The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game

A lot of the time, we don't know the real reason we're doing something. I had been telling myself that climbing was making me fitter, and that I was learning some skills. But in retrospect, what I actually loved was how it felt to be climbing. It was an experience of my own grace, a rare taste of loveliness flowing through my bones and fingers. And it was the fact that my life suddenly had rowdy road trips and drunk bonfires in it. I came back from climbing weekends cheerful, refreshed. Climbing made me feel complete.

And here's the strangest thing: What I truly loved was a feeling, a loving involvement with the difficulty of the physical world, that went far beyond the simple goals of climbing. But I also couldn't have found that feeling without that scoring system. The game of climbing has a very specific definition of success: You have succeeded if you get to the top. And the scoring system also tells you, over the course of a climbing life, that you should be trying to climb ever-more difficult climbs. This gave me a focus. It shaped a very specific kind of activity; without that goal, I would never have paid enough attention to my body, never would have refined my movement enough, to discover a pure joy in movement.

Given just a rock wall, there's no particular reason for a modern, tool-using human to try to move up a particular line of tiny holds using nothing but their hands and feet. But climbing is a game that tells you what to do; it forces you to take one hard pathway up the rock, and it tells you that it will count as a success only if you follow the rules—if you climb the rock using only your hands and feet on the rock itself. And it tells you to keep trying harder and harder climbs.

This structure forced me to tune in to how I was moving. It keyed me into a new form of beauty. It gave me a richer form of freedom than I had anywhere else in my life. It showed me the way to a new kind of agency.

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I'M A PHILOSOPHY PROFESSOR NOW. There is, in my profession, a single list of all the major philosophy departments, ranked by prestige. There is another list of all the philosophy journals you could publish in, also ranked by prestige. These are the scoring systems of philosophy.

Nobody is forcing people to use these systems. They're just a pair of websites, each compiled by a small group of professionals, based on some annual surveys. In the end, they're just a summary of a few people's subjective impressions of status. We could have just as well decided to ignore them; they have no official authority. But that's not what happened. Most professional philosophers pay intense, close, and regular attention to these lists. Most of us know exactly how we're doing on the rankings.

I didn't care about those rankings when I first fell in love with philosophy. I didn't even know about them. I got into the field because I was obsessed with some big, weird old questions. I wanted to understand the meaning of life, and where it came from. I wanted to know if there was any kind of objective morality. I wanted to know if beauty was real, if art actually mattered, or if it was all just a con. And I wanted to know why we trusted ourselves—our ability to reason, our moral instincts.

I loved the conversations I was having with other people, trying to figure these things out: late nights out with other philosophy majors, gleefully shouting at each other and scribbling logic diagrams on napkins. My parents wanted me to be a doctor or a lawyer or a programmer, something real. But I couldn't give up on these huge questions. My parents thought I was throwing away my chance at a safe and productive career.

I went to graduate school in philosophy precisely because I loved those wild, unmanageable questions. Then the stupidest thing happened. I met those rankings and they got under my skin. But the questions I loved weren't what got you into those highly ranked journals and departments. If you wanted to do well on the rankings, you had to write small, precise articles on fairly arcane technical questions. So, over the years, I stopped chasing the questions I cared about. I spent all my energy trying to climb those rankings. And all my joy in philosophy started draining away.

I don't think I would have cared nearly so much about status without the brutal clarity of the rankings. Before the rankings, I certainly wanted some respect, but only from very specific people: the particular philosophers I thought were cool. Before the rankings, my desires were grounded in my own sense of what mattered. But that wasn't what was in the rankings. The rankings represent the summarized views of other people—people who had been designated as supposed authorities by some other supposed authorities. I didn't actually trust anybody involved with the ranking process. But the fact that all their opinions had been aggregated into a single, clear ranking—a ranking that everybody knew about—made them powerful. The rankings compressed a mess of human opinions into a single neat score. That clarity sucked me into caring about something I'd never cared about before: the average respect of the whole profession.