In a Game: Complexity is the Point. In Life: Complexity is the Tax.
The rules we live by didn't come with a rulebook.
I saw him coming from a hundred yards away.
Same guy I’d passed a dozen times. Him, his wife, their dog. Me, the water, the walk. Every time — a nod. Maybe a half-smile. Nothing more.
And I laughed at myself. Because why not just say hello? Not another nod and wave, but an actual hello.
Some rule about how this works was running. I hadn’t written it. Had I chosen it?
It was just there, underneath, quietly deciding how this kind of thing goes. Deciding for me. Without my permission or even my awareness.
Today it was just him. So I stopped. Said hello. Turns out he’s a good guy. We talked for a while. Then I walked on.
And I kept thinking about the rule.
A philosopher named Bernard Suits once defined a game as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Think about that for a second. In golf the efficient play is to walk up and drop the ball in the hole. The game we chose has us standing four hundred yards away with a stick. In football we invite eleven men to stop us from getting where we’re going. The complexity is what we came for.
That’s a game. But I started looking at the rules I live by — some obvious, many more hiding in plain sight.
We know the three in the morning one. The room is dark and quiet and the mind is running a conversation that hasn’t happened yet. Maybe never will. Three moves ahead, preparing the defense, managing the outcome before there’s an outcome to manage. Nobody asked us to do this. Truth is — I didn’t ask for it either. No threat is present. But the survival mind doesn’t need a threat present. It just needs the possibility of one. So it runs the scenarios. Keeps itself the center of the room.
That’s not a crisis. That’s a Tuesday.
Or maybe it’s the standard we carry. The one about what a man provides, what he tolerates, what he never lets them see. We didn’t write that. We inherited it. From a man who inherited it from another man who probably never questioned it either. A chain of unexamined rules passed forward like land nobody ever thought to survey. And somewhere along the way it stopped being his standard and became just — the standard. The way things are. The price of being a man.
Some of us have been paying it our whole lives without ever seeing the invoice.
The rules we live by didn’t come with a rulebook. Nobody handed them to us at the door. They accumulated. Beliefs that hardened into fact before we were old enough to question them. Patterns worn so deep they stopped feeling like patterns. Expectations inherited. Resignations settled into so quietly we forgot there was ever a moment of choosing.
And unlike the game — we don’t know we’re playing.
In a Game: Complexity is the Point.
In Life: Complexity is the Tax. The one we have no idea we’re paying.
Here’s the thing about the tax. It doesn’t collect itself. Something runs it.
The survival identity — the idea of yourself you built to get through this — runs on fear. And complexity is its fuel. Every obstacle to navigate, every threat to manage, every rule to follow — that’s the survival mind staying relevant. Staying in charge. Staying the center of your awareness. Without the complexity it has nothing to do. And a thing with nothing to do starts to look unnecessary.
So it generates. Keeps the game running. Moves the goalposts. And we let it — not because we’re weak or foolish — but because it’s all we believe we know. We have held it that long and that tight. It has been our shield against every large and small thing we are afraid of. We cling to it because we believe without it we won’t survive. Not consciously. Not with any awareness that we’re even holding on. The grip just became the hand.
That’s the complexity we live in. Not chosen. Not seen. Just running. Resigned to.
And it obscures something.
I’m not saying this from the other side of it. I’ve been in it. Still walking out of it. I know what it costs to stay.
Simplicity isn’t a vacation. It isn’t a retreat or a practice or something you achieve on the other side of enough work. It’s a doorway. And what it opens into is the awareness of something that never left you. Not for a day. Not for an hour. Not in the hardest year or the longest night.
The truth of who you were before your first breath.
Still there.
It was there before the first bricks of complexity and fear were laid. Before the survival mind decided complexity was the price of being safe and loved and enough.
It didn’t go anywhere while you were paying the tax. It just got quiet. Patient the way the water is patient. Unhurried the way the water is unhurried. Not working to be anything. Already what it is.
That’s what the ease after the hello was pointing at. Not the conversation. Not the good guy or the pleasant walk. The brief moment when we had even a little willingness for the rule to step aside and something simpler and truer was just — there. The body recognized it before the mind did.
It always does.
Maybe you’ve felt this. Not as an idea. In the quiet moments you didn’t quite trust. The walk where the thinking slowed. The morning that arrived before the day made its demands. The water. The waiting.
That’s not nothing. That’s the truth reminding you it never left.
Still walking. Along the water.
For the willing.
If this one landed — share it with someone still paying a tax they never agreed to.
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