it doesn't mean you can't build anything upon it. Yes, you failed but it's not the end. It also teaches us that you always have a second chance if you work for it. But second chances don't erase the mistakes we've made. We all have to make peace with our mistakes and accept the construction we've built with its beauty and its faults.

Another thing I found interesting is the change in color of the plates as the game goes on. It made me realize that the way we perceive life always changes from one building block to another. Sometimes we might view things white, grey or black but if you keep building there is a whole specter of colors waiting to be seen. Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you get.

The last thing I wanted to say is that advertising this game isn't the point of my article. I chose to write about it because it made me think. There are many other games out there that teach you a lot about life, you just have to look close enough. And I guess that's the conclusion I'm trying to reach. Open your eyes to what surrounds you. Wisdom can be found in the darkest of places if one only remembers to turn on the light. (Dumbledore would be proud!)

Who actually knew what Robin Williams went through?

We've all seen posts, as usual "What a great man!", "He had a superb soul, we'll see you in Heaven!". Actually how cool would that be? If I'll meet all my favorite celebrities in Heaven I can't wait to die, I'll go make a pill cocktail, add some booze too and that's it, me on a cloud talking to Ghandi. But I have a question here, how will I find them? I mean there must have been millions and millions of people who have died since the idea of Heaven became popular, will I go from cloud to cloud and from an angel with a harp to another asking "Have you seen -Insert famous celebrity name here-?" and the angels will respond "Yeah, he/she spends eternal life at Beverly Clouds." A bit of humor in honor of a comedian's death.

Robin Williams died, yes, we've all heard that, seen the pictures and had his life unfold before our eyes. "O Captain! My Captain!". I remember when Amy Winehouse died. Nobody even cared what drug or alcohol problems she had but it all became clear when she died. Do you actually know how many people with these issues you pass by on the street? No, and you shouldn't because it's their life, their choices.

Nobody knew what Robin Williams went through because it was none of our business. Nothing that doesn't directly involve us is none of our business. Global warming is none of our business. Most of us haven't even seen more than one coutry, except the one we live in, so why should we care about what is outside our little city? Well we shouldn't, we're not exactly meant to, evolution and history proved that. We protect ourselves and who is around us. "It's only logical" Spock would say.

An exceptional actor died and we're all a little sad, some more that others. He was a big part of our childhood, Aladin, Peter Pan, Andrew the Robot, and many others. We can all assume he was happy doing what he did best at least. The problem is...that was not him, those were the parts he played. We never knew HIM. We were never part of his life as he was never part of ours. We shouldn't project the characters he impersonated upon the real person. We heard his jokes and seen his talent, but we only knew a small, insigificant part of what he was going through. What people who watched his movies, even fans, are doing is similar to being showed picture of a flower and then finding out that flower is dead now. Whould you post a hundred different poses of the flower before it died on facebook with the caption "It was beautiful, smell you in Heaven!"? No. You never watered the flower, never smelt it, never touched it or played it classical music to grow as beautifully as it did.

I don't now if Robin was a great man, I don't know if he was sad. I can only say I regret that he won't play anymore parts that I would have loved to see.
Another subject that I find interesting is the post mortem recognition. As history has shown us, artists are more appreciated after death. Why is that? I think I have come up with an explanation that will bring some light upon this subject. Williams was an actor and a comedian. He did stand up comedy untill he died, was nice and helped, as I have heard, a lot of people but why are we noticing this now? Well for starters people who once knew him, out of grief, are remembering him for what he did best in his life. That was a simple one. But why is his art being appreciated so much now? The reason is simple...death. Death is a great motivator to many. We all try not to think about it, when it comes to mind, the healthy thing to do is to dismiss the thought and think of something else. When we see a famous person die we notice all the things he did in his life and realise that in our lives we didn't accomplish half of what he did. Also he died doing what he loved untill the end. When you see someone (who has his own struggles, some of them leading him to commit suicide) trying to make people a little bit happier and even, proabaily, dying because of it, (check this link to find out why) well.. it kinda makes you think. Death makes people think, but only for a little bit because "ain't nobody got time for that". After that we just go back to forgetting that our life may suck.

Williams was known to be depressed, to have abused drugs and frequented rehabs. They say don't meet your idols, I say au contraire, you definitely shoud, because every child and adult should see that accomplishing your goal doesn't mean that you are mentally stable, surrounded by people or even happy. There are so many alone celebrities. People should know that they are not role models, they are people who were very good at what they did or just got lucky. They ar not always an example to be followed as every idol that you had and wasn't drawn or animated. We should all learn that as each of us makes mistakes, they are entitled to as well and not to be judged by a lonesome farmer who tries to keep his family well fed.

