In 1925 a New York metaphysical teacher opened her first book with a reframe that still works. Life, she wrote, is a game. The trick is learning the rules.

Most people consider life a battle, but it is not a battle, it is a game.

Florence Scovel Shinn, The Game of Life and How to Play It (1925), “The Game”

What she actually said

Shinn takes her rules from the Bible and says so on page one. We’ll leave the theology to you. Her game is giving and receiving: what you send out in word or deed comes back. Imagination does the heavy lifting. In her model it cuts out the pictures your life eventually matches.

Then come the case studies. A woman who kept saying she wished she lived in a trunk ends up, by her own account, living in one. A wealthy woman jokes for years about getting ready for the poorhouse and nearly lands there. Shinn’s verdict is the line people still underline:

The subconscious mind has no sense of humor and people often joke themselves into unhappy experiences.

Florence Scovel Shinn, The Game of Life and How to Play It (1925), “The Game”

What should stay in 1925

Shinn also tells of a man who feared a rare disease, pictured it constantly and died of it, and a girl who played at being a widow and later became one. She offers both as proof that mental pictures show up in the body and on the calendar. Say that to someone who is grieving or sick and it turns cruel fast. Nobody imagined their way into a diagnosis.

Same for her promise that every desire is instantly fulfilled once doubt and fear are gone. No game pays out on belief alone.

What’s worth keeping

Two ideas survive without the metaphysics. The first is the reframe. A battle has an enemy. A game has rules and a score you can check. Money-as-war turns every look at your balance into a skirmish, so you stop looking.

The second is the joke rule. Whatever your subconscious finds funny, your habits keep track of what you repeat. “I’m so bad with money.” “Don’t look at my bank account.” Each one is a small vote for not looking, and enough votes turn a joke into a policy you never agreed to.

A side note, since this magazine reads birth charts: Shinn didn’t. Later in the book she writes that numbers and horoscopes keep a person down on the mortal plane. We disagree, happily. We use a chart as a mirror and leave forecasting to the weather service. She would have hated our Scorpio content.

How to play it this week

  • Count your money jokes. For three days, write down every self-deprecating line you say about money, out loud or in the group chat. Don’t fix anything. Just count.
  • Swap the top joke for a fact. Replace your most-used line with something true: your balance, your card debt, the date the next bill is due. Facts are worse at brunch and much easier to plan around.
  • Write your game on an index card. What you’re playing for this quarter, and the one move you’ll make every week. A savings number and one pitch sent every Friday is a perfectly good game.
  • Book a money date. Fifteen minutes, same day every week. Light a candle if you like. Then open the spreadsheet.

Read the original: Florence Scovel Shinn, The Game of Life and How to Play It (1925), chapter “The Game.” Published in the United States in 1925, so it has been in the US public domain since January 1, 2021. Free full text at Project Gutenberg (eBook #74878): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/74878