Nineteen Beans: A Game About Your Life
What are your REAL priorities?
This week at Living Elsewhere, I am continuing to innovate. In fact, today I am presenting something radically different: a game. I am attempting to combine my two favorite ph-words: philosophy and phun! OK, well, you get the idea.
I spend a lot of time thinking about well-being, and have even developed a couple of theoretical frameworks that explore the topic. But people generally don’t get excited about theoretical frameworks—they get excited about games (especially if thrones are also involved). Therefore, I have devised an activity called Nineteen Beans, which is a game about priorities. I hope you will try it.
The premise
We all have to prioritize on a daily basis: “If I watch another episode, will I get enough sleep?” “What’s more important, getting this report finished by 9 AM or going to my daughter’s recital?” “Do I really need to visit my family for Christmas?” And so on. We make judgment calls as they emerge.
But how often do you think about what all your macro-level priorities are? If I gave you exactly twenty categories, how hard would it be for you to say which ones are the most important in your life? That’s what we’re going to do here.
I believe that one aspect of achieving well-being is getting clarity on what our priorities really are, so that we make good decisions about how to spend our time and our energy.
This game, Nineteen Beans, is all about limited resources. This is something that people (and when I say people, I especially mean Americans) generally hate to think about. Why? Because one of the foundational myths of modern society is that you can have it all. If you aren’t able to achieve everything, the thinking goes, you simply need to become more efficient. This argument is debunked beautifully by Oliver Burkeman in his book Four Thousand Weeks, so I won’t spend time doing so here.
The fact that really should be obvious is this: We humans have a finite amount of time on this planet, and we have a finite amount of energy and attention to apply to things. Therefore, the number of things that can be the focus of our energy and attention is necessarily limited. Nineteen Beans is about exploring how we want to use our limited resources.
The game
The game is very simple. In fact, some will argue that it is not really a game, since there is no obvious winner. But I would disagree—I say that anyone who gets even a small increase in clarity on their values by doing this exercise wins. So why not give it a try?
All you need is two things: A printed copy of the game board (see below for the downloadable PDF) and nineteen beans.1 Now, when I say “beans”, I really mean anything that works well as a counter. I personally use coffee beans, which I happen to have on hand, and which smell nice. But you could use dried chickpeas, lentils, black beans, or anything similar—or even post-it flags or coins if that’s what you have a lot of. Just make sure that you have nineteen of them per person and that they all represent the same value. Heck, you could even use a pencil and eraser, and just draw on the game board.
Here are the rules (which are also conveniently printed on the second page of the PDF):
If more than one person is playing, each player should have their own board.
You have 19 beans; you must place all of them on the board.
You must place 0–5 beans on each of the 20 categories.
You must place 3 beans on at least one category.2
Place the beans based on how important each category is for you personally. Refer to this scale:
5 beans = this is of paramount importance to me
4 beans = this is extremely important to me
3 beans = this is very important to me
2 beans = this is clearly important to me
1 bean = this is somewhat important to me
0 beans = this is honestly not a priority for me
Make sure that the categories with more beans really are higher priorities than those with fewer beans. You will not be able to put beans on all of the categories, so you will need to think about which ones to let go of.
Once you are done, look for any patterns you can find in your choices. If you are playing with others, compare your boards and discuss what similarities and differences you see—in how many categories were prioritized, and which ones they are. What do you think the results say about you as a person?
As you will soon see when you try this, this exercise is all about deciding what to say “no” to. This can be very painful at first (it is for me, too), but pushing through the discomfort and saying “actually, this isn’t so important to me” is exactly what helps to clarify your values.
The game board
Let’s go over the categories on the game board. I want to say right now that this is version 1.0 of the game, and I may well update it in the future based on your feedback. But with that said, I think it does a fairly good job of covering the main areas of importance in people’s lives.
There are twenty categories. Given the rules, you will only be able to choose between 5 and 17 of these, but those are extreme outcomes, and it’s much more likely that you will choose 7—10 categories.
Ultimately, you should feel free to interpret each category as makes sense for you, but here I will explain my understanding of them:
Spirituality: Spirituality of any sort, from organized religion to one’s own relationship to the cosmos
Transcendence: Attempts to access the sublime; the search for peak experiences; transcendence through art
Growth: Development as a person, including maturation and self-work of all kinds (personally I would put meditation here)
Learning: Education, intellectual development, and the acquisition of knowledge
Creativity: Any activities that are generative in nature and draw on your creativity
Beauty: Aesthetics and the experience of beauty in any form, whether that be natural forms, design, visual art, music, scents, tastes, etc.
