First, a passage from a Ran Prieur blog post from August 13th, 2026 (which itself is a repost from something he wrote in 2015) about the disappearance of play in the modern world, and then my comment on it.
David Graeber piece, What's the Point If We Can't Have Fun? When industrial age biologists see animals playing, they assume it must have some hidden utilitarian value -- but this assumption is purely cultural, a projection of our selfish and mechanistic society onto nature. Graeber looks at some other perspectives that could put play at the heart of reality:
Unlike a DNA molecule, which we can at least pretend is pursuing some gangster-like project of ruthless self-aggrandizement, an electron simply does not have a material interest to pursue, not even survival. It is in no sense competing with other electrons. If an electron is acting freely -- if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, "does anything it likes" -- it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake -- which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.
So if electrons are playing, and bacteria and insects and squirrels are playing, and tribal humans are playing most of the time, and modern humans are hardly playing at all, then what happened? One answer is that this is a dead end and we should go back to the stone age or go extinct. I like to think we're a work in progress, an attempt by universal play to manifest at higher levels of complexity, or within our particular mode of consciousness.
Right after reading the Graeber essay, I went with Leigh Ann to a catsit where part of the job was to play with the cat. Watching it jump around chasing a toy on a string, I thought, how often do modern adult humans get to play like this cat?
Basically never. When we're "playing" sports or games we're much more serious, especially at higher levels where winning and losing have heavier consequences. Even board games and card games are more about competitive focus than strict-definition play. One partial exception is Cards Against Humanity -- and that's an interesting name given the idea that modern humans might be the least playful thing in the universe.
Video games can focus and expand our minds in valuable ways, but I can't think of a single one that's truly playful. Is this a failure by human game designers, or is it built into the hardware? How hard would it be to build an AI that could design and improvise a virtual world more creatively than a good human game master? Would we have better artificial intelligence if we judged and improved it by looking at playfulness, instead of using the Turing test which is based on symbolic language? Do we need to start over and build AI from a foundation that cannot be reduced to numbers and logic?
What can we do to make ordinary life more playful? Today I rode my bike to the store, and I noticed that there's a lot more room to playfully ride a bicycle than drive a car. Play is about sudden unpredictable movements, and if you try that in a car you're going to crash. So the most playful society is the one that can tolerate and use the most surprising behavior.
You can read more about this subject in a book called Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga. Huizinga uses children as an example of what real playing looks like, but that doesn't work in the 21st century because even children's activities are too structured now. I had to use a cat. Maybe that's why so many Millennials have social anxiety.
The part that interests me is about low tech has more room for being playful, because to me it is not just a secondary aspect of complex technology, nor a coincidence, it is a fundamental aspect that separates machines from tools, and which point to the fact that modernity is not as negotiable with as some people might think. Some might think that we can tweak machines, and the machine world we live in, towards being more human-friendly, to make the system we live in more aligned with human values. I say, this misalignment didn't happen accidentally.
Machines are complex arrangements that are fundamentally fragile, which is why everything needs to be so predictable, from the parts that make them up, to how they're used, to the people who run them. Organisms can be playful because they self-repair and because they're good at making small adjustments on the fly to avoid any disaster (if they are intelligent).
Furthermore, conscious people can face death in a way that machines can't, because the only modus operandi that makes sense to a machine is preserve itself for as long as possible, hence, the machinic nature of the ego. This is why conscious people can delight in life even when things are genuinely painful and the future is uncertain, whereas machine-people are constantly plagued with anxiety and despair.
We live in a machine world because it is what is best at creating power in the short-term, not because people consciously chose this life over anything else. To the extent that people "choose" or "prefer" modernity over other options, they do so from a fundamental ignorance, because they have never experienced the qualitative reality of other societies. They see various metrics pulled out of context about the past, and see for instance that people used to die earlier (somewhat true because of advent of antibiotics and medicine in general, but very misleading because the only thing that significantly changed is the death rate at birth), or that they didn't have access to all of the comfort we have now, and conclude that misery and despair used to be everywhere, which isn't true. It's related to the "is ought problem", the way that we can't derive qualitative realities from merely factual statements.
For instance, as mentioned in a previous piece on the centering effect of repetitive work, from the point of view of maximizing profits, the one that tries to minimize input costs (time, energy, material resources) and maximize outputs, it only makes sense to delegate as much work as possible to machines. At least, in the short-term, since the industrial world is incredibly hungry in energy, which ultimately comes from non-renewable fossil fuels.
But from the point of view of human life, working with simpler technology is valuable for a variety of reasons: it is more grounding, it is less prone to terrible accidents, it feels more rewarding, it empowers you and makes you independent from systems which do not have your best interests at heart, it allows you to go at your own pace because you are not as tied to external demands, all of which make the work non-alienating, in a way that the push towards optimization in the modern world systematically does.
This is why people constantly burn out in modern societies, not because they have to work harder or for longer than people in the past, though some people nowadays might, but because their work is totally atomized from any sense of connection, to their body, to a sense of mastery, to a real community, to any purpose relevant to the human soul, and to, dare I say, God.
