Levels: The Game of Life

Everything you do in life has levels. Most people only ever see the one they are standing on.

I was walking through Singapore airport and started counting doors.

There is the lounge you get with a credit card, two visits a year, help yourself to the buffet. Then the lounge for people with airline status. Then business class. Then first. And then one more, quieter, where somebody knows your name before you give it, because of who you bank with.

Five doors. Same terminal, same aircraft, same sky. Most people walk past four of them without registering that they are doors at all.

It works like that everywhere. Wealth, food, clothes, health, craftsmanship, the people you can get on the phone. Every one of them runs deeper than it looks from where you are standing. You can see one rung above you. Sometimes two. Past that it disappears into fog, and the fog is not difficulty. It is ignorance. You do not know what you do not know, and the ladder keeps going anyway.

Which gives you three kinds of people.

One: people who do not know the level exists.
They are not content. Content is a decision, and they have not made one. They have simply never been shown the room.

Two: people who know it exists and climb by default.
Next rung, next rung, next rung, because next is the only direction anyone gave them. This is the group that looks successful and feels hollow. Climbing without choosing is just obedience with better luggage.

Three: people who can see the whole ladder and choose where to play. They know what is above them, they can describe it accurately, and they stop where they mean to stop.

Only the third group is interesting.

The other two are NPCs. Non playable characters, drifting through on ignorance or momentum, running a script nobody wrote for them.

And you do not join the third group by refusing to look. Turning away from the ladder is not wisdom. That is group one with better excuses. Choosing not to care only counts once you know exactly what you are declining.

So look properly. At the door you assumed was not for you. At the room where the actual decisions get made. At the conversation you decided in advance you had no business joining.

You do not have to walk through. You just have to know it is there.

Because in everything you do, there are levels. The only real decision is which one you meant to be playing at.

Calvin Klein, Jo Malone, Le Labo, Penhaligon's. You won't know the difference until you do.