Play gives meaning to life

Updated Jan 15 2024

• pleasure-and-play

Play gives meaning to life, wrote the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga back in 1938. He christened us homo ludens—‘playing man.’ Everything we call ‘culture,’ said Huizinga, originates in play.¹

Almost all mammals play, and many other animals can’t resist. It’s the most intelligent animals that exhibit the most playful behavior. Domesticated animals play their whole lives.

The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression. —psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith

Fear destroys curiosity and playfulness. In order to have a healthy society we must raise children who can safely play and learn.²

From Tarot for Change, Jessica Dore:

Donald Winnicott, who was a pioneer in the field of child development, described play as a process in which a paradox had “to be accepted, tolerated, and not resolved.” He felt that play required people to switch off the brain’s instinct toward caution. And this makes intuitive sense because play requires the deployment of imagination to experience a reality that lives somewhere between the material and the imagined. In a world as desperately in need of people with the capacity to dream new realities as ours is, this strikes me as a crucial life skill.