Editor’s note: I’m extremely lucky to have some younger MSers in my circle that became heavy hitters in a short time and are wise beyond their years. Thanks to one of those, my buddy Will for today’s great post. Enjoy!

I used to be addicted to Destiny 2. During the pandemic, with my first remote job out of college, there wasn’t much else to do. With that game and many MMO-style titles, it can become a part-time job if you’re spiritually unemployed: completing the weekly time-gated challenges, grinding the dungeon for the latest meta weapon, watching raid guides, reading Reddit for tips and tricks. I’m ashamed to say that during certain times I clocked forty hours in a week.

My overarching goal during those years was to complete a raid (a group challenge with puzzles and fighting mechanics) on Day 1, running the activity blind, with no prior information, racing to be the first to complete it for a WWE-style belt.

I eventually found a ragtag group of people and, to my surprise, we skated through the Day 1 raid. It turned out to be comically easy compared to what we’d prepared for and was widely considered the easiest Day 1 raid of all time.

All the hundreds of hours of prep and max-armor grinding, and any Jimmy with an Xbox and a season pass could get carried for the same clout of a Day 1 clear. That realization hit hard. I’d spent years spinning my wheels for a game that, in the end, gave me nothing tangible to show for it. 

Around the same time I fell out of love with Destiny 2, I started looking into credit cards as a young adult with a proper salary. I fell down the standard pipeline of watching YouTubers rank their “GOD TIER TRIFECTAS” (MrBeast thumbnail included) or “5% everywhere setups” (they spend maybe $10K annually on organic spend, by the way). I eventually started reading r/churning daily, subscribing to MEAB, and trying to learn everything I could to the point of obsession. I joined any group I could find and started reading pages and pages of Slack and Discord threads (unknowingly saving myself from future spoon emojis), listening to podcasts, and trying to figure out how to play this new game.

At first, it felt familiar. Destiny and churning had the same penchant for spreadsheets, stacking multipliers, meta builds (plays), and weapon rotations (loops). But instead of flexing to your clanmate on Discord after farming a boss for fifteen hours, now the payoff was seeing the world and doing it for “free”. 

Recently, I was sitting at the restaurant in the Thompson Central Park after getting the free breakfast (thank you, Globalist status – no one should ever pay cash price for the food), and my friend, the same one who introduced me to Destiny 2, looked at me and said, “Man, you really just quit Destiny 2 and started playing this credit card game.”

A concept that often comes up on financial planning and FIRE podcasts is “memory banking.” It always resonated with me because, given my age in the mid-20s, it’s rare that ten years from now all the friends and family I have will still be able or willing to travel. In ten years, my peers might be married with children, and in fifteen years, my parents might not be as healthy or active.

Points have real cash value, and I’m not suggesting you blow your retirement savings on trips. But if you’ve ever run the FIRE calculators (and let’s be honest, if you’re reading this you probably have), ask yourself: would you rather use those points to take a trip with your closest friends, fully present and in the moment, or move your retirement date up by three months?

Some of my favorite award travel redemptions weren’t the craziest “CPP”, but they made a real impact on others:

• Booking flights with 100K Aeroplan for my brother and his girlfriend to return from studying abroad in the Netherlands when cash tickets were $5K
• Redeeming some stranded British Airways Avios (tried to book AA metal like a rookie, pre-deval) so my friend could stay an extra day in Brussels to attend a festival
• Getting (6!) friends to open a few credit cards so we could fly round trip to Japan together for “free”  
• Using my Hyatt and AA miles to fly my brothers and dad to Nashville to see one of their favorite bands of all time
• Booking several back-to-back-to-back-to-back FHR credits to stay for a week somewhere I’d never think possible

When I look back at the time I spent playing Destiny 2, I don’t resent all of it. The game taught me how much fun it is to master systems, learn mechanics, figure out the meta, and chase that feeling of progress.

The systems I once obsessed over for digital trophies now let me build real memories. I still get that same itch to optimize, to min-max, to see ‘number go up’ – but at least now the rewards live off-screen. And that feels like a much better kind of game worth playing.

-Will