I used to play this dice game called 10,000 🎲

We’d play it at my house—the one my brother and I had to ourselves. My friends from high school would come back into town for the holidays, staying at their parents’ places, and then drift over to mine like it was some kind of escape hatch. We’d sit around a table, pass a bong packed with my homegrown weed, and roll dice for hours.

That’s where I started noticing something strange.

Through the fog of being stoned, I remember rolling triple 5s—three dice showing 5, worth 500 points—and just… freezing. I could feel the strategy gears in my head try to turn and then completely jam.

What should I do?

It felt like there was no clear choice.

I could take the 500 points. It’s not bad. It moves you forward. Or I could roll again with the remaining dice and try for more—but risk losing everything I had just earned.

And I did both. Sometimes I’d play it safe and take the points. Other times I’d go for it… and lose the whole turn. I remember that feeling too—the quick drop in your stomach when the dice hit and nothing scores. So much for that turn.

But triple 5s always felt different.

It wasn’t like rolling something obviously bad, or obviously great. It sat right in the middle. Just enough to take. Just risky enough to question. Every time I saw it, I hesitated. Every time, it felt like a trap.

I didn’t realize it then, but I was living my life the exact same way.

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I was smoking weed every day. As much as I wanted. And honestly, it was great. It made everything easier, softer, more interesting. Days flowed into each other in a way that felt… manageable.

It was a solid 500 points.

Not amazing. Not terrible. Just enough.

But underneath that, there was this other feeling. Like I was quietly limiting myself. Like anything more ambitious—school, growth, really showing up for my life—was just slightly out of reach. Not impossible, just… harder than it should be.

And that’s what made it so difficult to change.

Because nothing was wrong.

Taking 500 points isn’t a mistake. You can win the game that way. Slowly, steadily, stacking decent turns. And I told myself that all the time. This is fine. I’m fine. I don’t need to push it.

But it started to feel like a loop. The same turn, over and over again. The same 500 points.

And eventually I had to ask myself something I couldn’t ignore:

How do I actually feel about taking 500 points?

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So I tried to stop.

And it was awful.

It felt like I stopped taking 500 points and immediately started scoring 0. I’d try to push through, to “roll again,” and I’d lose the turn completely. I was emotional, unstable, restless. I needed everything—video games, shows, food, my partner, sleep, space—just to not smoke.

It didn’t feel like growth. It felt like failure.

Like I had given up something that worked just to be worse.

So I went back. Of course I did. Back to 500 points. Back to something that felt stable, predictable, safe.

But the idea didn’t leave me.

That feeling—that triple 5s feeling—kept coming back. That sense that I was stuck in this middle space. Not failing, but not really living the way I wanted to either.

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It took me almost two years to actually commit.

Eventually I joined Marijuana Anonymous. I just knew I couldn’t keep playing the same turn forever.

And then I made it 90 days sober.

That felt like scoring 1,000 points. Like finally getting on the board.

And here’s the thing I didn’t understand before:

Of course all those 500s would have added up to more over that same time period. That’s the safe way to play.

But I didn’t want to just accumulate points.

I wanted to change the way I was playing the game.

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After that, life didn’t suddenly become perfect.

I still had turns where I scored 0. Still do.

But I also started having turns where I scored way more than I ever used to—moments where I showed up for my education, actually grew as a person, built deeper relationships, got to know myself in ways I never had before.

Those weren’t 500-point moments.

Those were the result of being willing to risk losing the turn.

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I don’t think the lesson is that “mediocrity is bad.”

It’s more specific than that.

It’s about that exact feeling—the one you get when something is good enough to stay, but not good enough to feel proud of. That middle space where leaving feels dramatic, but staying feels quietly disappointing.

The curse of the triple 5s isn’t that it’s a bad roll.

It’s that it makes you hesitate.

It makes you question whether you should risk anything at all.

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For a long time, I kept taking the 500.

Now, I’m just trying to play differently.

Even if that means sometimes I roll… and lose everything.