Goofing Off

How a little play time can even be good for adults.

By Paul Roberts, published on July 01, 1995 - last reviewed on October 01, 2009

The pure pleasure of play is a true antidote to all the mundane duties ofadulthood, especially that most tedious of tasks, maintenance of Self. But we have a hard time allowing ourselves the purposelessness that is absolutely fundamental to the relief we crave.

Pity in the baseball fan. the strike may be over, the season under way, but the memories of the bickering and greed have forever marked our "national pastime" as Big Business. Gone, it seems, is the game's romance; the sweet blend of illusion and innocence. Gone, too, is the sense of play. Indeed, if the strike taught us anything, it's that professional sports now have little to do with playing. Play is something we do for fun, the outward expression of some deep, presumably joyful urge. Yet today's sports starts, with their grave expressions, steely glances, and rehearsed post-game patter, seem about as joyful and spontaneous as a White House press release.

"What's disillusioning is that the element of play has completely dropped out," laments psychologist Margaret Carlisle Duncan, Ph.D., an expert in leisures studies at the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee and president of the Association for the Study of Play. "All we see now is the professional aspect: what drives the players has become invisible; reduced to dollars and cents."

In many ways, our rising ambivalence about professional sports reflects a larger and deeper confusion in our conception of play itself. Americans, by almost all accounts, crave play. We work hard so that we can play hard. We spend lavishly on leisure and diversions--hundreds of billions of dollars a year. We idealize play, admiring "playful" personalities, envying others who manage to keep play in their lives.

And no wonder, for play--true, unadulterated play--is pure pleasure, an activity undertaken solely for enjoyment. Play is intense, absorbing, and invigorating. It can override consciousness, displace anger, anxiety, and fear. It can produce illusion and make-believe, clouding our sense of time, place, and identity.

Play isn't simply the antithesis of work: Its an antidote to all the mundane duties of adulthood, from partnering and provisioning right down to the tedious maintenance of Self. Little surprise that researchers link play and playfulness to such positive outcomes as healthy relationships, strong families, creativity, spiritual growth, and personal confidence.

Yet even as we idealize play, we're finding the ideal is elusive and depressingly complex. For all its rejuvenating powers, play--or "flow," as University of Chicago psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ph.D., calls it--can also be disruptive, dysfunctional, even addicting. "Flow isn't necessarily good," he says. "It's like electricity: It can be used for a toaster or an electric chair."

More important, playfulness, even in its healthiest sense is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve. Not only do we have less time for play, but we've begun to blur the boundaries between our work selves and play selves. More and more, we work at playing, larding our leisure with labor-related terms and themes: efficiency; perfectionisms; results. "Today's tennis players use terms like 'stroke production,'" grouses Geoffrey Godbey, Ph.D., a professor of leisure studies at Pennsylvania state university and author of The Sociology of Leisure. "That's not playing; that's work."

Indeed, in our drive for efficiency, we've even begun making our play do work, using it as a means to other ends--stress reduction, therapy, fitness, the never-ending process of "self-actualization." We may be fitter and faster, but we're also undermining the purposelessness that is so fundamental to play.

The harder we play the less playful we're becoming--and the more vulnerable we leave ourselves to the very things play is supposed t prevent: tension, stress, anxieties, discordant relationships, poor work performance, even depression. "Are we as late-20th-century North American adults at a crisis point?" asks the university of Wisconsin's Duncan. "Speaking as contemporary North American adult, I'd have to say 'yes.'"

a state of grace

What is play? Like love or happiness, play is a concept that resists explication: You know it when you feel it. In fact, play is now studied under so many diverse disciplines, from psychology and sociology to literary theory and theology, that definitions run the gamut. Nonetheless, many researchers agree that play can be described by four or five basic characteristics.

For example, true play is its own reward. It is undertaken voluntarily. It is often a form of self-expression and is always pleasurable. Finally, all play, whether experienced directly (through participation) or vicariously (through observation), is completely absorbing.

Why humans need such experiences is a far more complex and long-standing question. Since classical times, scholars have recognized that play is universal, and not simply within the human sphere. All higher animals, from the two-legged variety right down to fish in the ocean, exhibit some degree of play activity--that is, mental and physical action not directly related to survival. Play was, therefore, not simply a by-product of the mind: It dearly had some cruder biological end.

Most early researchers, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, sought to explain play in deterministic, cause-and-effect terms. We played, depending on the theory of the day, to burn excess energy, to recharge depleted energy, to practice "instinctual" behaviors such as fighting or courting, or to purge unwanted tensions.