The first zero-sum game most of us ever played was competing for our mother’s attention. We didn’t know we were playing it. We were too young to understand game theory, too young to understand much of anything, really. We just knew we wanted more of her, and that our sibling seemed to be getting it instead. And so we competed, in whatever ways small children compete: being louder, being cuter, being needier, being better. One of us got the attention. The other didn’t. Someone won, and someone lost.
We’ve been playing variations of that same game ever since.
What Zero-Sum Actually Means
In game theory, a zero-sum game is any situation where one person’s gain requires another person’s loss. The total value in the system stays fixed, like a pie that can only be sliced, never grown. For someone to get more, someone else must get less. There is always a winner and always a loser, and the game only ends when one side runs out of something to lose.
Most of us navigate daily life through a zero-sum lens without ever naming it. Think about the last argument you were in, a real one, where emotions were running high. Both people in that conversation wanted the same thing: to be right. But in most arguments about facts or interpretations of events, there’s generally one truth, and the two parties are competing to be the one holding it. One of you wins. The other concedes, or pretends to, or walks away quietly furious. Even when the argument ends in a draw, something has been lost: a bit of goodwill, a layer of trust, an inch of warmth in the relationship.
We see it in how we interact with social media too. Every post we publish is competing for the same finite resource: other people’s attention. And when we scroll, we’re giving that same finite resource away, not to the people we love, not to ourselves, but to whoever’s algorithm is best at capturing it that particular evening. The whole architecture of the modern attention economy is built on the assumption that your attention is a scarce, extractable commodity. And the platforms are extraordinarily good at mining it.
But before any of that, before the screens and the arguments and the dating apps, there was the sibling and the parent and the simple, primal feeling that there wasn’t enough love to go around. That feeling, of scarcity, of competition, of needing to win someone’s attention just to feel okay, is where most of this begins.
How We Learned to Play for Scraps
The tragedy of growing up in a zero-sum attention environment isn’t that it made us mean or selfish. Most children in that situation were just trying to get what they needed. The tragedy is that it wired a particular belief into the nervous system: attention is scarce, you have to compete for it, and not getting enough of it means something is wrong with you.
That belief doesn’t stay in childhood. It follows us into adulthood in ways we rarely recognize as related to anything from our early years. It shows up in how desperate we feel for likes on a post we worked hard on. It shows up in how we sometimes steer conversations toward ourselves without entirely meaning to. It shows up in the way we feel vaguely hollow after a night of scrolling, as though we went looking for something and came back empty-handed.
What were we looking for? The same thing we were always looking for: to be seen. To matter. To receive the attention that tells us we exist and that our existence is worth something.
And so we turn to the modern equivalents of competing for mom’s attention, the apps, the feeds, the arguments we can’t let go of, and we play the same game with the same rules, and we get the same unsatisfying results. The winner feels good for a moment, and then the moment passes, and then there’s another game to play, and another, and another, in an endless loop that the platforms have been designed to keep going indefinitely.
This is the zero-sum trap: it’s self-perpetuating, it’s exhausting, and it never actually delivers what we came for.
There Is Another Kind of Game
In his book Finite and Infinite Games, philosopher James Carse drew a distinction that I keep coming back to. Finite games, he wrote, are played for the purpose of winning. Infinite games are played for the purpose of continuing the play.
A conversation treated as a finite game ends the moment someone wins. A conversation treated as an infinite game has a different goal entirely: not to establish who’s right, but to deepen the understanding between two people enough that they both want to keep talking tomorrow. Marriages, friendships, cultures, these are all infinite games. They don’t have winners and losers. They have players who are committed to keeping the game going, which means they’re willing to lose a point here and there in order to preserve the whole.
There’s also something worth understanding about what actually happens when two people give each other genuine, undivided attention. In neuroscience and psychology, this is sometimes called co-regulation: the phenomenon where two nervous systems in close, attentive contact with one another begin to settle and synchronize. When you’re fully present with another person, and they’re fully present with you, something generative happens. Attention, in this context, doesn’t drain; it circulates. Both people walk away with more than they came with. The pie grows. That’s a non-zero-sum exchange.
Compare that to what happens when you give your attention to a screen. The platform gets your data, your engagement metrics, your time. You get a momentary dopamine response, and then the hollow feeling returns. That’s a zero-sum exchange at best, and often something worse, because you’ve spent something real in exchange for something that doesn’t last.
The oldest version of this lesson, it turns out, was available to us in the very dynamic that created the wound in the first place.
What Mothers Could Change About the World
This is the part I find most fascinating, and the part I want to sit with for a moment before moving on.
