While each of us has our own specific vision of the good life, we can all agree a good life tends to have certain characteristics: living by a set of ethics, maintaining meaningful relationships, time to pursue hobbies, and fulfilling work. Viewing life as a competition converts friends and family from people you care about to these uneasy, ambiguous relationships where you’re partially rooting for these people…but simultaneously also trying to beat them at the game of life. If you’re playing a “game,” the stakes of life’s inevitable failures and disappointments are so high that it makes life a terrifying ordeal, haunted by a specter of public defeat at the game.