Conscious Choice: Are We Having Fun Yet?

October 1999

Are We Having Fun Yet?

The Benefits of Play

by Mark Harris

I was visiting downstate recently with a friend and her eight-year-old daughter. Early one morning my little friend, Lillian, and I were sitting in the living room as she waited for her mother to get ready for work and the short drive to her school.

Lillian asked me if I was planning to stay another night. I said I wasn’t sure. "Why," I asked, "Do you have plans for later?" Lillian scrunched up her face. I think I had just asked the dumbest question she had ever heard. "I’m a kid," she blurted out. "Do you think I have plans?" Then she added, as if to emphasize what really goes on in her household, "My mother has plans."

Lillian, like most children, does not have a day planner or a Rolodex. Life is a child’s world of adventures and imagination, silliness and laughter, curiosity and learning. Life is lived in the moment. Even within an invariable structure of rules, responsibilities, and the plans of mothers there lurks always an energy of simmering fun, ready to bubble up at a moment’s notice. Like most children, Lillian loves to play.

Certainly children are the masters of play. It’s what they do. It’s also the way they learn, acquire cognitive and motor skills, and just make life interesting and fun. As adults we still play, but less spontaneously. We tend to schedule in our play time. When, that is, we can find time to schedule.

In fact, leisure time has dramatically eroded in recent decades, down to about sixteen and a half hours a week, report the editors of the Harvard Health Letter. This is in part because of a rise in single parent and two-wage-earner families, with all their attendant pressures. But it’s also because a lot of us are just working more; about a month more per year than was the norm in the 1960s. Even compared to our European contemporaries, we’re working more. Germans, for example, work 320 hours a year less than Americans. Yet, despite the "booming" economy, all the extra hours on the job have not translated into growing income. Most Americans today earn less in real dollars than they did back in the 1960s and 1970s.

This is an economist’s way of saying we’re stressed out.

Ironically, commentators of decades past used to ponder the issue of what we were going to do with all the extra leisure time expected to come our way as a result of the "automation revolution." But the technological good life has instead turned into a national lifestyle of overwork, stress, and too little rest. As many as 30 percent of Americans say they experience great stress on almost a daily basis. Sleep disorders and complaints of exhaustion have also become rampant.

Hurry Up and Play

Not surprisingly, the overloaded rush of modern life seems to spill over, even into the ways we play. I thought about this recently as I rode my bicycle with its upright handle bars and three speeds leisurely along the Evanston lakefront. Around me zoomed bikers hunched over ten-speeds, dressed like Flash Gordon. I imagined they were officially playing while simultaneously getting in their prescribed thirty minutes of three-times weekly aerobic exercise. No wasting the day here....

Later, as I drove down to Chicago’s North Side, I passed a storefront window of men and women running on treadmills in a space that looked like it might have once been home to a dry cleaner or a Thai restaurant. I admired their efforts but almost wondered whether a judge had sentenced them to grimly sweat it out in cramped, public view.

It’s hard to blame people. Our advancing high-tech life combined with the accelerating pace and insecurity of modern capitalism has fostered a culture that seems to be always working, always rushed, always (at least electronically) connected. Unfortunately, I think we also wrestle a bit with an undercurrent of belief that play is kind of frivolous. This is the subtle, scolding voice of a cultural and religious legacy that implicitly views suffering as somehow more redemptive than pleasure. If we all have our crosses to bear, perhaps one is that we’ve always got to justify our time.

And despite our personal pressure cookers of responsibilities, we do manage to play. Being human, we just can’t help it. We need to play. But how exactly do we define play? According to Lenore Terr, M.D., author of Beyond Love and Work: Why Adults Need to Play (Scribner, 1999), play is defined as "activity directed primarily at having fun." Simple enough (if not exactly an insight requiring an advanced degree). But what exactly does this mean? How do we know if, so to speak, we’re having fun yet?

When we’re in a state of intense play, first our cares and worries tend to vanish. Kayaking down a river, playing golf, or thoroughly engrossed in a good novel, we feel pleasurably alive, lighthearted. The experience of intense absorption in an activity can also leave us feeling uniquely cleansed, like the twin feeling of exhaustion and refreshment that follows an afternoon of volleyball.

Play can also take us to new heights of conscious awareness. Athletes refer to moments when they’re in "the zone," when body, mind, and spirit acquire a kind of transcendent rhythm and performance is at a peak. Essayist Diane Ackerman, borrowing a phrase from eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, describes such moments in terms of "deep play," when "levered by ecstasy, one springs out of one’s mind."

In the zone of deep, transcendent play there is calm but also alert and focused readiness. Emotions are primed, charged, and ready for release. It is a state actually not unlike a kind of simulated anxiety attack, say researchers, but without the adrenaline and endocrine responses that normally accompany a sense of real emergency.

Such moments of heightened awareness represent what University of Chicago researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as a state of "flow." This is the state of mind in which a person becomes so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. Awareness to the task at hand acquires a kind of meditative brilliance. Mindfulness zeroes in like a laser beam. Everything feels in harmony. In the flow, we feel satisfied.

This sense of being almost totally at one with your environment, with yourself in the moment, is perhaps the hallmark of play as a transcendent experience. Think about the tennis player totally focused on every move and strike of his opponent’s racquet. This, says Csikszentmihalyi, is the essence of the flow experience.

