If you want to change your life without having a total identity crisis, you need to start treating your major life decisions like a game.

Changing who you are—like switching careers or moving across the world—is usually incredibly stressful and 'expensive' for the brain. This paper argues that adopting a 'ludic' or play-like mindset changes the math of that transition. Instead of your brain seeing the change as a threat to your very existence, 'playing' makes the psychological cost linear instead of exponential. It allows you to test-drive new versions of yourself without the fear of a coherence crisis. Essentially, the secret to successfully reinventing yourself is to never take the process too seriously.