A thing to thank him for is that he wanted to play in those movies you love, he chose those characters you love and he did them well if not great at times. The Robin we knew is not dead, he still smiles on the screen and like with every book you have finished and closed, it doesn't mean that if the story ended, you can't read it again.

The Beginning Of Procrastination (a short history)

Procrastination - The practice of carrying out less urgent tasks in preference to more urgent ones, or doing more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones, and thus putting off impending tasks to a later time. According to Freud, the pleasure principle may be responsible for procrastination; humans prefer to avoid negative emotions, and to delay stressful tasks. The belief that humans work best under pressure provides an additional incentive to postponement of tasks. Some psychologists cite such behavior as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision. Other psychologists indicate that anxiety is just as likely to get people to start working early as late and the focus should be impulsiveness. That is, anxiety will cause people to delay only if they are impulsive.

Our brains are supposed to be super computers but nobody tells us how easily our brains can be hacked. The difference between a super computer and our brains (one of them) is that our brains can not only be hacked by others but by themselves. If you tell a computer to perform a task, the computer will obey your command and perform the algoritm. They go all 010001001001010001010100 on their ass and get to work, so why can't we?

Well the answer is at the begining of the post. And it is not a very recent issue as you can see, it existed before technology coud be blamed for the number of distractions it offers to our brain.

I chose to write about procrastination because at the moment I am actually procrastinating by writing about procrastination and I tought that this is a beautiful example and opportunity. I hate procrastination but I also love the amount of information I stuff into my head when last minute panic kicks in. So why do our brains function well when afraid and why we can't get them started when we need them to. It's not like by being afraid of an exam or our boss threatenes our life, right?

Wrong! And not because there any real danger but because your brain is very very very old. Well not actually your brain, don't take me so literaly, the DNA that makes your brain what it is today. So why is that a problem, it's not like it's outdated just like your Iphone 5 gets when Iphone 5s comes in with that fancy fingerprint technology? Well it's exactly like that. When we were CAVE MEN, not that long go (you may think it was because people tend to picture cave men running a

long with dinosaurs, but actually dinosaurs were extinct 65 milion years before the human race even emerged) our brains strived to keep us alive before we could call ourselves modern in any way. Actually humans, anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa, 200.000 years ago and reached behavioral modernity about 50.000 years ago. It took them 150.000 years to learn how to start a fire and make the wheel we all know and love.

At that time they were fighting all sorts of creatures and their instincts had to be very sharp to survive, they had to know when to run from danger and when to stay and fight. Most of the time they ran and starved a while but better alive and a little hungry than dead under a mammoth foot. So Man went on hunting and feeding himself and his family for generations and generations to follow. When  finally evolved enough to speak we could insult, annoy but most important, kill one another knowingly. I will not continue to bore you with the affairs of my great great great x 10000 grandfather but I will tell you that the human brain did it's best a huge amount of time to keep us from being killed. Most of the things we did involved killing or being killed so yes, our brains actually are outdated. The problem is that it took our brains 200.000 years to learn how to keep us out of danger but only in the last 500 years or so the risk of getting killed wherever you went slowly dissapeared and today the things that scare us are the deadlines we always have, the need to do the things that require work and really really don't like work.

   There was one bright fellow that said:

'We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.'   The bright fellow was Chuck Palahniuk and I guess you've seen Fight Club, the cinematic adaptation of his book where this quote is from.

So let us put the pieces together. Our entire race has been on a killing spree for most of its existence, recently we've gone sober and there's no war, no plague, no Great Depression in our lifes so our brain has no mortal danger to be afraid of and our day by day concerns have become the things we are most afraid of. And what did our brain do when we were afraid of something? He usually made you anxious (it got all your senses sharpened and worked hard to somehow keep you alive) to give you the best chance of surviving that he could. 

But your body cannot do that all the time because it exhausts it and the vicious cyrcle is formed. Your brain knows you are afaid of your deadline and you always wait untill last minute panic kicks in. That is the moment he thinks you are going to die because you are making him push his limits (being outdated, your brain doesn't know that pushing limits nowadays doesn't mean your teacher will pull out a shotgun and put 5 holes in your chest if you don't take the test). He does what you ask but know the connection is made, whenever you need to learn or write a paper you will hate it because you will be thinking about the deadline and that for you is death. So now when your parents ask you why you didn't stydy and got that bad mark tell them it's your ancestor's fault.