When I was ten years old, on a long flight back to the Middle East, I invented something I called the Game. It started as a way to pass time- a bored child’s attempt to make a fourteen-hour flight feel shorter. But slowly, it grew into a meditative habit, almost a ritual. The Game had one rule: pick any object near you and think about how it came to exist.

The first time, I looked down at my airplane seat. It was narrow, maybe eighteen inches wide. I imagined teams of engineers debating the optimal dimensions, the cost of materials, the ideal incline to prevent back pain. Someone else must have designed the upholstery pattern that covered those 18-inch-wide cushions. And somewhere along the line, another team thought it was a good idea to embed the TV remote into the armrest. (Even at ten, I knew this was a mistake. Too many elbows involved).

From there, my mind wandered outward. I thought about how many decisions were involved in designing, producing, and implementing the seatbelts, the safety cards, the flight attendants’ uniforms, and those comically-tiny peanut packets. Every object seemed to hold a thousand invisible stories, thousands of choices intersecting to produce this one ordinary moment, me fidgeting in seat 27B somewhere over the Atlantic.

This exercise can also yield some fun questions: Why are the windows round? Why peanuts? Why are so many people drinking tomato juice?

To play the Game well, you must effectively think about the world as one big group project. An incredible amount of people (i.e., group members) had to work together to create every object that you are currently looking at. Eventually, the list of group members you come up with grows so exhaustive that it includes the Wright brothers, the CEO of Boeing, the inventor of pretzels, the humans who helped decipher the foundational mathematics needed for air travel, and that one guy on the runway in his Hi vis vest.

I would keep playing the Game until my flight was over, I got bored, or I got to Adam and Eve.