The Illusion of Victory
What a fisherman and his wife reveal about the futility of selfish desire and the gentle strength of letting go.
What happens when we strive to win to prove to others that we aren’t losers?
Winning proves them wrong. But, in striving to win, we confirm what we thought they thought about us was right.
And so, when motivation stems from a yearning for recognition, no matter how much you win, you’ll still feel like a loser; how beautiful you become, you’ll still feel ugly; strong, weak; smart, dumb; important, insignificant.
In The Fisherman and His Wife, a fisherman leaves his filthy shack of a home to go fishing for the day. Casting his line into the clear water, he catches a fish who turns out to be an enchanted prince. The magic fish begs for his life; the man lets him go.
Returning home, the fisherman recounts the encounter to his wife. Frustrated by their squalor, she demands her husband return to the magic fish and ask for a cottage in exchange for sparing the fish’s life. Reluctantly, the fisherman complies, returns to the fish, makes the request, and the wish is granted.
When he arrives home, his wife greets him gleefully at the front door of the new cottage. The fisherman mentions they could live very well at the cottage, that it would be quite enough. His wife, however, thinks otherwise.
And so she sends him back to the fish again and again to ask for more and more. As her requests grow in magnitude, so does her unrelenting thirst. First, she asks for a palace. Then to become king. Then emperor, then pope, and, finally, God. Upon receiving this final demand, the fisherman senses disaster.
He returns to the sea, which with each request became increasingly tainted and turbulent. Upon this final request, the sea was now black, boiling, and bursting with waves as high as mountains. The fisherman asks the fish to make his wife God. The fish then tells him to go home, where he would find his wife sitting in the filthy shack in which they would live for the rest of their lives.
The fisherman’s wife wanted everything and, despite getting nearly all of it, ended up with seemingly nothing. Why couldn’t her thirst be slaked?
To understand why, we’ll have think about how the wife viewed herself, or, more precisely, how much the wife viewed herself. While not immediately obvious from her initial request, her yearning for elevation in the eyes of others reveals itself more with her later requests to become king, emperor, and pope.
And yet, the higher she got, the lower she felt. Despite the accumulation of superficial external accolades—the palaces, the monuments, the crowns—her internal psyche was festering like the surrounding sea.
As a magnifying glass concentrates light to produce a powerful beam of light, so the wife surrounded herself with distorting mirrors that reflected, magnified, and centered her own attention on herself. And as that beam of attention became more impressive and powerful, the less impressive and powerful she felt relative to it. So, in desperation, she scrutinized herself more, erected more mirrors, and further concentrated the beam that burned her up.
While the fisherman cast his line out to sea, his wife got hooked on extrinsic motivation: a motivation predicated on external recognition. She had something to prove.
When we strive for victory to prove to others we aren’t losers, something interesting happens. By winning, we prove them wrong. Yet, by proving them wrong, we prove what we thought they thought about us was right.
Thus, if our goal is to win, we must see ourselves as losers. And so it goes with any other extrinsically motivated goal.
Want to become more beautiful to prove you aren’t ugly? By enhancing your beauty, you earn a victory over ugliness. The audience, however, was right about you after all. To give one example of how beautifying extrinsic goals are encouraged and exploited, we can set our eyes on the cosmetic industry. They offer customers delightful, tangible, and discrete victories over ugliness, allowing those under the brush or blender—or knife or needle—to conquer this or that imperfection. Yet, in doing so, the ugly feelings that motivated the cosmetic enhancement are reinforced. The cosmetic industry thrives on customers looking beautiful, yet feeling hideous.
Want to become strong to prove you aren’t weak? You know how this goes. Dependent on supplements, powders, specialized equipment, or facilities, extrinsically motivated strength often leads to a kind of superficial strength—one that advertises reliance on power-ups rather than a powerful person. The same applies to cognitive strength, which has its own ‘supplements’ (such as artificial intelligence) and hyper-specialized institutions, producing a similarly superficial intelligence. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with dependence, it may be wise for us to consider whether our dependencies are wholesome—like whole foods and information, holistic exercise (both physical and mental), and genuine relationships—or whole-less—like atomized supplements, isolated workouts or modular coursework, and self-congratulatory snapshots (whether of muscles or diplomas).
Want to become more important to prove to people you aren’t unimportant? This is the mother of all other extrinsic motives, for we only want to become more beautiful or powerful so that others may recognize our beauty or power. This is the same yearning to stand out that engulfed the fisherman’s wife.
Those striving for recognition feel keenly the eyes of others on them. Yet, the more eyes they feel, the further they isolate themselves, for those sets of eyes they feel are in fact their own—both real and imagined. They are reflections from a self-absorbed enclosure of mirrors. As perceived attention attention grows, an impressive weight accumulates that depresses the perceiver, its prolonged absorption simmering into a sensitive wound of which the slightest disturbance—such as a reminder of insufficiency—brings to a boil.
