Life Is A Single Player Game

Over the past few weeks, I have been working through The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, and it may be the most useful book I have read this year. One idea in particular keeps echoing: Naval's claim that life is, at its core, a single-player game.

The phrase is provocative because it ­repositions the burden of progress. In a single-player game the decisive moves are internal while the external world provides only the scenery and occasional obstacles. Society, by contrast, trains us for the multiplayer mode: we learn to seek status, negotiate group norms, and read social cues. Both modes matter, but the multiplayer emphasis can obscure the obvious that the joystick still rests in your own hands.

Framing life as primarily single-player doesn't deny community but for me it clarifies responsibility. You cultivate judgment, discipline, and original thought first, then bring those assets to the multiplayer arena. Seen this way, self-development is not self-indulgence but it is the prerequisite for meaningful contribution. Naval's point is simple but radical: master the single-player mechanics, and the multiplayer rounds take care of themselves.

The reality is life is a single-player game. You're born alone. You're going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You're gone in three generations, and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It's all single player.

Naval Ravikant

Subjectivity of Reality

I once assumed reality was a single, unchanging snapshot identical for every observer. Naval showed me otherwise. A tree or a stone simply exists, but the moment I look at it, my mind overlays its own filter. My mood shifts the colors, and my memories supply the background score. What I perceive is no longer pure reality but reality plus me.

That insight was still humming in my head as I stepped out of Sinarmas MSIG Tower just after five-thirty, when the lobby still buzzed with people rushing for the elevators. My day at Ruangguru was done, but the commute was only beginning. I joined the steady stream of office workers moving toward the Dukuh Atas LRT. My backpack felt twice its usual weight: a laptop, a Mac mini I stubbornly insist on carrying, and a slim paperback titled How to Love Someone Without Losing Your Mind.

The platform was crowded, yet everything ran with the precision of habit—tap the card, file into the carriage, find any patch of floor space. When the doors closed, the train shuddered west to Bekasi. Outside, the skyline over Dukuh Atas shifted from solid blue to bands of orange and pink. Glass towers caught the light and flung it back in quick flashes.

Inside, most riders leaned into their phones. WhatsApp notifications popped up faster than thumbs could answer. Ride-hailing maps refreshed, showing red lines of traffic they were already planning to avoid. I opened my book instead, letting the first chapter pull my attention away from the carriage noise.

Same train, same rails, same sunset sliding past the windows yet every passenger was stitching together a different version of the evening. Jakarta reminded me of a truth I'd first learned months back in Tokyo, under winter neon and the razor-sharp air of Shibuya.

It was a clear January night, one of those Tokyo nights when the air feels sharp enough to cut ribbon, and I was meeting my best friend, Gabriel, and his partner, Assyffa, in Shibuya. A couple of days earlier, they had shared big news: they were expecting their first child. Gabriel had kept himself on a strict no-drinking rule during that stretch, but now the restriction was lifted, and he was eager to mark the occasion. He ducked with me into the FamilyMart below their hotel, came back with two Strong Zeros, and pressed one into my hand as if it were a trophy.

We carried the cans upstairs to their room, which overlooked the famous crossing. From a couple of floors up, the intersection looked like a time-lapse animation: five crowds converging, dissolving, and reforming each time the lights flipped. Gabriel clinked his can against mine and took the first sip he'd allowed himself in a couple of months.

Same city, same minute, but radically different headspaces. Gabriel was already talking about life in general and how overjoyed they both felt. Soon we were laughing about a mutual friend before pivoting somehow to raving about the unbelievably tasty Zunda shake from Sendai. I listened, nodded, and tried to match their joy, yet my mind hovered elsewhere on work in Jakarta, on a relationship that felt precarious, on the simple fact that after this toast, I would walk back to my place near Tokyo Tower alone.

Just before midnight, we said our goodbyes. Gabriel walked me to the station. I slipped through the underpass, boarded the last train bound for Onarimon, and let Official Hige Dandism's "Pretender" loop in my earbuds. I didn't yet know the woman I'd been seeing in Jakarta would end things a couple of weeks after I landed home, but the chorus, Kimi no unmei no hito wa boku ja nai ("I am not the one"), already felt uncomfortably accurate.

That night offered a clear lesson: we all breathed the same January air, drank the same cans of Strong Zero, and watched the same neon sweep of Shibuya Crossing, yet the meaning each of us attached to it was private. For Gabriel and Assyffa, Tokyo was an opening scene in the story of new life. For me, it was an interlude between an uncertain present and an even murkier return. Reality, I realized once again, is never a single photograph, but it is the raw image plus the caption each of us writes in our head.

Moments like these convince me that meaning isn't served to us on a silver platter, but we make it ourselves. That can feel terrifying, the way a blank page feels to a writer, until you remember a blank page is also pure freedom. Most of us first notice this freedom when life refuses to follow the checklist.

Picture a production bug that passes every test suite, ships, then appears again after the fifth "final" patch. You watch logs, rerun scripts, and wonder how many more late nights it will devour. In moments like this, the outside world is fixed, and you cannot wish the defect away, but your inner narrative is still malleable. You can label the bug a catastrophe, or you can treat it as the tuition you pay for mastery.

The same principle scales. A project timeline slips, a meeting derails, a teammate quits, and suddenly your sprint looks like spilled coffee. Reality hands you raw facts; interpretation is up to you. Between what happens and what you decide it means lies a narrow gap. Inside that gap you choose whether to react with frustration or curiosity, whether to blame circumstances or refine your craft

Calm focus starts here. When you recognize that the story is yours to edit, the blank page stops feeling hostile. It becomes a drafting table. Each thought you revise, each perspective you tighten, is another sentence in the manual you write for yourself. That manual is where real agency lives, and no external setback can seize it.

I picture life as a single-player adventure running on imperfect code. We don't pick our spawn point, birthplace, skin, those lines were compiled long before we pressed "Start." Yet the controller is still in our hands, and even the glitches can become hidden shortcuts. If I keep my view wide enough to marvel at the world's secret art direction and sharp enough to read the warning signs etched in its walls, every new level stops feeling random and starts feeling like an invitation to master its mechanics.

To be continued…