Justin Neuman wrote a piece about play for Aeon recently. In the piece he talks about the Greek ideals regarding different type of play as well as the thoughts of different philosopher on the topic.
A fair bit of the way down, I perked up at a statement he makes that aligns with my opposition to the prescriptive use of doses of art and culture to solve problems.
Neuman writes (my emphasis)
Simply put: adults need play as desperately as children do – a zone where inner life meets outer materiality and something unpredictable emerges…A person who never plays is as disordered as one who never works. I’m not talking about ‘work-life balance’, an exhausted metaphor that still treats play as recovery time for the next productive thing. To practise the virtue of eutrapelia means that a good life requires play. You don’t earn it. You practise it, daily.
I think there is a connection between this sentiment and the idea that arts and culture are something that are nice to have, but not necessary. The idea that play is the reward for working and what you do to recharge so you have the energy to work again turns play into a utilitarian companion for labor.
Neuman cites examples of the value he and others like Nietzsche, Rousseau, and Einstein, and a Stanford University study have found walking distances have had for creative thinking and problem solving.
I vacillated between thinking these examples could be viewed as a prescriptive use of walking for problem solving or as examples of people who integrated a balance of work and play into their process. Just as with the arts, I think it is too easy to interpret these examples as “just add walking to help you solve problems.”
Especially since the Stanford research found that treadmills were just as effective at inspiring divergent thinking and generating multiple solutions as walking about in nature.
Neuman ends the piece essentially noting that play is truly valuable to humans when they aren’t focused on keeping score about how many good ideas they can squeeze from X amount of intentional play.
The capacity for play – the willingness to stop optimising, to sit on the floor, to walk without a destination, to make something and give it away – embraces a virtue with an old name: eutrapelia. It is the habit of playing well. The ordinary magic of being real.
