(The following post is really only the start of a question I hope to explore further at some point. In the meantime, here’s a stab at wondering whether contemporary [US] adults are any good at play, or maybe just at enjoying themselves.)
There were a few fantastically rare occasions in college when, sitting on the roof of a friend’s dorm, we would throw down the challenge to get from word or phrase A to B to C within the space of, say, six sentences, the collection of which should result in a coherent narrative. So you knew you’d somehow have to start with the Warsaw Pact, move along to a bread bag, and finish with Josephine Baker. The miraculous thing was that no one ever gave up, and no one was criticized for what they came up with. Less miraculous is the fact that I can remember neither a single example of one of those tales, nor who excelled or bombed at making sense of their impromptu prompts. What I do recall, and can even feel, is the sense of easy laughter, the lack of concern about having anywhere else we needed or wanted to be, anything else we needed to be doing. The game would arise spontaneously, and at some other point, just merge into conversation.
I’ve managed a few times since then to wrangle other friends to join in a game of exquisite corpse, in which everyone writes a sentence on their respective piece of paper and passes it on to the next person. Another sentence is added, and before the page gets passed on again, it’s folded in such a way that only the most recently written sentence is visible, with space beneath it for the next person to add on. The write-and-pass sequence continues until everyone’s had at least one chance to contribute to every page, and until the pages are full, at which point everyone reads aloud the results of whatever happens to have landed in their hands. The outcome is often strangely lucid and frequently hilarious, a combination of the reader struggling to speak through laughter at what she realizes she’ll have to read and the hearers going into giggles thanks to sheer contagion, even before the unintentionally comedic lines have been spoken.
But it’s been a while, and I wonder whether it’s due to something more than the fact that not everyone loves storytelling, or that you just have to have the right crowd, or that the further you move into midlife, the harder it is to get friends together, period. There are probably any number of factors at play here, and I’m guessing the internet having turned into our de facto place to spend our time (free or not), whether streaming something, doom scrolling, or doing our crosswords or word games on a computer, is one of them. But I’m also contemplating whether our tendency to pragmatize everything—to have a justifiable reason for why we do anything from eating oatmeal instead of sugary cereal, or tofu instead of chicken, to selecting the right after-school activity for our kids—is messing with our ability just to hang out and let the sociability lead where it leads.
An old NPR piece might help me here. Almost a decade ago, All Things Considered interviewed Stuart Brown from the National Institute for Play (NIFP).1 The short segment talks about why play is so important in keeping adults hale and hearty and on the ball, etc., etc.: admittedly fantastic and valuable. Brown starts off by asserting in the interview that “Play is something done for its own sake… the act itself is more important than the outcome,” and producer Sami Yenigun follows that up with the claim that play “helps us maintain our social well-being…. Playing is how we connect” and can maintain healthy relationships.
No problem there; why else are we hanging out with each other in the first place but to connect? But a part of that segment starts drifting into a realm where play seems to be undertaken for something more than, as Brown said, its own sake. Yenigun tells us that it helps us “stay sharp… lowering [our] risk of Alzheimer’s disease… playing games or doing puzzles helps maintain memory and thinking skills.” Again, not a problem; a good thing, in fact! But something tells me that when we go into situations of “play” for reasons other than just, well, playing, we start moving into regimens aimed at “optimizing” our lives.
At NIFP’s website, it’s made clear that we all have different ways of playing, emphasizing that play is “play for you” and that “One person’s fun is another person’s boredom.”2 If you need to, you can even try and determine what your own “play personality” is. Great! But then you know once the lifestyle entrepreneurs get wind of this (OK, they already have3), the apps and programs will start rolling in, along with the pressure to use them and buy them and get on the lifestyle bandwagon, all for your own benefit. And all those tools are sure to get pushed on you by your friend and mine, your employer, who needs the best adjusted, least neurotic employees possible for maximum productivity: an add-on to all the icebreakers and team building exercises and other forms of mandatory, emotionally invasive, and generally inane “fun” that keep us from just doing our jobs and being able to go home, further eroding the so-called work-life balance that everyone claims they value so much. Already overworked and made to feel guilty about taking a second for ourselves that doesn’t involve being productive in one way or another, we get trapped in a loop of rushing and getting stressed about having to do our meditation or yoga class, or color the goddamn mandala we’re required to fill in and stick up on our (real or virtual) wall in order to express and celebrate ourselves. When it becomes one more thing we’re assigned, whether by employers or arbiters of social good, it could be that play, period—in whatever form—starts to feel like a burden, and you’d rather just curl up on the couch, where no one can make any demands of you.
