We
do what we do because, from an evolutionary perspective, it works. In
nature, children play, breeding adults work, and non-breeding adults do
a bit of both. In raven communities, for example, each flock has a
breeding pair and a bunch of singles who help protect the breeding
pair's young, search for food, connect with other flocks, and otherwise
spend their time doing barrel-rolls on roofs, mid-air cartwheels with
their talons entwined with each other, mimicking sounds (brilliantly),
and, when they're alone, singing to themselves. Likewise, geese will
fight over the breeding area, but if they lose the fight, they will
head off to the subarctic summer grazing area with the rest of the
non-breeders and party all summer until it's time to head south for the
winter.
Parenting is a privilege, and its price is full-time
work. For the rest, young and old, what keeps them getting up in the
morning is principally having the prospect of having fun. If life for a
species becomes tedious rather than joyous, it is likely that Darwin's
rules would have that unhappy species underperform at the survival
game, and yield to some other species that has more reason for living
than just survival.
There is growing anthropological evidence
that early human societies were also largely leisurely, with perhaps an
hour a day, or a day a week, needed to gather or catch the community's
food, and the rest of the time given over to art, exploration, play,
and just living in the moment. This is how life works in a world of
abundance.
But today we live in a world of ever-growing
scarcity. While a smaller percentage of humans are destitute than was
the case in civilization's earlier centuries, those brief gains have
come at the cost of the desolation of the Earth, and the theft of
irreplaceable resources from our children and the other species who
co-habit our planet, soaring debts that are unsustainable. Today in
much of the world we keep work longer and harder just to make ends
meet. Instead of having children every five years or so, as they did in
'prehistoric' times, many women in recent millennia and even now have
children every year, because the only asset they have to offer up to
those who can keep them from destitution is the labour of many
children. Prior to civilization and permanent settlement, having more
than one child each five years was impossible, since the unweaned
needed to be carried everywhere the nomadic tribe went until they were
old enough to keep up on their own two feet. Nature enabled this by
sharply reducing fertility during breastfeeding. It worked, so by
evolution's rules this was the way we lived. Lots of walking, but lots
of fun, too. Not so for modern humans.
For civilized humans,
parenting is not a privilege with a five-year respite but an
expectation and responsibility for every adult (reinforced by social
mores, religious dogma and, in much of the world, brutal economic
necessity). More children means more work to raise and provide for
them. So now marriage, which we have somehow come to believe is an
integral part of parenting, has become another job (This is one of the
theses of Laura Kipnis' wonderful book Against Love). And in civilized society, we all have to be interdependent (self-sufficiency is a naturally effective way to live, but a terribly inefficient
one), so we must also have a job in service of others (so that we can
afford to have them serve us in return, without which we would live, as
Derrick Jensen puts it, in constant fear of not having enough).
So
we grow up, most of us, working at a job in service of others, working
to keep a marriage and home together, and working at raising children.
So when do we have fun? Sex is now often work within a marriage, almost
always forbidden outside a marriage, depressingly monetized, and
fraught with danger -- and the self-service alternative is stigmatized.
No fun there. How about sports? Well, it's an industry
now. Work hard, use the right drugs, bribe the right judges, and you
can be 'successful' at sports -- it's become work too. If you don't
like working that hard, you can be an observer of sports and arts: That's an industry, too -- the entertainment business. The 'players'
are the people on the field or on the stage, and they're working very
hard. No play there. And we in the bleachers and in the loges are mere
spectators -- that's not play either.
When we're children, as I wrote before, we are addicted
to play -- we don't want to do anything else. This is a natural
addiction -- it's how nature makes learning fun. We know better than to
confuse this with the torture that takes place in classrooms --
learning that's no fun. But we never really lose the addiction -- we're
meant to love playing all our lives, whenever the opportunity arises.
We are not supposed to stop learning. If we haven't learned enough from
play by the time we become parents -- enough to be good parents -- well, then Darwin will take care to remove our lineage from the gene pool so that the error is not repeated.
What
has happened to play, though, in recent years? Play is no longer
open-ended, physically rough-and-tumble, mostly outdoors, social, and
unstructured. Our children are kept indoors for their health and/or
safety (indeed, it is now sometimes hard to get them to even go
outside). Their toys and games are closed-ended: Specific rules,
limited options. They are physically unchallenging. They are asocial or
even anti-social, interacting with objects instead of people. They are
highly structured. What kind of fun is this? Instead of being addicted
to tag they are addicted to a video game. This is a different kind of
addiction -- one driven by adrenaline instead of endorphins. It
increases stress levels instead of lowering them. Winning becomes
important instead of learning. Mental exhaustion replaces physical
exhaustion. Reflex replaces creativity. Watch children playing video
games, and listen: How much laughter do you hear?
So then they
get older, and the games change. They are invited to 'create' new
realities, but these new games are still governed by intricate rules
and limited options. Whereas 'real' play is socially engaging, these
games are social escapism. What little you learn is of value only in
the hermetically sealed artificial world. Adult organized games like
golf and poker (at least when you play the same poker variant over and
over) may offer a little more social
The essence of fun and play is imagination -- and that is not the same thing
as creativity. I think we live in a world of enormous imaginative
poverty, not because we're incapable of imagination, but because we're
badly out of practice. The words play and work
are antonyms, a dichotomy of all human activity. They are their own
root words, so their meaning is clearly fundamental to all human
experience. They are impossible to define well using other words -- we
just know what they mean. The word fun is inextricably associated with play.
The significant differentiator between work and play is that work has a
predetermined objective while play does not. So if the objective of an
activity is to win, then it is work, not play.
The idea of
doing something without any predetermined objective is now foreign to
us. To us, such 'idleness' smacks of thoughtlessness, even rogue
behaviour: Aren't graffiti and vandalism the consequences of 'doing
something without a predetermined objective'? Maybe that's why we want
people to work all the time -- we don't trust people to play. If we can't imagine, we can do anything.
If
we want to relearn how to play, to have real fun -- the kind that is
delightful and not merely exhilarating -- we first need to relearn how
to imagine, and practice it. The children and animals can show us how. |
7:14:17 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
