I recently opened a book I first read 35 years ago: Games People Play by Eric Berne. As a rookie manager, I found it helpful in many ways, and much of the learning from it was helpful throughout my career. Coming back to it with a mindfulness perspective, I joined a few dots I missed the first time round.
The essence of the book is around how people spend their time, and why they engage in certain behaviours. Much of what we do is habitual – in mindfulness terms we would say we are in automatic pilot. There are certain common patterns that emerge. Berne divides social behaviour into three categories: pastimes, games and intimacy. Intimacy is only touched on briefly towards the end of the book, and it is cited as the route out of habitual behaviour, and it is this that makes more sense to me now as a mindfulness practitioner.
Pastimes are mostly harmless rituals that enable us to fill our time with others in a safe and often pleasant way. The famous English ritual is to talk about the weather. Pastimes are useful for structuring social engagement, and can be a safe preamble to other interactions. The pay off from pastimes is social recognition, and can often be a pleasant way of filling time.
Games are a little more challenging. In a game one or more people are looking for a pay off, often at the expense of others. What makes games particularly challenging in a social context is that we often engage in them without being consciously aware that it is a game, and who is playing for what purpose. Sometimes we engage in a game consciously – let’s take buying a car. The salesperson’s pay-off is a sale with a profit (or maybe to get rid of a troublesome car). The buyer’s pay-off is a new car that is better than the one they have. The game usually starts with some pleasant rituals, which enable the salesperson to make an assessment of the buyer – how are you, what brought you here, would you like a cup of coffee, etc.. A shrewd buyer thinks carefully before committing, making sure they are not being convinced to buy more than they want. With luck, the game ends in a win-win with the buyer getting the car they want at a fair price, and the salesperson making some profit.
Games, alas, can get quite out of hand, and become dangerous. At their most extreme they can be very harmful and even fatal. In a social context, various forms of abuse are games. The courts are full of stories that are examples of complex and harmful games. The most dangerous game of all is war. It is not trivialising to see these as games – there are multiple players, often seeking conflicting outcomes, and willing to inflict harm in order to achieve their goals, quite often blind to the full consequences of their actions. What is most difficult is that the players usually do not understand they are in a game, and will continue playing until the stakes are high.
Berne ends with the briefest of chapters, just one paragraph long: “After Games, What?”. The stand out sentence is: “For certain fortunate people there is something that transcends all classifications of behaviour, and that is awareness; something which rises above the programming of the past, and that is spontaneity; and something that is more rewarding than games, and that is intimacy.”
Mindfulness training is (for me at least) a training in intimacy, with myself and with the people I live and work with. I still have plenty pastimes and games to entertain me, but I know better how to navigate the world, to be more open and honest with myself and others, and also when to keep quiet or withdraw from a situation when there is nothing productive or useful I can do. I have begun to understand the patterns of my thinking, how they have developed, and how they might change.
How does this play out in daily life? Suppose a friend moans about an acquaintance. A pastime might become a joint moaning about people in general. A game would arise when your friend starts to run down the acquaintance and you either agree or actively disagree. An intimate response might be to ask your friend how they feel about it. Usually our responses to such situations are automatic, but there can be more than one response with different outcomes. The best and most valid response in some situations might be to stay at the pastime level – you might not be ready for intimacy in that situation with that particular friend.
Mindfulness gives you more choice in how you spend your time, and encourages you to take a broader perspective. An MBSR course has an exercise where you are invited to write down a list of activities in a typical day, then to mark them as nourishing or depleting. I remember the first time I did that exercise, the bulk of my day was depleting. The exercise helped me become aware of how wearing life had become, and I took steps over the next year to re-balance my life and have a greater proportion of nourishing activities.
Berne’s book addresses how the majority of us spend most of our time: in pastimes and games. He gives a big hint, without saying how to achieve it, that awareness is a route out of this into a more rewarding and spontaneous life. Becoming more aware of our habitual tendencies is a starting point, and if you are curious about social psychology Berne’s book is a great starting point. Mindfulness practice helps with how to move on from habitual behaviour, and helps us see our life in greater perspective.
So, the question is, how much of your day is in automatic pilot, in pastimes and games, and how much is fully aware? You don’t need to read Berne’s book, but you might want to reflect how much time you spend in activities that are depleting, and how you might increase the time you spend on nourishing activities.