When siblings compete for a parent’s attention, the impulse is understandable. They’re acting on scarcity, on fear, on the very human need to feel chosen. But the research on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, one of the most famous thought experiments in game theory, shows us something interesting: when two parties act purely out of self-interest, afraid the other will take more than their share, they often both end up with less than if they had simply cooperated from the start. The zero-sum logic, applied ruthlessly, tends to produce lose-lose outcomes.
Now imagine a mother who understood this deeply enough to teach it: not through lectures about game theory, but through the way she structures the family’s daily experience. A mother who consistently rewards collaboration over competition, who makes clear that her love is not a finite pie to be divided but something that grows in the presence of connection. A mother who models the infinite game, who demonstrates through her own relationships that the goal of a disagreement is not to win, but to keep the relationship alive and generative.
A child raised in that environment learns something profound and rare: that connection is not a competition. That attention, given freely and received fully, doesn’t diminish either party; it expands both of them. That you don’t have to fight to be seen, because you already know what being seen actually feels like, and you know how to offer it to someone else.
That child grows up and moves through the world differently. They’re less likely to spend three hours scrolling in search of something they can’t quite name. They’re less likely to die on the hill of being right in a conversation that doesn’t matter. They’re more likely to play the infinite game, in their relationships, their work, their communities, because they were taught early that the real prize isn’t winning, it’s continuing.
This is not a small thing. It might, in fact, be one of the most significant things a person can teach another person.
The Internal Game Nobody Talks About
Here is where I want to take this somewhere perhaps unexpected, because I think there’s a piece of this conversation that rarely gets addressed.
Before you can play a non-zero-sum game with other people, you have to stop playing a zero-sum game with yourself.
Most of us carry an internal landscape that looks more like a competition than a collaboration. There’s the version of you that wants to rest and the version that insists you should be productive. The version that feels afraid and the version that tells it to stop being so weak. The version that wants to say something true and the version that reminds you what happened last time you did. These parts of us don’t cooperate; they compete, often loudly, for control of the interior conversation. And the energy that competition requires is enormous. It’s exhausting in ways that are hard to account for, because the game is invisible.
And here’s the thing that connects all of this back to the beginning: that internal war is running on attention. Your attention. The same resource that was competed for when you were a child, the same resource that the platforms are extracting from you every time you open an app, is being consumed internally by a zero-sum game between different parts of yourself.
When I discovered somatic work, the practice of turning attention inward and actually being present with what’s there, one of the first things I noticed was how unfamiliar it felt. Not because I was bad at it, but because I had been directing my attention outward for so long, toward screens and conversations and other people’s opinions of me, that the idea of giving it to myself felt almost foreign. Like offering something valuable to someone who hadn’t been expecting it.
But the practice of learning to be present with yourself, to sense what’s actually happening in your body, to acknowledge the stress and the tension and the noise rather than managing around it, is one of the most genuinely non-zero-sum things I know of. Because when you give attention to yourself in that way, something releases rather than accumulates. The internal competition quiets. The parts stop fighting quite so hard. And in that quieter interior, you find that you have more attention available, not less, for the people and experiences around you.
This is what shifts the game, I think, at the deepest level. When you’re no longer operating from a place of internal scarcity, you stop needing to compete for external attention quite so desperately. You stop needing to win the argument to feel okay. You stop needing the likes to feel seen. You already know how to see yourself. And from that place, you can offer genuine attention to someone else without feeling like you’re giving something away.
Playing the Infinite Game
So here’s where this lands for me.
The zero-sum game started early, in circumstances none of us chose. We were small, we needed attention to survive and flourish, and there wasn’t always enough of it distributed the way we needed it to be. That experience shaped something in us, a belief about scarcity, a reflexive impulse to compete, that has followed us into adulthood in ways we’re still untangling.
But the game doesn’t have to stay zero-sum. There is another way to play: one where the goal isn’t to win someone else’s attention but to generate something real in the exchange between two present human beings. One where the goal of a conversation isn’t to be right, but to be in better relationship at the end of it than you were at the beginning. One where the internal war quiets enough that you actually have something to offer the person across from you.
That’s the infinite game. And it starts not with the screens, not with the other people in your life, not even with the sibling you competed with decades ago. It starts with the willingness to turn your own attention inward, to stop giving it away so reflexively, to learn what it feels like to actually receive it yourself, and to discover what becomes possible when you’re no longer playing from scarcity.
Lighter people build a better world. I believe that fully. And this, I think, is part of what it means.
If this resonated and you’re curious about the practice of turning attention inward, and what can shift when you do, the Mindworx method is where I’d suggest starting. You can learn more at tophuman.co/mindworx.
André Crabb is a former Silicon Valley software engineer turned Somatic Energy Engineer. He is the founder of Top Hūman, a somatic energy work practice based in Orange County, California, and trained under Dr. John Amaral.