Nature: Anything concerning either direct experience of the natural world, including plants and animals, or the well-being of the planet
Health: Personal physical and psychological well-being, however you define it
Vitality: Physical activity engaged in for pleasure, whether that be running, kayaking, yoga, hiking, weight-lifting, etc. (exercise can go either here or under Health, depending on how you feel about it)
Sex: Sexuality defined broadly, including not just physical sex but also flirtation, attraction, and aesthetic self-maintenance (I would actually put here anything related to the industry known as Beauty)
Enjoyment: Physical or intellectual activities engaged in purely for pleasure, ranging from TV to comedy to crossword puzzles to fine dining
Hobbies: Any optional activities that take a lot of time but don’t pay off monetarily, whether that be sports, music, birdwatching, carpentry, sewing, etc.
Service: All activities that are intended to help other people (outside the family), whether at the personal level or the societal level
Friendships: Establishing and maintaining close relationships with people outside the family
Community: Establishing and maintaining ties with the people around you as a network of interdependent individuals and associations; this is different from Friendships in that these relationships need not be intimate
Family: Forming, nurturing, and maintaining a family unit, however you define that; also, ties with non-immediate family members
Career: Work that you see as not just for money, but that forms an important narrative about your own life and identity
Status: Anything that allows you to feel like an important person in society or your peer group
Power: The ability to influence others, however you define it (from dominating competitors to smashing the patriarchy)
Wealth: Making money, either for the sake of having money, or for the security and options that it brings
There are probably some activities that are not too easy to place under one of these categories. For example, building a house could fall under Family, Hobbies, Career, Service, Learning, or Status, depending on how you conceptualize the project. Someone who loves animals might relate that to Nature, Hobbies, or Family, depending on the nature of the connection. And what about reading? Depending on what you read, it could fall under Learning, Growth, Enjoyment, Beauty, or Transcendence, at least.
How to play
I would like to propose two different ways of playing Nineteen Beans.
One way is to do the activity by yourself. Here is a suggestion:
Start by placing your nineteen beans according to the rules, but as you feel you SHOULD place them. In other words, allow all of your inner voices and social shame to come to the fore and tell you where you should dedicate your energies. Take a photo of the result.
Then, paying attention to where you feel resistance, move the beans around (still according to the rules) until you feel that you have better represented what truly feels like your priorities. Take a picture of this, too. Then you can compare the two photos and think about whether there is anything in your life that you would like to change.
Another way is to play the game with someone else. Make sure you have printed one game board for each person. Proceed as follows:
Each person should place their nineteen beans according to what feels right for them, not looking at what the other is doing until everyone is finished.
Then, spill the beans! Compare your boards, looking for similarities or differences in terms of:
How many categories were prioritized
Which categories were chosen
Where on the board these tend to cluster
Any categories with radically different numbers of beans
Discuss what was difficult about the exercise and which categories you feel most conflicted about. Does comparing your results make you want to change yours? Does the way you placed your beans suggest anything about changes that you might like to make in your life?
You may have noticed that on the game board, the categories are printed in different colors. This represents five major “clusters” of categories based on the relationships that I see among them. In addition, the placement of the individual categories on the board is also significant, in that I have tried to put related ones near each other as much as possible. This means that looking at the “geography” of your results might possibly lead to some insights.
The ultimate goal
As should be apparent by now, this is more of a philosophical exercise than a game. But my hope is that it will still prove to be a bit phun. I can imagine couples doing this together, or a parent doing it with a son or daughter. It could even be used as a party game among good friends, to spark discussion. (If anyone finds a way to turn it into a drinking game, I’d love to hear about it.)
Here you can download the game board and instructions, US version:
Here you can download the game board and instructions, rest-of-world version:
I hope you will find Nineteen Beans to be both phun and phascinating! I would be happy to get your pheedback, including any suggestions for improvement or any reports of how it proved to be phulphilling.
It’s perfectly OK to print the game board in black and white; I’ve tested it, and it works fine. The only thing you lose is the colored clusters, but those aren’t essential.
You may be wondering about the need for this rule. It serves three purposes. First, it prevents someone from putting one bean on each of 19 categories. Second, something must be “very important” to you, and this forces you to say what it is. Third, this way there can’t be too great a gap between the category with the most beans and the one with the fewest (2 rather than 4). I know, clever, right?
The concept of limited resources and having to allocate them is quite familiar to people with debilitating chronic diseases — called there the “spoon theory”. You get up in the morning, with a number of spoons - say 12 which represent a days energy after a good night’s sleep - and you have to decide what you’re going to do without exhausting yourself. Showering is 2 spoons, dressing and just brushing your teeth might be 1 spoons. Do you not shower and save a spoon to cook a meal later? Life is entirely about this on the micro and macro levels.
This is an interesting game, although I would rather play it as a thought experiment. The categories seem to be overlapping too much, but that is my subjective experience and my redefinitions probably wouldn’t work for others. The idea that I might unintentionally ignore some categories because I prioritize others is one I’d like to explore more. Overall: great post!