Life Tokens by Allison E. '27

When I was younger, one of my favorite board games to play with my family was “The Game of Life.” It’s a bit like the mobile game BitLife, I suppose. You start as a young adult, and walk along the pathways of life–choosing a career, getting married, having kids, getting promoted (or fired), buying a house, and eventually retiring. The goal is to collect as much money as possible over the course of your life. There’s a bunch of different squares that you might land on–some are “payday” squares, some are “lawsuit” squares, and some just involve random actions like paying taxes or donating to a charity. Sometimes, though, you land on a “LIFE” square. Each of these squares represents an interesting life experience–maybe you visit the Grand Canyon, maybe you host a family reunion, maybe you break a world record. 

The 2007 version that my family has :D

Actual life tokens!

Previous Next

More importantly, though, when you land on these squares, you also get to pick up a life token⁠01 i just googled this and found out i’ve been calling it the WRONG NAME for the last YEAR. apparently it’s actually called a life TILE?!? which is a patently inferior term. i refuse to use that name, so i will continue to refer to these as life tokens , which you cash out at the end of the game in exchange for money–$10,000, $20,000, even $50,000, equivalent to the payday salary of a “computer designer” in-game.

The reason that The Game of Life has to quantify life experiences as money is just game mechanics– the game rules determine the winner by amount of money.⁠02 there’s definitely a boatload of social commentary to unpack here But I think it’s a value system that has truth even outside the rules of the game.

Right now, while we’re young, there’s plenty of short term gain from interesting life experiences–joy, new knowledge, friendship, etc. Sixty years from now, though, the ability to look back on all the interesting life experiences we’ve had will be all the more valuable to us when we’re all retired, our friends and family have dispersed, and our bodies are too worn out to do much. If/when I turn 80, how much money would I give up to have the memories and experience of cooking a sixteen-dish Thanksgiving with ten college friends? Honestly, probably at least $2,000. How much to have dragged 24 pumpkins through the streets of Boston? Maybe $300. How much to have investigated possible arson in Burton-Conner after a 4:00 am fire alarm? Probably at least $500. 

I’ve spent the past year or so living by this philosophy. Shenanigans are worth it not only for the joy in the moment, but also for the value of their memories later in life. It’s led me to incredible tomfoolery–building a snow fort at 3:00 am, howling at the moon in Central Park, chasing the aurora at Tufts on a random Thursday. Each of these memories is worth more to me than most of the objects I own, but we don’t have a good system to value experiences the way we do objects. So I think about them as life tokens, and I collect as many as I can.

P.S. I once convinced a friend, Ojas G. ‘27, to snort a line of li-hing powder⁠03 a powerfully sweet and tangy plum powder that we put on gummies, apples, and everything else in Hawaii. you either love it or hate it using the life token argument. At first, we were going to pay him $5 to do it, but I managed to convince him that it would be worth at least $100 in life tokens when he was retired and reliving the good old days, and he agreed to do it. I stand by the truth of that claim. He might not 😆