Chapter 6: Your Job is to Play and it Should Never Stop Being Your Job

Because you were just born yesterday, you probably have some questions about what to DO here on Planet Earth. First of all, eat, pee and poop. Over and over. Nonstop. This will allow you to grow up so that you can feed and change the diapers of other babies.

Another job is that you’ll need to be cute so that others will bring you food and clean up your scatological messes. You’ll quickly figure this out.

Here’s another job for you and it’s rather hysterical. You’ll quickly learn how to train adults to talk in “baby talk.” Truly hilarious. Fully adult tax-payer citizens who talk in somber and earnest voices most of the day. You—little you–will have the power, using sheer cuteness, to cause them to talk in little high pitched voices, saying things like “poopie” and claiming that they “wuv” you. Enjoy it while it lasts. You will have zero responsibilities for only a couple years and then you’ll need to start fending for yourself by coming up with a more clever schtick.

In addition to being cute, your job is to play. Play is your best way to creatively explore your world. Essentially, you’ll be doing lots and lots of experiments, including physics experiments (What if I drop this apple sauce on the floor?) and social psychology experiments (What will happen if I poop on this white living room carpet?). This will be your main job. Try hundreds and thousands of things and see what happens. Figure out the patterns. When something interesting happens, use your hippocampus to pack it away for future reference. For a couple years no one will blame you for anything you do, so play to your heart’s content. Have lots and lots of fun.

Beware that your parents might soon try to groom you to be a super-child so that they can claim to their friends that they are extremely good parents. This comes with the territory and there’s no way to get around some of some of these performance obligations. I would urge you, though, to keep playing as often as possible and for as long as possible. Some parents try to turn you into an academic superstar even when you are 2 or 3. Resist this! Lots of research shows that you are much better off playing on your own terms, including this article, which contains this quote:

“If this study doesn’t put the nail in the coffin of academic training to little children, it’s hard to imagine what will,” says psychologist Peter Gray.

Here’s a longer excerpt:

Gray believes these outcomes were predictable. When kids are pushed into academics before they are ready, he says, it disrupts the natural unfolding of curiosity, mastery, and joy. It’s like being forced to take poker lessons before mastering Go Fish. Kids feel lost, bored, and dumb. They may decide they hate school, or that the only way to escape is by acting out.

Compare that to plain old playing, where kids discover how to make things happen, try out new ideas, and make friends. This requires learning “self-management,” i.e., the ability to hold yourself together enough that other kids want to play with you. Those are real lessons—some of life’s biggest, in fact. There’s time for academics later.

But that’s just the beginning of the struggle. As you get to be a teenager and then an adult, please please please keep playing. Don’t let your inner child whither and die! I’ve seen countless adults who have forgotten how to play. They forget how to make believe. They don’t know how to creatively pretend. They’ve long ago forgot how to giggle. They are uncomfortable making their own music and art. They start calling these things “wastes of time.”

Beware of those serious adults. They think that their job is to look proper, but here’s the sad truth: To the extent that adults no longer engage in play, they die. You can see it in their dull eyes, eyes that formerly sparkled. It is well established that adults need to play in order to maintain their mental health. That is the conclusion of psychologist Barrett Brown. Brown encourages the audience that they should not set aside time to play. Rather, they (including adults) should infuse every moment of their lives with play. He argues that play is just important for humans as is asleep and dreaming.

Over time, adults who don’t play ossify into hard lumps of properness. They worry about the craziest things instead of playing. Mostly, they worry about having money to buy things to impress their friends. Some of them will never have enough, so there will never be a time to pause this bizarro form of hunting and gathering.

Also beware of the false claim that work is different than play. In reality, work is entirely compatible with play and this pertains to both children and adults. Hyper-achieving adults are often playing at a high level of creativity and intensity. Perhaps this is one reason is that working hard on a problem is the best cure to anxiety you might be feeling about that problem.

So here’s my advice. 1. Start playing. 2. The entire world is your playroom. 3. Never stop playing.

Epilogue, consisting of a few quotes about play (many of these from The National Museum of Play):

“A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.”
-Mencken

“A person’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.”
Nietzsche

“Play is the foundation of learning, creativity, self-expression, and constructive problem-solving. It’s how children wrestle with life to make it meaningful.”
Susan Linn
Contemporary American psychiatrist

“In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.”
Nietzsche

“Play is the primary way children were designed to learn.”
Kathy Hersh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff
Contemporary American psychologists

“The drive to play freely is a basic, biological drive. Lack of free play may not kill the physical body, as would lack of air, food, or water, but it kills the spirit and stunts mental growth.”
Peter Gray
Contemporary American psychologist

“Play is our brain’s favorite way of learning.”
Diane Ackerman
Contemporary American author

“A child loves his play, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.”
Benjamin Spock
American pediatrician
1903–1998

“When the fun goes out of play, most often so does the learning.”
Joanne E. Oppenheim
Author

“Play is training for the unexpected.”
Marc Bekoff
Contemporary American biologist

“If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.”
Jean Piaget
Swiss philosopher
1896–1980

“We shouldn’t stick too close to everyday reality but give room to the reality of the heart, of the mind, and of the imagination. Those things can help us in life.”
Hayao Miyazaki
Film director and storyteller