What I do remember for certain is this: I thought I loved poker, & when faced with the seemingly unavoidable question of, "How are you going to get paid?"* poker seemed to be "the most-loved" of the things it seemed one could do in order to get paid.
Before this time, & this time was Age 21, freshly graduated from liberal arts school with meaningless paper made more meaningless by the pauper status of my fields of study: English & Philosophy.
Oh well, because before this time, I was lucky enough that money wasn't something that needed to be thought about. Yes, this was only possible because my parents spent an excessive amount of time thinking about money, climbing the ranks of the middle classes.**
Why is this blog called, "The Overjustification Effect?" Because either loving something isn't enough, or "loving poker" isn't the right wording for what it was I thought I felt for poker at the time I chose it for a career. Because getting paid for doing what we love causes our love to drop off a cliff.
The GREAT GREAT GREAT David McRaney writes, "When someone reminds you that acquiring currency while ignoring all else shouldn't be your primary goal in life, it feels good. You retweet it. You post on your wall. You forward it, & then you go back to work."
Balance is great. & it's super-great to see that the poker community is becoming more & more about balance. There was a time there where all I cared about in the poker literature was related to balance. The creation of Jared Tendler (sp?) as a thing is, in terms of poker itself as a meme-creature needing to survive even while folks like Caesar's try to suck it dry, absolutely necessary.
Guys who say they couldn't beat the nosebleeds if they weren't de facto Buddhas due to the amount of meditation & pre-frontal-cortex-directed thought required -- absolutely necessary -- if poker is to survive. But this blog is called THE END OF POKER AS WE KNOW IT for a reason, & that reason is that I don't think poker will be surviving, for a number of reasons.
Today's reason: Balance is great. Poker-life-coaches are great, too. But this means the survival of poker is based on needing noobs to start meditating, or even most of this readership.
De rigueur re-entry tournaments & the Bovadavization of Online Poker Thru Catering to the Recreational Player -- these will do a better job of killing the subculture than our collective torpor on the meditation matter.
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*Yes, "seemingly" unavoidable, because it wasn't until I was finally forced to have to make wages to keep myself in calories & shelter that I realized that this was even a thing (capitalism, survival by wages for wage slaves, et al). It gets too philosophical & there is a lot here to unpack. I'd love to unpack it, but I can't imagine anyone is interested. If you are, comment below please & that'll be keen.
**The reason the rich are justifiably envied is not due to the amount of money that they have. The real reason is that they live a life of insouciance & general freedom that is ONLY ONLY ONLY possible in the presence of a most supreme accumulation of capital.***
***Or, that even rarer accumulation: wisdom in the science of consciousness****
****Definitely for another time.
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