Three drives, life, and incremental games
I've been recently reading Paul Conti's What's Going Right. Although I'm still on the earlier pages, the framework of categorizing our drives into the pleasure drive, the assertion drive, and the generative drive was interesting and got me overthinking.
In short, the pleasure drive is exactly what you think it is, the assertion drive is what makes us seek agency in our lives, and the generative drive is about making our lives and the world better. As anyone would expect, the author goes on to emphasize the importance of having the right balance of these three. But why?
I find an oversimplification to be helpful here in making sense of the essence. One way to view life is as an incremental game, like the Cookie Clicker, where the goal is to get some number as high as possible via various actions some of which simply increment the number while others could decrement ("spend") the number to boost future increments. The "number" we want to get high up is something like quality time, lack of pain, and good memories.
The interesting analogy here is that the pleasure drive, the assertion drive, and the generative drive are somewhat like short-term, mid-term, and long-term strategies for this game of life. Seeking pleasurable low-hanging fruits will make our life arguably the most content in the short term, but soon it becomes obvious that one could have invested more in longer-term strategies to be better off eventually.
Seeking agency, which the assertion drive centers around, allows us to gain some degree of control over how gratifying the activities we engage in daily are. There are fights to be fought to claim agency, which means that it comes with the opportunity cost of immediate pleasure. However, it multiplies the effectiveness of future activities, thereby hopefully making up for the deficit.
The generative drive is about more abstract things such as cultivating relationships. As such, they are far from immediately gratifying. However, by gradually making the life itself better, which includes improving the ability to improve one's life, there could be an exponentially increasing payoff in the very long term.
Anyone who has ever played an incremental game knows that the optimal strategy often involves mixing and balancing strategies of various payoff timelines. This is how I make sense of the importance of balance between the three fundamental drives.
A good analogy should not only portray the characteristics of what it is compared to, but also suggest a new insight about the original phenomenon — the full circle. In this case, what comes to my mind is some players' tendency to obsess on a single type of strategy. For example, one might skip most low-cost upgrades to save only for big exponential boosts. This can be totally fun, seeing the rare yet dramatic jumps in the speed at which the numbers go up.
What's happening here is that on top of the primitive reward of increasing numbers, we are introducing some proxy rewards, like seeing immediate increments or seeing dramatic jumps. Finding proxy rewards and pursuing them are our organically developed heuristics for optimizing the reward in a game with a complex ruleset.
The downside of introducing redundant variables ("proxies") in the equation is that we can be tricked into pursuing a proxy as if it is the ultimate goal. I've recently had a realization that a lot of what I do has been centered around maximizing my agency and control over what I work on. Pursuing the proxy goal did help me achieve more than I thought I would ever be able to, but it also meant my immediate comfort was routinely sacrificed by the reduced sleep hours and a constant focus on work stressors.
My long-term well-being has also been at risk. With the hyper-focusing on relatively near-term projects, the corny but important questions like "what should I do now to put myself in a better place in 5 years?" were subconsciously being ignored.
It is worth asking ourselves what proxy rewards we are pursuing, and if there aren't any distortions in their priorities. There is always a reason why one ended up obsessing with a particular proxy. However, I believe that being aware of the proxy and the obsession could make a huge difference, because at the end of the day, what we truly want is to cover all parallel universes and timelines with our tasty antimatter cookies.