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Play is not an anomaly

Updated Jan 10 2025

What if we treated play as our starting point? Not as an anomaly, but a principle to every self-organizing system?

What would happen if we proceeded from the reverse perspective and agreed to treat play not as some peculiar anomaly, but as our starting point, a principle already present not just in lobsters and indeed all living creatures, but also on every level where we find what physicists, chemists, and biologists refer to as “self-organizing systems”? —David Graeber, What’s the point if we can’t have fun?

This gives us ground to unthink the world around us.