To quote Slavoj Žižek, what gets called playing seems to feel more and more like “buying into lifestyles rather than living our lives”4 —in this instance, playing for socially acceptable, health-building purposes at socially acceptable, productivity-building times (stop everything you’re doing for fifteen minutes of Candyland in the conference room!) as opposed to being chided for, say, having an impromptu dance party in your cubicle with music only you love. When Žižek talks about enjoyment via certain products, he could easily relate it to the way in which we get our play in these days: “Enjoyment is tolerated, solicited even, but on condition that it is healthy, that it doesn't threaten our psychic or biological stability: chocolate, yes, but fat-free; Coke, yes, but diet; coffee, yes, but without caffeine; beer, yes, but without alcohol….”
My friends’ word and story games of old were hardly threatening to anyone; we could be condemned for being dorks, but that’s about it. And I’m sure there’s some researcher who’d be eager to come along and show all the amazing social and individual benefits that accrued from those experiences—which is fine if the researcher gets a kick out of it. But I sometimes suspect we rely too heavily on the benefits we’re supposed to be getting as a motive for playing or enjoying ourselves in the first place, instead of playing just to play: blurring the line between recognizing hey, this fun thing happens to have benefits, and then removing all the fun from it by turning it into a task to be accomplished if we’re to be considered anything like a real adult. The key to a really great round of storytelling, after all, was that it couldn’t be forced; the presence of just a single person averse to the plan meant it didn’t happen—we weren’t going to coerce anyone into our game, and spoil the whole thing as a result. The key to playing, it seems, and the one I fear we all too often lose sight of, is that you’re there because you want to be, plain and simple, for no other reason than that.
Sami Yenigun, “Play Doesn’t End With Childhood: Why Adults Need Recess Too,” All Things Considered, 6 August 2014, https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/08/06/336360521/play-doesnt-end-with-childhood-why-adults-need-recess-too.
National Institute for Play, “Play Personalities,” 2023.
For example, here’s ThePittNews’s editorial board, in the wake of both Wordle and John Krasinski’s Some Good News being sold to big corporations: “It seems like the urge to make money has its reach on anything that appears to bring people together through pure intentions…. For once, people weren’t fighting and were rallying around something that brought positivity in a difficult time. As soon as these rare wholesome moments are taken and sold to corporations, they lose an aspect of relatability and community. They get sucked into discourse like everything else.” ThePittNews Editorial Board, “Stop Monetizing Everything,” 3 February 2022, https://pittnews.com/article/170961/opinions/editorial-stop-monetizing-everything/.
And there are all sorts of recommendations for “stress management apps”; here’s a representative one from HubSpot’s Aimee del Principe, where the first caption you see is especially revealing: “Download our complete productivity guide here for more tips on improving your productivity at work.” “11 Stress Management Apps to Relax Your Mind and Body,” 26 May 2023, https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/stress-management-apps.
There’s something lurking here that wants to make a potentially greater leap to play only being useful if you can eventually monetize it for yourself—but at this point, that leap still feels like too much of a stretch/a vague, and admittedly cynical, hunch.
Slavoj Žižek, “Fat-free chocolate and absolutely no smoking: why our guilt about consumption is all-consuming,” The Guardian, 21 May 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/21/prix-pictet-photography-prize-consumption-slavoj-zizek.
Yeah, that was a great thing about being a kid: no baggage associated with playing. Also, btw, this is probably my least favorite aspect of being an employee:
"all the icebreakers and team building exercises and other forms of mandatory, emotionally invasive, and generally inane “fun” that keep us from just doing our jobs"