playing around; thoughts on work
This review is based on the book Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown.
I wanted to establish a better understanding of my thoughts on what it means to be “playful” in modern society, and how necessary breaks and relaxation time can be to enrich our personal lives and health. What brought me to this book? While reading CAPS LOCK by Ruben Pater, I found myself wondering how we’ve established that those in society with the mindset in which they would rather spend their life playing, learning, or engaging in critical thought are often looked upon as “lazy,” “childish,” or “immature.”
Since society in the modern age has established that living requires work-life balance, we’ve connected growth with learning to pay taxes, starting a family, and working a 9-5. If I was to step aside and ask you, dear reader, what you might view to be your dream job, what would you answer? Would you want to be a Lawyer, defending the public in court? Maybe a YouTuber, playing games to entertain others? Or rather you might want to use your creative skills to produce art for big companies.
When asked this question now, I still have the same answer as when I was just leaving secondary school. To put it simply, why dream of labor in the first place? I personally don’t fall asleep and excitedly await a dream to do household chores, or file some paperwork at the office. Whether you truly feel you love your job or not, in the end you will still be working. You are trading time(the most invaluable thing in a humans short life) for capital, which you then turn around and spend to maintain your own standard of living.
Can you really say without an ounce of hesitation that you would rather be doing that work instead of relaxing on a beach, playing a game, or acting out any of your hobbies? I think that we can agree that the answer to that is no.
Even a YouTuber, for example, which is considered a rather privileged position for a person to spend their life working in; has days in which they feel that they hate their job. In fact, most YouTubers can often be depressed or go through “Average Life In Numbers”, Clockify mental health issues due to the stress and isolation of being a micro-celebrity online. They are expected to display a cheery, perfect personality to their viewers regardless of their own health. The higher their viewership, the more this pressure can build, often leading to the common sudden hiatuses or retirements.
Don’t get me wrong here, I understand that society in it’s current configuration cannot function without work. Especially in the capitalist economic system, which is built upon underpaid “lower end” workers to maintain the market, someone is needed to stock each shelf, clean each bathroom, or pour each coffee. The problem here is instead how much time, and how little we get back for this time. A week has exactly 168 hours in it, and the average worker in America spends roughly 38 hours at their job in 2023. This may seem easy, “Work-Life balance? yeah I got this, look how much time I have!”
However, if you break that day down into each category, such as eating, chores, sleep, and work, you find that a person may only have 5 or 6 hours a day to themselves. This is assuming a normal 8 hour work day, the average sleep of 7.6 hours, 1 hour for chores, and 1 hour for eating in drinking. This time does not calculate travel to and from work, which for some could take another hour or two from their schedule. With only 5 hours a day to yourself, the numbers look bleak. That’s only roughly 20% of your day, and by extension we can say that including all of these elements, it can take up roughly over 2/3rd of your entire life.
Graphic Designers suffer from often unpaid overtime as well, adding to the total time we may spend working depending on a strict deadline schedule. It’s easy to point out how ridiculous a system such as this is when you see these numbers, and when I look at them. Frankly, I don’t want to spend my short time here creating templates and filing papers for a company that in the end, is meaningless. I think this is where my own thoughts and the book separate, as when you continue reading, you find some older ways of thinking within Stuart Browns thoughts.
For example, he writes “This kid, Harry, was a very smart and pseudo sophisticated couch potato, preoccupied with dark themes in video games, and drawn to ponderous existential literature, but clearly stuck in his juvenility. I had been active on the Outward Bound Board, and knew that the program then operative in the mountains of North Carolina was well-led, rigorous, and safe. So on my advice, Harry’s parents enrolled him.” (p. 120)
Brown then goes on to explain Harrys experience at the camp, stouting how great it was that they had been denied food, had to kill their own chickens to create dinner. He boasts that after the trip, Harry was a confident triathlete and medical student. While I have no problem with children needing to learn self-autonomy and reliance, I think it’s easy to point out the flaws in this line of thinking. First off, I think we need to mention that Outward Bound has countless traumatic survivor stories related the general lack of treatment and abuse suffered at these types of camps. Most staff within these camps are untrained.
Typically there is no license or papers enforcing proper care. This is especially the case for many of the said “troubled teens industry” programs across America. In this case, I would assume by the wording of “His parents enrolled him” means that Harry did not want to participate in this camp. This is of course speculation, but it’s very possible Harry had decided to “straighten his life out” out of the fear and trauma of having to go back. Rather, I can say easily that I believe Harry’s “growth” in becoming an athlete and medical student did not correlate with anything the camp could have “taught” him.
These types of “life camps” are by no means safe, well-led programs. Without federal oversight, these programs operate to simply extract money and take advantage of troubled youth, while manipulating parents into believing this will be good for them. However, something I also take issue with in Browns edorsement of this type of camp is the meritocratic and condescending nature of his arguments for why Harry needed re-educated. He denounces video games, and ponderous existential literature in what I would call an attack on the humanities and arts. In his established viewpoint, it is clear he views athletes and doctors as hierarchically superior to those within the arts.
There is nothing wrong with enjoying the dark themes of the well-written story of the Dark Souls series, or reading the existential literature of the philosopher Osamu Dazai, for example. Some of the most important life lessons I’ve learned in my time come from the media I have consumed, the video games, the literature, the music and more. The artists and musicians are of course just as important as the doctors and athletes in society.
Brown argues that through play, we learn everything important to social animals such as humans. Brown then uses that information to aim his focus at work culture, using the “power of play” as a tool for corporations to utilize in their employees. “play” in his definition is no longer about enjoying rest or relaxation, but about efficacy and productivity. This is clear in some of his last lines in the book; “Play is how we are made, and how we develop and adjust to change. It can foster innovation and lead to multibillion dollar fortunes... as Freud says, life is about love and work.” (p.218)
While there are many insights I can take from Brown, I find that in his support of certain system through his writing, it reveals his true character, and I personally don’t feel that most of those thoughts align with my own way of thinking, centered towards a society without the systems he endorses. As I’ve learned myself over the past few months, I can definitely agree that physical activity and social sports such as climbing invigorate the mind and soul. Yet play can be so much more, it can be life lessons delivered in a amazing show, or problem solving learned from a puzzle filled video game. If you open your mind to what you can learn, you can find that you can acquire many life lessons from just about anything.
Media as art, in that sense, is limitless in possibility.
