Life’s Games: Last Human Standing & The Pocket Dimension
May‑2025
Inspired by James P. Carse’s infinite-games lens, Will Storr’s status research, David Pearce’s pleasure blueprint, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s fun puzzles, and Naval Ravikant’s wealth axioms.
Last Human Standing
Day three after humanity vanishes.
The pantry’s stocked. Your shelter’s secure. You sit on the hood of an abandoned Ferrari at sunrise, watching the empty city gleam. With survival handled and no audience left, what will consume your day?
Do you:
- Wander the silent museum, losing yourself in beauty that no one else will ever see again?
- Race the Ferrari down empty highways, chasing the pure rush of speed?
- Climb to the ridge with a notebook to unravel cosmic riddles?
- Sort through abandoned materials to build something that outlasts you?
- Practice an instrument no one will hear, perfecting your craft simply because you can?
Your answer reveals which of life’s fundamental games truly matter to you when the external pressures evaporate.
The Pocket Dimension
Now imagine the opposite. You wake up in a pocket dimension – a pristine copy of Earth where travel between dimensions is effortless. Your close tribe (family, friends, loved ones) can move freely between dimensions. Want to visit someone in the original world? Step through. Want time alone? Come back. The difference? This pocket dimension has no survival pressures.
Self-sustaining infrastructure handles everything. Autonomous systems maintain power, water, transportation. Food production runs itself. Complete abundance. No work required, just choice.
Day three. You can socialize with your tribe here or expand your social circle in the original world as often as you want. But when you’re here, you don’t have to compete for resources, status, or survival.
What games do you find yourself playing now? How does the option of an audience change your choices?
These scenarios reveal something: when survival pressures dissolve, we gravitate toward our true motivational cores. Whether completely alone or in a pressure-free social paradise, we’re drawn to certain fundamental games that shape our existence. These aren’t trivial pastimes with rules and pieces, but deep motivational frameworks that shape our decisions, define our values, and ultimately determine whether we find fulfillment or frustration.
The Game Board
| Game | Core Motive | Key Question | Typical Drives | Orientation | Finite / Infinite | Typical Pay-off |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wisdom | Understand reality | What is true? | Inquiry, learning, introspection | Internal | Infinite | Clarity, awe |
| Status | Climb social hierarchies | How am I regarded? | Competition, recognition, hierarchy | External | Finite (within groups) | Prestige, influence |
| Hedonism | Maximize felt experience | What feels best? | Pleasure-seeking, flow, sensation | Internal | Variable | Positive valence |
| Wealth | Build value → freedom | What can I build/control? | Building, investing, resource management | External | Positive-sum | Time, optionality |
| Virtue | Forge character | Who am I becoming? | Discipline, ethics, self-mastery | Internal | Infinite | Inner equanimity |
| Legacy | Influence beyond self | What will outlast me? | Mentorship, creation, contribution | External | Long-run positive | Mortality defying impact |
Deep Dives
1. The Wisdom Game: The Infinite Puzzle
“An infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing the play.” -James P. Carse
Picture the physicist mapping quantum fields, the philosopher contemplating consciousness, or the child dismantling a clock just to see how it works. The Wisdom Game is about understanding how reality functions at the deepest levels. Pursued for the sheer thrill of knowing, regardless of audience or reward.
Even if you were the last person on Earth, this game would remain compelling. The “aha” moment when understanding clicks into place delivers a hit of satisfaction that needs no external validation. It’s an infinite game. The goal isn’t to win but to keep playing, to keep expanding your understanding of reality.
Why people play it: The pure joy of comprehension, intellectual adventure, awe at uncovering truths.
Pitfall: Getting lost in abstraction, analysis paralysis, knowledge without application.
My take: There’s something uniquely satisfying about the moment when a puzzle clicks into place – whether it’s trying to understand why economies crash, why certain melodies resonate with our brains, or how the universe started. The game has no end, only deeper layers.
Post AGI: The question shifts from “what is true?” to “how do we weave truth into meaning?” As AI systems churn out facts instantly, the human advantage lies in synthesizing patterns across disciplines, exploring metaphysical questions, and understanding subjective experience. Wisdom becomes less about acquiring knowledge and more about developing unique perspectives on the infinitely complex tapestry of reality.
