why adults need play

a case for leisure, wonder, and doing nothing useful

Most of us absorbed a belief that time only counts if it produces a finished project, a crossed off task, or a skill. We work, and we feel worthy, we rest and we feel guilty and walk away with a sense that we should’ve used the time more “productively".”

I say this to myself as much as to you: play is productive and the belief that it’s a luxury is a poison that we have to challenge. It’s psychologically unhealthy and philosophically mistaken because it gets wrong what being human means.

I recently began reflecting on this when receiving my latest mailing from Poesie Purdue focused on leisure and realized I had a lot to flesh out on my ideas of leisure and play in adulthood.

The original seed was planted to me in college, when I read Josef Pieper’s book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, first published in 1948. Pieper was a German philosopher writing in the aftermath of postwar Europe, a society desperate to rebuild through labor and still his argument was —slow down. A life organized entirely around work misunderstands what makes us human. Spiritually and intuitively, this resonates with me so deeply and activates a sorrow in me that comes with the feeling of knowing the importance of something, and seeing how far removed I am from living it.

“Leisure is only possible when we are at one with ourselves. We tend to overwork as a means of self-escape, as a way of trying to justify our existence.” -Josef Pieper

the idea we’ve accepted

Pieper discussed a worldview he called total work as a culture that values human beings primarily as workers, and measures time by what it produces. Sound familiar?

We aren’t just overworked, we’ve internalized the logic of work so deeply that it infects everything else. The hobbies we consider become possible side hustles, and rest becomes a way that we recover, so that we can work more. Even how we speak of leisure is infected. We “invest” in relationships and “optimize” our morning routines, we vacation to “recharge.” Framing leisure this way is just fuel for more productivity and there are whole industries that profit greatly from these ideas.

With every new season of my life, the responsibilities adulthood presented felt heavy and serious. Play felt like something that people who took those responsibilities seriously did to selfishly indulge. I won’t go on a tangent, but I want to first mention that that topic is an essay in its own right. I think have gotten play so wrong, that there are examples everywhere of people that stay in a perpetual state of “play” or a perpetual state of “work”. We are all over the place.

The idea that I’ve been ruminating on since reading Pieper's book is that leisure is not the reward for work, it is the foundation of a fully human life. Culture, philosophy, art, worship, and play cannot exist when everything is subordinated to usefulness and the capacity to stop, to wonder, to receive beauty for its own sake is not a luxury, but a necessity for our soul.

Defining leisure

Here’s where Pieper’s ideas inspire me to rethink. We can’t define leisure as anything we do when we aren’t working. It’s not collapsing on the couch or doomscrolling. It’s something more active than that and requires a certain disposition of receptivity.

Pieper writes that leisure is “a mental and spiritual attitude — it is not simply the result of external factors, and not the inevitable result of spare time, a holiday, a weekend or a vacation.” You can be surrounded by free time and still be unable to rest. You can be deeply at leisure in the middle of an ordinary afternoon. This explains the many times I have told my husband that sometimes it feels like I can be given so much alone time and still feel a deficit.

No one who looks to leisure simply to restore his working powers will ever discover the fruit of leisure; he will never know the quickening that follows almost as though from some deep sleep. -Josef Pieper

True leisure, in Pieper’s sense, is the willingness to be open to reality, beauty, and presence without needing to control or produce it. It is more a disposition of wonder than idleness. I think of the way a child feels building a sandcastle knowing it will be washed away, or a dog chasing its own shadow.

Pure play is beautiful and good for us and it needs no justification except that it’s delightful, absorbing, or fun.

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What happens when we stop playing

“It is a happy talent to know how to play.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I have forgotten how to play a feeling of dullness comes over me. I am more irritable, pessimistic, less relational, mean. Things that used to feel interesting no longer spark anything.

According to some research on this, when play is suppressed, we become more rigid, anxious, less creative, and less able to connect with other people. That explains it!

Pieper adds a philosophical dimension by saying that when we stop playing, we stop being able to receive. We become purely instrumental and closed to the kind of experience that makes usefulness worthwhile in the first place.

Permission to do something useless

Louisa May Alcott wrote: “Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success.”

I adore how naturally she pairs useful and pleasant as two things a good day requires in equal measure. Play isn’t the enemy of a well spent life. It’s part of what makes it worth spending.

The invitation is to give yourself permission to do something that has no point, but just because you are a human being, and human beings are not machines, and some things are worth doing simply because they are beautiful or joyful or interesting.

Read a book with no practical application, learn to draw badly, take a walk without tracking your steps, sit in a garden and notice things, build something you’ll take apart, choose a recipe book to cook from just because you’ve been meaning to.

This essay by The Culturist recently inspired me to take up walking as a form of play. I encourage you to read it, too!

The Ancient Cure for Mental Fog

Consider this your permission to wonder and play for the sake of leisure and beauty.

Warmly,

Lilly