Play

(This is entry 88 of 100DaysToOffload)

I'm sitting here and looking out over people who are out and about today. It's a quite nice day: bright and sunny, fairly warm when you're in the sun (and pretty chilly when you're not). There's quite a lot of people out, kids on scooters and bikes, adults on bikes, people walking their dogs...

I don't really get enough play in my life. Certainly I get leisure, but I don't have that kind of pure, raw, fun, very often anymore. It's sort of one of the things that, in the transition from child to adult, I've sort of ended up losing. Even chat quite often ends up dull to me, even if it does manage to get past smalltalk.

Meanwhile, everything has become a task to be completed. There's so much work, yet not all of it really should be work. Essentially, life is sort of divided into work and downtime, but the third category of play is lost. Even gaming with friends feels like a task occasionally now. Relaxing becomes meditating becomes "do it ten minutes a day for optimal health". Eating becomes "get the right foods so I don't end up unhealthy, you can have a little bit of chocolate here and there as a snack but never too much", when as I kid I would always eat skittles and starbursts to abandon without any problems. Sleeping becomes "I need to get to bed on time to make sure I'm well-rested for work tomorrow". Etc. Everything just becomes another job, another thing to optimise.

Comedy, or watching the opera, or listening to music, are all fun, and all downtime, but it's not play. It's not pure fun, running about for the sake of running about. It's just... non-productive action. That's not really the same as play.

Maybe it's just high-functioning depression I've got here, but I feel as if it would be nice if adults could have a little bit of play in their lives, too. In Japanese, the equivalent to play, 遊ぶ (asobu), can be used for both adults and children. It would be nice if we could have something like that. Just pure fun, levity. Currently, everything in life feels so... weighty.