2. The Status Game: The Primal Ladder
The tribe circles up, hierarchies snap into place. The hardware is 200,000 years old and predates humanity itself. Even primates obsessively track their positioning in the social hierarchy. It’s the game we’re most biologically hardwired to play, with our brains releasing dopamine when our status rises and stress hormones when it falls.
As Will Storr points out, this game underlies everything from office politics to social media flexing to success theater. Status saturates moral crusades and public displays of virtue. The critical flaw? It’s inherently zero-sum within any defined group: for someone to rise, others must relatively fall.
Why people play it: Immediate neurochemical rewards, access to resources and opportunities, protection from social threats.
Potential pitfalls: Anxiety, envy, validation addiction, never feeling “enough.”
My take: You can’t fully opt out, status games ride deep mammalian circuitry. But you can choose your tribes wisely: intellectual honesty, creative contribution, and genuine support over zero-sum competition. Focusing on elevating others paradoxically raises your standing in ways that feel sustainable and satisfying.
Post AGI: As material needs dissolve, status reorganizes around uniquely human capacities – emotional intelligence, creative synthesis, philosophical depth. The currency shifts from resource control to the ability to inspire, connect, and innovate in ways machines cannot. New hierarchies emerge based on who brings the most meaningful human experiences to shared spaces.
3. The Hedonism Game: Orgasmium vs. Rich Experiences
The Hedonism Game maximizes subjective experience. The felt quality of being alive. It extends beyond base pleasures, encompassing flow states, aesthetic depth, and richly immersive sensory moments.
David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative envisions biotech permanently erasing suffering and elevating our hedonic baseline toward bliss. Yet Eliezer Yudkowsky’s provocative “orgasmium” thought experiment questions this pursuit: would we genuinely want to tile the universe solely with pleasure centers, stripped of context, narrative, and purpose?
Why people play it: Pleasure and meaningful sensory experiences are intrinsically rewarding; life is short and suffering is real.
Potential pitfalls: Diminishing returns (the hedonic treadmill), emptiness from pleasure devoid of meaning, and resource-intensive escapism.
My take: I see hedonism as the art of experience collection. From the sublime (watching a meteor shower) to the intense (flowing in solo sports) to the refined (a perfectly balanced dinner). Variety over intensity, pleasure as one color in life’s palette. The challenge is the balance of immediate gratification with deeper narrative and existential satisfaction.
Post AGI: When perfect pleasure becomes available on-demand, the game transforms entirely. The new frontier becomes the architecture of meaningful experience – how to blend challenge, context, and uncertainty into pleasure to create depth. Humans might deliberately introduce friction into bliss, seeking the textured complexity that makes satisfaction feel earned.
4. The Wealth Game: Engineering Freedom
Naval Ravikant distills it best: “Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep.” (Naval) The Wealth Game isn’t merely about accumulating money. It’s about engineering systems that convert resources into freedom, primarily freedom of your time and attention.
Played correctly, this game becomes genuinely positive through value creation rather than extraction. When you build something people willingly pay for, everyone benefits. Scavenging for food, building shelter, and creating safety has always been inevitable. But society’s system of IOUs, money, is an extraordinary innovation. You can create enough value to earn the freedom to engage in life’s other games.
Why people play: Autonomy, security, optionality, and the freedom to reinvest in other games
Potential pitfalls: Confusing wealth as the end goal rather than a tool, getting stuck on the accumulation treadmill, funneling newfound wealth straight into the status arms-race essentially reskinning The Status Game
My take: Wealth isn’t about accumulation but about buying back time and attention. It requires a careful focus on equity over salary, building systems that generate freedom rather than just income. The real win comes from being able to play games deeply – funding curiosity, supporting causes that matter, and creating without survival pressure looming.
Post AGI: “Wealth” evolves into control over scarce human experiences and creative capacities. As AI generates material abundance, value shifts to curating authentic human moments, developing unique skills that resist automation, and creating spaces where genuine human connection flourishes. The new wealth creators will be those who design experiences that feel irreplaceably human.
5. The Virtue Game: Forging the Self
Who are you when no one is watching? The Virtue Game revolves around character building: integrity, discipline, courage, compassion. Qualities cultivated internally, independent of external recognition.
