Life is, in simplest terms, a temporal string of choices. At any given moment, the agent may act or not act; or, formulated differently, the agent may act offensively or defensively.
Imagine a game where there is one die, with each face painted a different color from the rainbow (indigo not included). If the green face is up, then you are happy, and otherwise, you are unhappy. A man asks you every hour whether he should roll the die or not, and you can reply “yes” or “no.”
The expected outcome of this simple game is that the idealized agent replies “yes” until the die turns green-side up, then replies “no” thereafter This pattern of behavior not only represents political spectra, where rebellious youths turn into conservative adults, but also romance, economics, academic policy, sports games, and so on.
The nuances to the game enter when there are multiple people playing, who want different colors and who may also influence the man’s eventual action – to roll or not to roll. Human behavior deviates in several cases (e.g. the rural poor, academic elite) because of additional layers of superimposed concepts. For instance, we could imagine that another player convinces you that you desire another color than that which suits you, or that another player believes in a “global happiness” and thus seeks to maximize the happiness of the most people in the group, rather than for him or herself.
There is not much difference between the game that is played by all living creatures and the game played by humans, but humans have simply added so many rules and strategies that they often do not realize that they are still playing the same game. The most intense dualities stem from this ebb and flow: desire and satisfaction, searching and finding, shifting and settling, working and resting. The subtlety is that inaction is not a null in this game but a nearly equal force and choice as action itself. There is an energy behind both action and inaction, and that is what creates the conflicts that characterize life.
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