Cultural baggage

In David Graeber’s excellent 2014 essay, ‘What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?,’ he explores our fascination with animals and play: 

“Why do animals play? Well, why shouldn’t they? The real question is: Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious? What does it tell us about ourselves that we instinctively assume that it is?” 

It’s a fascination that – in our view – comes down to formatting.

No matter where we look, our dominant cultural frameworks have some serious baggage when it comes to play. Whether we look to the West and its individualistic culture that favors competitive play and independent achievement, or to Confucian hierarchical values that consider play as a means of fostering virtuous behavior and social harmony, what we see are top-down views of play as but another formatting tool — far from the intuitive, liberating ideal we’ve explored so far. This kind of framing has a seriously profound impact on our relationship to play as both children and adults. 

From the way we tell stories to the assumptions we make about what’s ‘normal’ and ‘valuable,’ free play — play without purpose — is deviant. And so culture undermines play’s true form as an open and freeform practice, acting as an invisible hand rushing children — and keeping adults — out of their most original, generative state; “[training us] away from natural-born foolishness” as Gordon McKenzie, author of Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace, puts it. 

Conditioned by the desire to quickly grow up and into productive, ‘optimized’ members of society, rather than, say, mature, considerate and open-minded ones, children are encouraged (if not forced) to set aside their ‘imprudent’ and ‘irresponsible’ behavior; to ‘quit playing around’ and embrace adulting. As Rebekah Willett, a professor at the Information School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied childlore (a concept we couldn’t get enough of during this research process), outlines for The Atlantic, it’s a shift in parental focus. So enamored with their children ‘becoming’ — worrying about their development and preparing them for the adult life they will one day lead — they miss the power of children simply ‘being.’

It’s an inherently cynical attitude, one that’s deeply bound up in our next monster-head: good old capitalism.

Power dynamics

The forces of culture and capitalism would have us believe that play is synonymous with disorder. And so, of course, it’s only natural that the powers that be would aim to exercise control. In their view, play should only happen under certain circumstances and for certain purposes, accessible strictly to those who fit an exclusive set of criteria — creating a power imbalance between those whose remit it is to maintain the status quo and those who’d wish to challenge it.

And so, despite the fact that the United Nations recognizes play as a right of every child — and the Convention on the Rights of the Child explicitly positions play as a fundamental right — not everyone has the time, space, or resources to experience it. As a proxy for power, wealth tends to facilitate access to the kinds of safe spaces, equipment, and materials required for play — and perhaps more importantly, determine just how much agency one has over their time, idle or otherwise. Gender, race, and ability can create barriers of their own, but it all comes back to power and privilege. 

So let’s zoom out for a moment, beyond the practicalities of play, and consider how power structures operate within the likes of institutions, organizations, and societies writ large. To have ‘power over’ is to demand submission, assume systematic outcomes, and enact top-down control. To embrace play, for children and adults alike, is to experience and cultivate freedom, cooperation, lawlessness, and joyful disorder. So, of course, play and traditional forms of power are like oil and water; by definition, play creates a contradiction. 

Any force that makes us more human, more curious, and more cooperative is naturally a threat to the competitive, individualistic, and hegemonic structures in place. 

In the context of most institutional organizations, rules and regulations limit the individual’s freedom to engage in anything too unstructured or spontaneous — monitored and enforced by everything from automated time-tracking software to rigid bureaucratic structures. This same structure has been replicated in the power dynamics between children and those responsible for their growth and development. As Peter Gray, a psychology professor emeritus at Boston College, outlines: the decline in free play we’ve seen over the last several years is “at least partly because adults have exerted ever-increasing control over children’s activities. As true at home as it is at school, we see this dynamic in everything from the heightened intensity of youth sports to the declining prevalence of recess. Per the CDC, only eight states in the U.S. require elementary schools to provide daily recess, and since the mid-2000s, up to 40% of school districts across the nation reduced or eliminated its presence entirely.

So, what kind of world are we creating when we deprioritize play at every turn? What are we encouraging by dampening its power and raising barriers to its access? From hampering people’s ability to embrace, adapt, and react to changing circumstances to stifling creativity and innovation, keeping play contained and restrained has real ramifications, stunting our growth as individuals, communities, and societies world over.