And so, in their self-infatuation, the extrinsically motivated distance themselves from the audience (they think) they so dearly want to please. This tendency exists in all of us—and really is subtle and confusing—so we must forgive ourselves and others for falling for it. We must also, however, be careful about enabling it. Encouraging sensitivity may not spread love like we think it does. As a slap in the face may be an act of wisdom and compassion when driving drowsy, so confronting our wounds with courage may allow us to wake up and live life more fully. This also means allowing others to feel pain, and being careful not to remove all of their obstacles so that we can feel better about ourselves.
This was the one fault of the fisherman. He caved to his wife’s every request, despite having a sense that they had already had enough for a meaningful life. As the magnitude of the requests grew, so did his unease in delivering them. And yet, he still kept delivering. Some may say he was fulfilling those requests out of love for her. But as her status inflated, so did her misery; had the fisherman attended to his wife wholeheartedly, he would have seen that enabling her envy and greed harmed her. The fisherman may have had some mirrors of his own, acting out of love for himself to avoid confronting his power-hungry wife.
Perhaps a negative self-image is worthwhile if it brings about positive outcomes. If I win more, become more attractive, become stronger, and more important, isn’t it worth feeling like an unimportant, weak, ugly loser?
Is it?
Despite his weakness, the fisherman held a valuable strength: He could let go.
When the magic fish begged for its life, the fisherman immediately let it go. Rather than jumping to exploit the fish, the fisherman identified with it and the boundary separating them dissolved. With this co-identification—this interbeing—the gain of the fisherman was interwoven with the gain of the fish.
This sense of interbeing was absent for the wife; her enclosure of mirrors severed her relationship with her surroundings. Not only that, but in being dissatisfied with where she was and preoccupied with where she’d rather be, she saw the magic fish as an object, separate from herself, meant to deliver her to her idealized future. The fisherman, by contrast, content with where he was and how life was unfolding, had no need for the fish’s magic. For him, life was already magical. And so there was simply no end that required exploitation to attain.
This quality of ‘endlessness’ is the key to freedom from the finite games we play—with their wins and losses—that ultimately leave us dissatisfied. Endlessness opens the possibility of a game that can be neither won nor lost. A game with no end.
An infinite game.
Perpetual games, while having no end, are not aimless. For those engaging in an infinite game, the direction of play is the one that perpetuates the game. And since a perpetual game cannot be sustained by one player (for that player will eventually perish), collaboration must occur to sustain the game. The generous disposition of an infinite player was embodied by the fisherman in his first encounter with the magic fish and his readiness to let the fish go. Generosity is the generator of perpetual play.
Thus, the giving up of something of value for the sake of something more valuable is essential to perpetuate play. In other words, participation in infinite games is sacrificial. Naturally, this makes them more difficult to play; no longer may we relish in the finite satisfaction of finite wins and the advertisement of our finite accomplishments (and thus how unaccomplished we feel). This relishing is difficult to give up but, as we’ve found, we give up more of ourselves to this relishing. And when we look closely, we realize that what we sacrifice is never truly lost, since we belong to the greater whole to which we give. How meaningful.
To reveal that meaningful, greater whole requires dismantling the mirrors that separate us from it. As demonstrated by the wife, the outside-looking-in view that governed her behavior is intoxicating, yet its concentration of attention is immiserating. As a church’s stained glass windows are unimpressive when viewed from the outside—only from inside can one observe the beauty that is revealed when sunlight pours through them—so the technicolor of life is revealed only when perspective unfolds from within. Only by gradually dismantling the deluding mirrors that surround us, and shifting to an inside-looking-out perspective, may the gentle light of the whole pour over us and tend to the wounds of self-absorption.
So, can you become great without striving for greatness?
Hmm…
I don’t think so. But for whom you strive for—that’s the question right there, and your answer to it will determine whether your life brims with misery or meaning. Striving to prove something to others is, as we’ve seen, self-worship in disguise. But a genuine striving for others—to see those around you as more worthy of elevation—births genuine greatness, because to elevate others, you must become greater to bear their weight. Consequently, you then become more important—not in a self-aggrandizing way, but in the way the fisherman was important to the magic fish when he let the fish go.
When the wife made her final request, she had no idea what she was truly asking for. Her finite mind was preoccupied with enlargement of self: a craving for infinite power, unlimited influence, and, ultimately, eternal life. Believing that God embodied these qualities, this is what she thought she was asking for.
Yet eternal life is not what perpetuates the game, for one life is finite. What keeps the game going is eternal birth, along with an acceptance that perpetual death is an essential feature to the re-generative process of perpetual play. The infinite mind, therefore, does not struggle for immortality but struggles as a mortal. It struggles not to enlarge itself, but struggles toward something larger than itself.
So, what was the wife actually asking for when she asked to become God? She was asking to dissolve the boundaries she’d erected that separated her from the whole. She was asking to embody the ultimate sacrifice. She was asking to birth possibility rather than consume it.
As before, the fish granted her wish.
And so, she was returned to her filthy, humble shack beside the clear, calm water. No longer was she swallowing Nature into a finite point. Instead, she rejoined it in its radiating, infinite possibility.