Philosophy Professor: Why Optimising Your Life Is Making You Miserable
What if the numbers you measure yourself by are quietly changing what you care about?C. Thi Nguyen wrote the book on that question, and he has never once looked at its sales ranking. He mentions it almost in passing in the first minute, then spends the next hour explaining why.
He has a name for what's probably already happened to you. He calls it value capture: you join a platform to meet interesting people, go viral once, and six months later you're writing for likes instead. The same quiet swap runs step counts, GPAs and screen time. Something rich and hard to describe gets traded for something simple and easy to count, and you don't notice the trade until it's made.
Once you can see it, you see it everywhere. At an AI conference, engineers told him they were measuring "good art" using Netflix engagement hours. At a high school worried about screen time, a teenager was pulled away from coding his own video game so he could watch a movie instead. Both decisions are defensible. Both are measuring the wrong thing.
His defence against all this is stranger than you'd expect. Fly fishing, he points out, is an absurd way to catch a fish, and that is precisely the point. The obstacles we choose for ourselves are where most of the meaning lives.
Then Kristina asks him the meaning of life, and he refuses to answer. His reason for refusing is the most interesting thing he says.
CHAPTERS
0:00 What would we do in a perfect world?
0:30 Meet philosopher C. Thi Nguyen
4:05 He was gaming before games had graphics
6:22 When scores delight you vs. when they drain you
8:49 How Twitter likes hollowed him out
10:33 The best definition of a game ever written
12:52 Fly fishing: the "stupid" way to catch fish
15:31 Aristotle, utopia & the one activity we never want to end
18:19 "Even a great job is 60% crap"
19:40 Why gardening is secretly a game
23:35 When points stop being fun
25:05 The AI that confused addiction with art
26:35 Value capture, explained
29:32 Why screen time is a stupid metric
31:35 Why metrics can never capture what matters
35:01 McDonald's vs. Mom's cooking: the hidden cost of scale
38:06 "Is this the game I want to play?"
39:04 Why games don't ruin us (but metrics do)
41:06 Is it getting worse? A 1,000-year story
45:11 The Four Horsemen & the apocalypse of order
47:55 The messages readers keep sending him
49:47 So… what's the meaning of life?
📖 THE SCORE: HOW TO STOP PLAYING SOMEBODY ELSE'S GAME
By C. Thi Nguyen (Penguin Press, 2026). Reviewed in The Guardian, The Washington Post and the Financial Times.
Get your copy: https://link.amazon/B08dOACyl
👤 ABOUT C. THI NGUYEN
Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah, specialising in the philosophy of games, technology and value. A former food writer for the Los Angeles Times, his public philosophy has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and his first book, Games: Agency as Art, won the American Philosophical Association's 2021 Book Prize.
Follow him: https://x.com/add_hawk
💬 What's one "score" in your life you've realised you don't actually want to keep chasing? Share it in the comments — we pass the best questions on to our authors.
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