Computer Solitaire is a Perverse Metaphor for Life.
Think about it.
Before you even begin it, the deck will be shuffled and dealt by the computer. You have no control over this, much like you have no control of your genetics, and just as your genetics have a huge effect on your life, the whims of the computer will determine the difficulty of the game. Some deals give you aces with no effort. Other times you're only given one color of face cards, and it's the wrong color for your pips anyhow. The majority of games are solvable, but some of them aren't, regardless of what you do.
By its very nature, solitaire is solitary. Oh, other people can give advice, helpful or otherwise, but it's ultimately up to you what to do. In life, you are certainly influenced by your history of reinforcement (which includes current interactions with others) and genetics, but you choose how to play, and in that sense, is not every human alone?
In solitaire, you're running on incomplete info, since you don't know what's buried under your top cards at first. You have to guess based on what you can see, and if you make a wrong guess based on that, you may lose the game. You can play perfectly, and through no fault of your own Random Number God will decree that the next card you flip is another red jack, and you have no black ten to let you move a pile of cards onto your first red jack, the deck isn't being helpful, and there are no more cards to flip. If only you'd known where that second jack was, you'd have left the first one where it was in the deck, and you'd have been able to move the second jack to get to the card under it. But you didn't, and now you're screwed. How many people have gone through a hard or even impossible time of things due to lack of the knowledge that would save them?
Solitaire's a pretty quick game, and you should have an idea of where the game is headed even quicker. Those early moves, and whether or not you screw them up, will decide how the rest of the game goes (barring the malice of RNG, of course). In the game of life, the early years and how you spend them affect what jobs you can get, your style of living, who you have relationships with, and so on.
And much like life, when you're approaching the end of a solitaire game (which, may I repeat, usually doesn't take long) you're left wondering, "What have I been doing for the past five minutes/eighty years? Is this all?"
...It's occured to me that if I don't write a thousand page novel one day and fill it with BS digressions like this, I'll have wasted a God-given talent for pointless musing.
Any thoughts?
~Chaotic Neutral
Before you even begin it, the deck will be shuffled and dealt by the computer. You have no control over this, much like you have no control of your genetics, and just as your genetics have a huge effect on your life, the whims of the computer will determine the difficulty of the game. Some deals give you aces with no effort. Other times you're only given one color of face cards, and it's the wrong color for your pips anyhow. The majority of games are solvable, but some of them aren't, regardless of what you do.
By its very nature, solitaire is solitary. Oh, other people can give advice, helpful or otherwise, but it's ultimately up to you what to do. In life, you are certainly influenced by your history of reinforcement (which includes current interactions with others) and genetics, but you choose how to play, and in that sense, is not every human alone?
In solitaire, you're running on incomplete info, since you don't know what's buried under your top cards at first. You have to guess based on what you can see, and if you make a wrong guess based on that, you may lose the game. You can play perfectly, and through no fault of your own Random Number God will decree that the next card you flip is another red jack, and you have no black ten to let you move a pile of cards onto your first red jack, the deck isn't being helpful, and there are no more cards to flip. If only you'd known where that second jack was, you'd have left the first one where it was in the deck, and you'd have been able to move the second jack to get to the card under it. But you didn't, and now you're screwed. How many people have gone through a hard or even impossible time of things due to lack of the knowledge that would save them?
Solitaire's a pretty quick game, and you should have an idea of where the game is headed even quicker. Those early moves, and whether or not you screw them up, will decide how the rest of the game goes (barring the malice of RNG, of course). In the game of life, the early years and how you spend them affect what jobs you can get, your style of living, who you have relationships with, and so on.
And much like life, when you're approaching the end of a solitaire game (which, may I repeat, usually doesn't take long) you're left wondering, "What have I been doing for the past five minutes/eighty years? Is this all?"
...It's occured to me that if I don't write a thousand page novel one day and fill it with BS digressions like this, I'll have wasted a God-given talent for pointless musing.
Any thoughts?
~Chaotic Neutral