Do you play enough?
Most people would say that they don’t, and the world of play advocates stands by to exhort: Hey! You need to play more, buddy! Get outside! Jump in a puddle! Snuggle up at home and do a puzzle! Play a game or start learning archery! Do anything besides work, binge senseless TV series and doom scroll.
The call to more play remains an enticing antidote in a culture that routinely devalues or often marginalizes play, particularly adult play. We have a bad habit of overworking and then narcotizing ourselves with anything desperately to recharge before the next onslaught of productivity. Sometimes, we even come home from work and work more to feel better about work. Even worse, in our go-go culture, we too often optimize our downtime around fast-casual dining, fast-casual media and fast-casual, drive-by relationships. Ugh.
If all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, as the old saying advises, maybe no work and all play would be the way to go. If we played all the time and never worked, would we feel better? Would we be happier? The knee-jerk reaction seems to urge a full-throated YES. But really? Is play a utopia?
In his book, The Grasshopper, philosopher Bernard Suits sets up a conversation between Aesop’s grasshopper and the ants. As you may recall from the fable, the grasshopper fiddled and fooled around all summer while the ants labored. When the cold weather set in, the grasshopper had nothing and had to rely on but the generosity and largess of the hardworking ants. In Suits’ retelling, the ants offer the grasshopper food and shelter, but the hopper rebuffs them. He’d rather perish in the cold of winter than regret playing all summer or be in debt to the ants for future work. So, in this version of the parable, the grasshopper dies.
But doesn’t this skip over a truth—work can be deeply satisfying? Maybe there is another way of thinking about this.
The great British historian Arnold J. Toynbee once opined, “The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.” He saw something important in civilizations that treated work as a form of joyful expression. Perhaps he never thought of it this way, but it seems he saw something significant in the idea that you should “Whistle while you work.”
Making work fun has long been a goal of management looking to juice more productivity from workers. For Toynbee, the idea wasn’t to sugarcoat unpleasant labor but to find joy in the work. And the only reason this sounds provocative is because we have this false dichotomy between play and work. As a culture and a worldview, we have embraced the idea that everyone is working for the weekend. Work sucks, but I need the bucks—presumably to spend at least some of that on something outside of work that is fun enough to make work tolerable.
This work/play dichotomy misses the much more obvious truth that there is such a thing as playful work, and certainly, there is serious play. Anyone who looks forward to their job understands that it comes with a sense of play. Anyone serious about play knows how much fun it is to get deep into what you are doing. When you think about work as purposeful making and play as a kind of embodied experience—as fun—then work and play enter a dance. Suddenly, it’s okay for work to be hard and challenging and difficult because the effort is connected to meaning. It is also okay for work to be very playful, creative, joyful and engaging.
Back to the question at hand. Would more play and less work always be the right choice?
At this point, you should have some questions about that question. If work was more like play and play embodied the meaningful-making aspects of work, what would it mean to play more and work less?
Before we answer that question, one more observation.
In general, play is self-modulating. That is, if we play too long, we get tired of playing. If we go on a beach vacation, eventually, we decide to get off the sand and eat dinner, read a book or go to bed. If we visit Disneyland and spend 12 hours in the park one day, the next day, we might feel pretty good about sleeping in a little bit because we’re tired. In that sense, play self-regulates or modulates because we recognize that the purpose of play is to feel joy and engage in meaning-making. It is challenging to play too much because we have to take a break to recharge our play batteries and enjoy playing. At the same time, work is not so self-regulated or modulated.
Cultural norms and our bank account constantly remind us that more work is better. It runs deep. America was founded by a bunch of Pilgrims who told us that “idle hands are the tools of the devil.” Even today, guys like Musk and Ramaswamy tell us that we should be working 80 hours a week or we are lazy. The entire capitalist system demodulates or deregulates us around work because it assumes that if work is good, more work is better. Notice here that the rhetoric is always around control and the premise that work and play are different things. It turns out the systems of power are most comfortable when play is separated from work and work is under management.
Put all this together, and you reach a workable answer to the question, “Is more play better?” If you don’t buy into the play/work dichotomy, the real question is simply one of balance. It follows then that you should always ask if your work is playful enough and if you are taking your play seriously enough! Beyond that, remember to introduce some of the self-regulation into your work life that you naturally have in play.