Hume must have been really good at backgammon.
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher in the Enlightenment period. Beyond his influence in philosophical empiricism, such as famously pointing out that humans are biased to assuming the future will resemble the past, he’s also known for a beautiful quote that goes as follows:
“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? … I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.
(…) I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
I love this quote. It’s a little weapon I like to poke people with whenever anyone starts getting angsty and isolated from the world.
My partner Shashvat loves this quote too. Currently we’re long-distance, so we’ve been having virtual dates over Zoom; date-planning tends to be about finding a new online game to play.
One day I proposed that we run a date completely inspired by Hume’s legendary quote, and both of us were immediately thrilled by the idea.
The itinerary would be as follows:
- Discuss our deepest, darkest fears.
- Dine. (Eat food.)
- Play online backgammon.
- Return to our fears and examine our emotions towards them.
The day of our date arrived, and we logged onto Zoom and started trading fears like we were trading jokes.
“I’m scared of spiders.”
“I’m scared of the death of my family members.”
We spent way too long on the fears bit. I was insistent on uncovering more and more fears, boring into the gnarliest parts of our psyches – perhaps I was trying to dig ourselves into a hole, much like Hume had to emerge out of, or perhaps I was unwittingly trying to do some psychology research. Our food was long eaten and yet I kept twisting the knife, until finally, we wrenched ourselves from the pretty depressing conversation and decided to start on backgammon.
Backgammon is a relatively simple game to pick up. It predates chess and has less rules. You try to move your pieces from one end of the board to another, and dice are rolled to determine how many steps you can move. Much of the strategy is about making aggressive moves to capture your opponent’s pieces, or defensive moves to block your opponent from moving.
Shashvat and I had agreed to do minimal prep work beforehand to learn the rules of the game. I watched a WikiHow video on the rules, and a video by a backgammon grandmaster about ‘efficiency in backgammon’. This led me to the self-assured conclusion that I understand how the game works now.
I lost all the games we played. I was peeved.
To his credit, Shashvat was trying to talk through the moves and play somewhat collaboratively, but I was having none of it. I just wanted to battle him and look steely and silent in the process, like Anya Taylor Joy in The Queen’s Gambit (a show I’ve not watched).
But I kept losing. From my little soft ‘peace-loving’ heart arose this bitter competitiveness that I’d tried to avoid for most of my life. The more I tried to make moves that I thought were right, the more the anger when those moves didn’t work out.
After we stopped playing backgammon that date, I was so tense and annoyed that I couldn’t go back to being affectionate, and as we talked about it I did a classic Joy move and cried tears of frustration.
Not quite an ideal date in the end. We reflected on this together. In my half-exasperated humour, I said, “How the hell does Hume find this game to be relaxing?”
It turns out I’m just a sore loser. That, or Hume was whooping ass at backgammon.
joy wang 
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