I've heard this framed other ways like "living to work vs. working to live", but I prefer the term play here since it evokes something more necessarily joyous and creative, not just vaguely alluding to being alive.

Anyway, this is not going to be my neatest write-up ever, but it's something that was on my mind and want to put out there.

What I was noting was, to use an example, John Cleese (the comedian) has a talk where he goes into what he calls "open and closed mode" and how getting into the open mode is important for creativity. It's an interesting talk and all, but something I feel I missed about it when I first encountered it and for a long time after is the way in which it implicitly emphasizes the priorities like this: "play is something you do in order to get into a more effective state for producing better work."

I don't think he says this in so many words, but it's implied, from what I can remember, and in any case, it's just one example in a sea of how capitalist thought talks about labor. Recreation is often framed as something you do to rest, rejuvenate, and otherwise improve the end result: which is to produce labor.

Rarely is it framed from the other direction. So we have the directions that look something like:

Play to Work (capitalist): Listening to music to help you concentrate for work, doing brainstorming activities; the normally play-like activity becomes a tool for you to work better, play becomes subservient to work.

Work to Play (communal?): Laboring in order to accomplish some kind of security/safety/sustenance, so that you can sing and dance and play music with community after (or whatever playful activity you can think of; the activity itself is less important than the purpose being toward the end of play rather than toward the end of work).

The problem I see in Play to Work is how depressing and demoralizing it can be. Something that, if you had an okay childhood, you learned to associate with liveliness and excitement, openness and awe, instead becomes something you learn to associate with struggle and hardship, efficiency and effectiveness. What used to be a play that makes you happy to be alive gets warped into a tool of labor and the joy gets sucked out of it. It's no wonder, then, that adults sometimes pine for the days of childhood play.

Is this to say that if you bring play into work at all, it will become "corrupted"? No. But it is to say that if you have no play that is actually, really for things like liveliness and excitement, openness and awe, you might find yourself struggling to look forward to things.

Efficiency isn't enough. We aren't machines. And there's a temptation, if one is caught up in capitalist efficiency brain, to go, "Alright, so the takeaway is, do play more effectively." Which is more of the same trap. What is being lost is a fundamental exploratory nature of play. This does not mean you can't bring skill to play, that if you decide to play the piano, you must play it badly even if you know it well, in order for it to qualify as play. No, it means that if you mean to play the piano, not just go through the motions, that is a different state of being, a different state of mind, than laboring over a piano.

Or to go deeper with it, what kind of society are we working to create and nurture (beyond basic sustenance)? One where we are all very efficient? That's great for logistics, but it can't be all there is to it. Somehow we have to escape the machine view of efficiency. Which doesn't only mean acknowledging that we break down and grudgingly setting aside time for relaxation, but also recognizing the fundamental liveliness that comes from having play to look forward to for a purpose more meaningful than "restoring our battery levels".