Don't Forget About Play
How to not keep yourself in a cage of expectations and bring more playfulness.
Birds in cages next to a cafe in Hanoi, Vietnam. © Marcin Konkel . All rights reserved.
Are You Sure This Is What You Want?
In today's world increasingly dominated by AI, people delegate writing, creating images, or decisions about their future to machines, leaving for themselves activities such as doing laundry, cleaning, or chores they dislike1. Something went wrong here. Where is the creativity or playfulness in all this?
"Playfulness" is defined in Cambridge Dictionary as: ”the quality of being funny and not serious.”
“Play” on the other hand as “Spending time doing an enjoyable and/or entertaining activity.”
For the purposes of this article, we'll expand this definition. We'll understand play (or playfulness, which I will use interchangeably) as activities that bring you joy and which you don't do for any purpose other than following your own curiosity. Like when you were a child and suddenly remembered you were hungry after immersing yourself in a book, game, or bike ride, without purpose but according to what your intuition suggested.
Over time, as we emerge from childhood toward responsibility, it seems we deprive ourselves of play. The older we get, the more we look at things in terms of their usefulness and efficiency.
We use creativity or play within designated and acceptable frameworks in our environment. Like being (too) serious at work as we feel nothing else is accepted. What's worse - we consume more (Netflix, articles, emotions, other people's thoughts) than we create ourselves. So do we really need more play manifesting itself as more lightness, a state of flow uninterrupted by the external world, which we remember from childhood when something fascinated us.
If you don't carry this longing within you, stop reading and use your time elsewhere. If, on the contrary - I invite you to continue reading.
Play Doesn't Like Boundaries, But Creativity Does
In a world where all corporations talk about KPIs, goals, and productivity gurus teach the next techniques to squeeze more out of every second, we forget about play. We also forget that time management is really about energy management since it's not possible to work with full concentration for more than about 4 hours a day2. But that's a topic for another post.
Returning to play - it's essential for our creativity. It's difficult, if not impossible, to turn on creativity when you create a tight framework of expectations around it. Especially regarding desired effects or the quality. It's like going out on the street with a camera and expecting that after a 15-minute walk, you'll take a photo worthy of a Magnum agency3 photographer. Similarly, when we allocate 30 minutes or an hour to paint a picture or simply decide to do something creative. It's burdened from the start with the expectation that something must happen, something must come of it. Creativity that comes from play breaks out of these patterns.
At the same time, creativity likes constraints in certain respects. For example, time frames for creativity can work when we give ourselves a certain problem to solve. Then our mind, adapting, looks for ways that fit this criterion. We then use our brain’s capacity to find new perspectives in a given narrative.
The ideal solution seems to be combining creativity and play, which can help achieve a state of "flow". Exploring the concept of "flow", Mihály Csíkszentmihályi began with play, though it quickly went beyond this concept ending with work:
"The best moments of life are not those passive or relaxing ones – though these can be pleasant if we've worked for them. True happiness appears when the body or mind is maximally engaged in voluntary effort to achieve something difficult and valuable."
Another conclusion, particularly important in our topic, is:
"To overcome the anxieties and depression of modernity, people must become independent of social rewards and punishments. They must learn to produce satisfaction independently. Happiness is a state that must be prepared, nurtured, and protected."
Today's culture of constantly achieving more and more definitely works against this principle by creating new rules, focusing us on following consumerism, instead of directing us toward ourselves and our needs. Maybe instead of generating another image through Midjourney, try drawing it yourself, however imperfectly?
Nurturing Happiness
Today, taking care of happiness and play means for me:
Following my intuition, instead of what everyone is shouting about.
Allowing myself to create imperfect first drafts, instead of Instagram-like idealized creations.
Not evaluating work before it's finished, as it takes away concentration from what's in front of us.
Having no expectations about the effects of this work - sometimes getting rid of direction can give us much more than we could create with a goal "hanging" in front of us. It's pure exploration of what comes. Goals are useful, but they have their specific context, like in business or working towards a particular skill. Though this too can be debated if useful.
Being more in the body than in your head - avoiding excessive complication, feeling the direction instead of inventing the direction, or creating overly logical concepts around it.
Following what brings you joy - instead of looking for practicality or usefulness in everything you want to do.
The last point was particularly important to me. This might be learning a foreign language purely for your own pleasure, instead of one that will increase your advantage in the job market. For me that was Indonesian.
It can also be reading sci-fi books when everyone around you is constantly absorbed in professional literature. It's also taking care of your garden when everyone else is posting photos from yet another surfing trip to a popular destination or visiting yet another trendy café.
To clarify - nothing wrong with either, the key here is following yourself and not others. If your passion is discovering new dishes, you appreciate well-designed cafes that recently appeared in your neighborhood and doing it from your own motivations - great. Keep it up.
A few additional examples of play in practice:
Take a different route to work than you always take and pay attention to something different each time - plants, animals, change your walking pace.
Start playing music before online meetings for 1-2 minutes - I've been experimenting with this for years and it nicely engages groups in the meeting.
Start drawing without judgment and without expectations of what should come out. Most people have resistance or claim they can't. Enter into it without expectations.
Burned-Out Richard
This reminds me of the story of Richard Feynman, who was known for his approach through play and humor to serious topics.4 After finishing work on the Manhattan Project, Feynman experienced professional burnout and lost his passion for physics. During this period, one day while sitting in the cafeteria at Cornell University, he noticed someone tossing a plate in the air. He was intrigued by the way the plate wobbled as it fell, specifically the university logo that was on it - it seemed to wobble faster than the plate itself.
Feynman began to wonder about the mathematical relationship between the plate's wobbling speed and its spinning speed. This simple, joyful observation of an everyday phenomenon rekindled his interest in physics. He began engaging with science again "for fun," not out of a sense of duty or treating it as work.
This approach of following his own curiosity without pressure led Feynman to work on quantum electrodynamics, for which he later received the Nobel Prize. Feynman himself often emphasized the importance of play in his approach to science, saying he "plays with physics" instead of working on it.
It’s important to remember that play is also important when you are starting a new business. Without deriving joy and play from the process and only seeing money as the result you will likely burn-out fast. The best products are created from fascination with the problem instead of pure focus on the outcome or money.
Notice I did not mention “passion” in creating a business but a fixation on the problem and playing with it. Let's return to photography - it's easy to lose passion for it when taking wedding photos for the umpteenth time (that's where the money usually is), if weddings aren't what originally excited you about photography. Again, it’s an easy way to start disliking your hobby. In such cases private projects that you do for your own pleasure become important so that passion doesn't die but has its outlet.
Worth Thinking About
I hope I've managed to convince you to think a little bit more about the meaning of play in your life. Before you impose more goals on yourself again and relentlessly demand their realization - ask yourself these questions:
What things entertained and fascinated you in childhood that you miss today?
How can you introduce elements of play into contexts where you already function? What would that mean in practice?
How can you add a little bit of play into your daily chores? e.g. dancing when cleaning your apartment, creating a game with your own rules on how you clean
Where and how should you create and tend to your space for play? All without purpose and for your own pure entertainment.
What has always fascinated you, made you curious but you were always neglecting it because of impracticality or seeing as nonsensical?
There is nothing wrong in doing these actions or liking them. They are used as examples of activities people tend to dread.
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