Think Stoic philosophers deliberately embracing hardship to cultivate resilience, or artisans pursuing mastery purely for the craft itself. Validation here is internal, and the timeline is lifelong.
Why people play it: Inner peace, alignment with deeply held values, reliable character under pressure, and quiet pride.
Potential pitfalls: Perfectionism, self-righteousness, neglecting external impact.
My take: Virtue is most compelling when it’s tested against real-world complexity. Deliberate discomfort almost always leads to some incredible character growth. Like strengthening a muscle no one can see but everyone can benefit from.
Post AGI: AI systems could serve as perfect virtue partners – offering consistent moral reasoning, pointing out inconsistencies in our behavior, and modeling ethical frameworks without the emotional baggage of human judgment. The challenge becomes maintaining authentic virtue when every action could be optimized by an AI counselor. True character emerges in choices no algorithm would make.
6. The Legacy Game: Ripples in the Pond
This game transcends your lifespan. Played by parents raising children, mentors guiding protégés, artists crafting enduring works, or leaders establishing lasting institutions it seeks lasting influence beyond personal existence.
Legacy integrates elements from other games but uniquely expands the horizon far beyond one’s own life. It asks: “What mark will remain after I’m gone?”
Why people play it: Meaning beyond the self, deep connection with future generations, transcendence of personal mortality.
Potential pitfalls: Sacrificing present well-being solely for future impact, or prioritizing legacy image over real, lasting contributions.
My take: Focus on genuine relationships and tangible contributions rather than abstract posthumous fame. Approach legacy as present-day positive influence that sends lasting ripples forward through time.
Post AGI: The scope of legacy explodes exponentially. A single human contribution to AI alignment, space exploration, or understanding consciousness could echo through millennia. Yet the most profound legacies might remain intimate – the human who taught AI to value beauty, the community that demonstrated new forms of cooperation, the artist who captured what it means to be alive in the age of artificial minds.
From Thought Experiment to Imminent Reality
The Pocket Dimension isn’t just a useful fiction. It’s the blueprint for the world AGI is rapidly constructing around us. The thought experiment strips away necessity to reveal inherent drives; AGI promises to automate necessity itself.
Think about it: Autonomous systems handling energy, food, logistics. AI tackling complex problems that once demanded lifetimes of human labor. This isn’t science fiction; it’s the trajectory. As the baseline of survival and resource acquisition gets automated, essentially creating abundance, the external pressures that forced our hand in certain games begin to dissolve.
The frantic scramble for basic Wealth transforms. The zero-sum desperation of primitive Status games loses its evolutionary urgency. When the “how” of survival is increasingly handled by intelligent systems, the human focus inevitably shifts to the “why” of existence.
This transition isn’t seamless. The games still collide and combine within us:
- Wealth doesn’t vanish; it morphs into a tool for amplifying other games – funding Wisdom’s explorations, enabling Hedonism’s refined experiences, or bankrolling Legacy’s ambitions.
- Status hierarchies reconfigure, shifting from resource control to influence in realms AI can’t dominate: creativity, emotional depth, philosophical insight, the curation of uniquely human experiences.
- The pursuit of Virtue becomes less about resisting external temptation and more about defining internal meaning in a world of effortless options.
- Hedonism faces the “orgasmium” challenge: crafting meaningful pleasure when any sensation is possible.
- Legacy gains exponential leverage – a single insight guiding AI development could echo for millennia.
- Wisdom confronts an ocean of AI-generated knowledge, demanding synthesis, perspective, and the courage to ask questions machines don’t.
The Great Filter is Choice
The Pocket Dimension, brought to life by AGI, forces the ultimate human question: With survival pressures minimized, which games are truly worth playing?
This isn’t a hypothetical exercise anymore. It’s the emerging reality. The fundamental drives remain – the pursuit of truth, connection, experience, meaning, impact, and self-mastery. But the choice of which games to prioritize, how to blend them, and what constitutes a “win” becomes the defining human endeavor.
We are approaching a threshold where the external world stops dictating our primary motivations with the force of survival. Instead, we must consciously choose our games based on intrinsic value. The real challenge isn’t competing with AGI; it’s deciding who we want to be, individually and collectively, in the vast playground it unlocks.
The Pocket Dimension is opening. What games will you play?