Playfulness: March 2024
Is this story good?
There was once a beautiful boy named Harry who was a prince and angel. He went to school and everyone loved him. He decided he should run for president, and it was his birthday, and he won the race. He got engaged to his favorite person, and then a monkey came and said “now you are king.” Everyone clapped for Harry, and Harry clapped for himself.
This story is boring and bad. Why? It has angels! It has an irresistibly good-looking lead! It has a victorious ending! But what is the purpose of storytelling? Why do we use our imaginations to engage in fictional experiences at all? It’s conceivable that one of the greatest uses of our imaginations would simply be to imagine great things and—in fantasy—get to experience great things. Therefore, a story that has only positive elements would be a wonderful thing to spend time with and run through our imagination-virtual-reality machine.
But we don’t do that. Instead, a story that doesn’t involve any of the things we know in our hearts make up our day-to-day experience—toil, strife, failure—strikes us as not really worth our time, not a worthwhile fantasy.
There’s something so beautiful about the way our imagination allows us to experience reality in a safe way. When we cry at a film, the sadness is both real and more tolerable because it is not a reflection of our real circumstances. We use this function even to enjoy intensely negative emotions, like horror. Why would we seek a way to sanitize but still experience something like that? And what does this all mean for playfulness?
I think I had a low opinion of playfulness when I only imagined it to refer to scenes like a slow motion food fight among bright, smiling friends-for-ever in a ballpit. But then I remembered that the most fun role-play I’ve ever been a part of was a long-form scene in which I imagined I was a father having a very serious conversation with my pretend wife about how to manage our destructive teen. There was shouting and crying and none of it was real and it lasted for about 45 minutes. No food was thrown. No balls were dived into.
I think what I’m trying to say is, playfulness is really weird. It is not one-dimensional. It can look a lot more like a drama than a comedy. According to the National Institute of Play, the required elements of play are:
It is self-chosen or self-directed
It is intrinsically motivated
It is structured or ordered based on rules in the player’s mind
It is imaginative or has a creative aspect
The player is in a playful state of mind—they are engaged, mentally alert, and unstressed about the activity because there are no consequences.
In my own life, I’ve decided one of the best uses of this state of mind is to safely engage with internal processes I find to be difficult to engage with in real life. When negative emotions are summoned in play, I can rehearse tolerating them in a safe way, which then translates to an ability to tolerate them in the real world. There is abundant research that many of our personal plagues—procrastination, inability to forgive and to apologize, anxiety, depression, substance use, and even ADHD—boil down to an inability to tolerate negative internal states. When we cannot tolerate negative emotions, we have no choice but to engage in the behavior which will rescue us from them.
This all points to playfulness as one of the most critical tools we humans have to cultivate a healthy way of life. Jacob Moreno, who pioneered Psychodrama—a therapeutic method wherein you simply roleplay as yourself in search of catharsis—phrased it this way:
“Throw away the old script. Redo it, here, now. Act yourself as you never were, so that you may begin to be what you might have become. Make it happen. Be your own inspiration, your own playwright, your own actor, your own therapist, and finally, your own creator.”
Fin,
Harry