The Seamless Play of Things

It was Freud who first suggested the allure of such transcendent moments might be traced back to the infant’s "oceanic feeling" of completeness, when in the throes of being loved and nurtured the infant consciousness blends or merges with the one who nurtures and loves. Unlike Freud, however, who defined the primary needs of adult life around the twin axes of love and work, Terr, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, argues that play is crucial at every stage of life. In play, we discover pleasure, cultivate feelings of accomplishment, and acquire a sense of belonging. When we play, we learn and mature and — no small matter — find an outlet for stress. "Play is a lost key," Terr writes. "It unlocks the door to our selves."

Neither are the benefits of play limited only to those Michael Jordan-like moments of peak performance. We reap the rewards of play in subtle, everyday fashion, too. In her book, Deep Play (Random House, 1999), Ackerman cogently describes the rapture of standing among a "vast city-state" of emperor penguins in Antarctica. Yet she also discovers a transcendent, if not so unusual, pleasure in just riding her bike through the neighborhood or gardening in her back yard.

Even those storefront treadmill runners may have been onto something. For play is infinitely open-ended in its expression, and one person’s drudgery is another’s ecstasy. In Flow: Living at the Peak of Your Abilities (Nightingale Conant), Csikszentmihalyi tells an interesting story about a sixty-year-old factory worker named Joe who lived on Chicago’s South Side. This man’s job entailed building railroad cars in a huge hangar. The conditions in the hangar were harsh, unprotected as it was from Chicago’s extremes of weather. Joe, who had only a fourth grade education, was also on the low rung of the factory.

Yet, as Csikszentmihalyi describes, Joe was one of the happiest people he had ever met. At work Joe was exactly where he wanted to be. He had no desire to be a foreman because he only wanted to fix the machinery. And fix the machinery he did. All of it. Better than anyone. In fact, the word around the plant was that if Joe retired, they might as well close up shop because he kept everything going.

But Joe’s passion for fixing things didn’t end at work. At home he had built a rock garden with an underground watering system. The garden also included a lighting system designed to produce rainbows. Thus, Joe and his wife could sit on their porch in the evenings surrounded by rainbows. Joe had made of his life one seamless expression of a particular passion; in this case, a passion for building and fixing things. He possessed the gift of being able to completely absorb himself in his interests. In his living and in his working, Csikszentmihalyi concludes, Joe was a man who knew how to play.

Act Naturally

Certainly one quality of healthy, inspired play is that is always natural, unforced. Play at its best is nothing if not heartfelt. Ironically, the very same business culture that’s squeezing more hours out of employees has in recent years discovered the issue of "stress in the workplace." In true Dilbert-like fashion, however, this concern for employee well-being has engendered a cottage industry of "humor consultants"(a sub-branch of the larger "performance improvement" industry) who sponsor workshops on what might be described as the problem of enhancing cubicle levity.

Unfortunately, such experiences in developing a more playful work culture tend to prove lame, in no small part because the humor is uninspired (why is a manager wearing a clown nose in a corporate setting considered stunningly hilarious?), but also because such projects invariably come to be viewed as one more obligatory task.

Undoubtedly, the American workplace is not always a happy place. But instead of a forced march through the corporate version of Comedy Central, why not consider more substantive ways to lighten our lives? Admittedly, how to make our work more like play is a vast topic. But for starters here’s one idea. Instead of "clown nose Monday" or some other such exercise in low-impact laughter, why don’t we consider shortening the work day?

If we implemented a six-hour day, at our current salaries, well....Just think of all the extra play time we would have! Not to mention all the extra energy we’d have for those six hours. Perhaps "casual Friday" could become so informal that we don’t even show up at all? If this sounds far-fetched, don’t forget that the eight-hour day was once considered outlandish, too.

Actually, a shorter work day not only makes sense in terms of happiness, it makes economic sense. Consider that the productivity of the average person working has more than doubled since 1948. Hypothetically, we could thus all work about four hours a day and still produce at a level equivalent to our mid-century economy. Yet the demands of a global economy appear to drive us only ever deeper into the mire. Time to play has become only one more "frill" to be downsized.

Let’s Pretend

I remember when Lillian was four years old, I once watched her and a friend named Krissy play with a set of dolls and a large wooden doll house. Their play consisted of each of them alternately introducing a theme, such as, "Pretend we’re baking a pie for your brother’s birthday, but he hasn’t come home yet and I’m the mother and I’m worried." A few minutes of this scenario would follow, eventually to be punctuated by the two words that signaled time for a change, "Pretend that..." and after some tussle negotiating the details, they’d be off on a new scenario of fun and fantasy.

What struck me as I watched these young girls was how thoroughly engaged they were. And how I envied them. If, as it is said, children think heaven is being an adult and adults think heaven is being a child, then in that moment their world seemed like heaven to me. The way they played was so natural, so complete. So content.

I say, let’s pretend we’ve created a world where we all work reasonable schedules with plenty of time to laugh and play and just enjoy each other. Let’s pretend we’ve let go of our worries about money and power or whatever we think we want that we don’t have. Let’s pretend we’ve created a less strife-torn, conflicted world, one in which we’ve learned to relax more and mistreat each other less.

I say, let’s pretend, rediscover what any child knows about the truth of living in the moment. And how wonderful it is to be fully human, fully alive. Who knows? If we play it for all it’s worth, we might just make it happen.

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