The Game Nobody Told You About

A comic book for young people building their own lives, and for the parents and family who want to give them a head start early

I watched a child go through twelve years of school. Then I watched what came out the other side.

Not one child. Several, over the years, including my own. Good kids, capable kids, in a system that taught them almost everything except the one thing they would actually need the day the system let go of them. Nobody handed them a rulebook for what comes after graduation. Nobody told them there even was a new game starting. I didn’t know, at the time, what I know now. I couldn’t give my own children this before they walked out that door. So I built the thing I wished someone had given them, and I’m giving it to them now, as they start building their adult lives. That’s where this book came from.

It’s called “The Game Nobody Told You About.” It opens exactly where that gap opens. A kid graduates. Everyone celebrates. Then the panel changes and it’s just them, alone in a kitchen, laptop open, a door in front of them that says ADULT LIFE and a sign next to it that says ORIENTATION: NONE. No rulebook. No teacher. No winning move posted on the wall. That’s the whole premise in three pages, and it’s not a metaphor. It’s what actually happens.

The most important image in the book isn't the opening. It's chapter four. You already trust three signals without a second thought: thirsty, so you drink. Hungry, so you eat. Tired, so you sleep. Nobody taught you to debate these. The signal arrives, you act.

That same signal runs behind everything else too, just quieter and much easier to override. A drink that tasted a little off in year one tastes normal by year two, and by year five the person can't feel anything wrong at all. The signal was never missing. It just stopped being heard.

That’s the actual argument the whole book makes. Not “here are rules for living well.” A kid doesn’t need more rules. They already have plenty, and most of them came from a TV, a set of textbooks, and adults who meant well but installed an operating system in them without ever asking whether it fit. What they need is a way to feel, on their own, whether something is working for them or draining them, without anyone telling them first. Not a checklist. Not a coach they have to keep coming back to. Something they carry with them into every kitchen table, every job, every relationship, for the rest of their life, without ever needing the book again. That’s the only kind of tool worth giving a young person. One that makes you obsolete.

I designed this for young adults who just finished school, standing exactly where that kid in chapter one is standing. But I don’t think it should wait until then. A parent, a grandparent, an older sibling, anyone a child actually trusts, doesn't just hand over this book and step back. They can ask, in an ordinary moment, how it actually feels to be on the phone right now. And ask again, differently, after a walk outside. Not as a lesson. As a question about something the child is already feeling and has never been asked to notice. That’s the whole transmission. Not a rule about screen time. A habit of checking in with a signal that’s running whether anyone names it or not. Do that often enough, in enough ordinary moments, and the child grows up already fluent in something most adults spend years relearning.

None of this is fully in any one adult's hands. What a child does with a signal, once they can feel it, was never ours to control. But putting the instrument in their hands early, before the years that actually cost something, is ours to do. A habit built now instead of relearned at forty can be the difference between years of struggle and years actually lived. That’s not a small thing to hand someone. It might be the best gift available.

If there’s a child in your life, six years old and up: you won't walk the road for them, and you were never meant to. You can still make sure they don't walk it deaf to their own signal..

The book is here: https://www.awarelife.co.il/product-page/the-game-nobody-told-you-about