Modern work is more "efficient" in the short-term (even then, not true when you consider the true cost of th entire system upon which we depend on), but it is not aligned with human nature, which is why people constantly dread doing it, even if it doesn't come with the (sometimes brutal) physical demands of pre-industrial work.
The problem is not work. Just like pain is not inherently bad, and a life spent keeping it at bay makes the body, mind, and soul weak, work can be ennobling, purposeful, informative, and even beautiful. Work at its best is our manifestation of devotion, to ourselves, to other people, and to the Divine.
One sign of the decay of modernity is that we try to remove any sort of difficulty or friction as much as we can, because we are out of touch with what matters. Thus we become numb, weak, incompetent, hedonistic (and thus anhedonic), stupid, and unable to stay focused on anything for more than a few minutes at a time.
There is obviously no inherent value to difficulty, by itself. Doing difficult but meaningless tasks is a form of hell, but on the other hand, those who cannot do anything difficult whatsoever are setting up themselves for a life of misery, because they cannot live for something other than their own self, which is also why they are unable to partake in real, spontaneous play.
Play is missing in the modern world because the source of the technological system, the alienated self, is unable to surrender to the moment and engage in simple, improvisational play. The way that the (alienated) self interprets play is either selfish hedonism, 1 which includes video games too, or it completely narrows down onto closed games that it tries to optimize so that it can then win: sports and competitive gaming of course, but even social media and business to an important degree.
In either case, the only concern for the self is what it can get from a given situation, which is why self puts so much effort into strategizing and improving itself to do better and better. Real play can certainly feature a great deal of mastery, as practiced actors are undeniably better at impro than the average person, but the primary point is not to win at some arbitrary game, it is simply to delight in the moment with others. The game is there as a unifying context for us to engage with one another, but it is largely secondary, which is why it would be absurd to think of how to cheat at social games, the way that people try to cheat at closed games, or abuse systems to their own benefit. 2 There is nothing to even "win", so why would you cheat?
The fact that self is so desperate to get something from the situations it finds itself in is why it is so fundamentally joyless. Some selves are better at hiding this than others, and even the most unconscious people have something conscious about them, but the alienated self is too existentially afraid, too busy worrying about its problems and working on it, to experience the surprising humor in the moment.
To the extent that self laughs, it's from being nervous—hence the common theory that laughter is a way of releasing tension—or because of the groupvibe that compels people to laugh (again, out of being nervous together), including the groupvibe of the sitcom or the podcast (you laugh when you are prompted to laugh), or it is laughing at someone or something, but it very rarely, if ever, simply laughs, the same way that young children do, because that requires the kind of presence needed to live without a script, and the kind of surrender needed to not need to go anywhere, not need to get anything from the situation.
As societies get more and more complex, presence and surrender are not just useless, but antithetical to the need to fit into the technological system. You cannot be spontaneous with a bureaucratic institution, such as at school or work, because those environments have their own demands that precede the flowing quality of the moment. You have the demands of the curriculum, of the classroom, of the credentials, of the manager, of the stakeholders, of the machines you use, of the bankers who lent you money, of the government, of the landlord, of the economy, and of the system at large.
How could someone see the lot of all of those demands and say that technology is "neutral" is beyond me. Complexity is never neutral, because it at the very least needs to maintain itself, which is not a neutral endeavor, and in our case, has steeped way outside of its limits.
People don't feel naturally compelled to maintain the technological system, they do so because they have no other choice to survive today, and because we have been severed from our roots: local communities, self-softening rituals, love, self-mastery, and the unity of consciousness, manifest in the present moment.
The professionals of our times, the ones that tell us how societies and human beings operate, tell us that nothing would work if people were left to be free, but what they mean is that no civilization would work by giving people radical freedom. And they are right. Spontaneously free people do not default to building civilization, they default to living in small groups of relatively "low" complexity, a way of life which is far from perfect of course, namely because it is painful, difficult, and uncertain, but none of those things are experienced the same way for a radically more conscious person.
It is not just pain and uncertainty that self fears however, it is also the radical freedom of the now. Have you ever noticed how terrified people are of genuinely free time? Not just the two days they get at the end of the week to catch up on the things they couldn't do, but prolonged periods of time away from work, from the screen, from modern demands, and even from the mind. Most people immediately turn to their phone, or their recreational activities, or their addictions, because to be one with the moment invites a surrender for the self, which is essentially death to it.
This is the fundamental reason why "civilized" people cannot have fun. It's not just that they are boring and stiff, though it is true, but they are existentially afraid in a way that is much deeper than what anyone could remedy through a mere technique, or a workshop. The only cure to this fundamental boredom and tension is life itself, because you cannot ignore the reality of your own life, whereas you can always close a book, or stop listening to a teacher, but you can't ignore the reality that is right in front of you. At least not forever.
1 Emphasis on selfish, because pleasure by itself is again not problematic. It is only when the self turns onto pleasure because it is unable, or unwilling, to experience anything else that it becomes alienating. Making love is delightful, but fucking someone else just for your own pleasure is not.
2 This and many other similar observations are made very well in Darren Allen's piece on the open game of life.
Go back to the list of blog posts
2026-08-31