Man, this Alan Watts fella was smart.

I had my first serious misgivings about the division between work and play when I was in still in elementary school.

Nothing I could have articulated, of course, just a vague feeling that there was something wrong with dividing our time like that.

I suppose the fact that for me, school was not very hard played a role in that. For as long as I can remember, the worst part of school for me was the walk there and back.

Well, and the bullying. But the actual school part was a breeze. I

It wasn’t until college that I got the chance to really articulate it. It ended up coming out when I was writing my big paper for my Philosophy of Education course and I was spooling out my thoughts about how bizarre it is that we have an educational system so fundamentally wrongheaded that it can actually teach a child to hate learning.

Children are learning machines. They naturally love to learn. Even in play, they are exploring the world and testing their abilities and learning everything they can.

But like Einstein said, even the most voracious of predators will be put off its food if it’s strapped down and force fed for eight hours a day.

And he knew what he was talking about. All his teachers were Prussian.

Anyhow, back to work and play.

Of all people, it was Mary Poppins who had it right :

And there it is, the secret to a happy life, in easy to remember song form.

Because she’s absolutely right. If you can find a way to see everything in life as a game, then the entire concept of work goes right out the window.

But we’re so indoctrinated into the “work bad, play good” mindset that we automatically reject such thoughts as naïve, simplistic, or just plain wrong.

But think about it. The dividing line between work and play is not a matter of effort or work. A lot of the most popular forms of play are at least as much work as the jobs we do, and yet we do them joyously and of our own free will.

And it’s not about the nature of the task, either. There is no job so bad that there is not someone in the world who would find it to be a lot of fun.

No, the difference is simple : choice. Work is the stuff you don’t choose to do but are forced to do anyhow. Play is the stuff you choose to do.

And that starts with that force-feeding factory known as school. That’s where we learn to divide our day into “the good part” and “the part that sucks”.

And this rule is socially enforced. Woe betide the child who openly enjoys school. Their peers will swiftly and mercilessly correct them.

It can be socially disastrous to like the wrong things.

In fact, it can make people wonder aloud what the hell is wrong with you. Often they will conclude that you are either retarded or crazy or both.

But imagine if you could simply reject the whole notion of work and take Mary Poppins’ lesson instead, and see the world as full of fun and games, some of which people will actually pay you to do.

You’d be king of the world, wouldn’t you? You’d never work another day in your life, and you didn’t even have to get rich first. You could be working a dead end entry level job and still be having the time of your life. It would be amazing.

So who cares if everyone thinks you are the dullest person on planet Earth?

You’re having fun, and that’s all that matters.

More on this in part 2.

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But how do I get there?

I have no idea.

But I am going to try to get there anyway, and if I find the way, you’ll be the first to know.

I know I have a lot of deprogramming to do. I have to disable or destroy the part of me that reflexively scoffs at the idea of treating life like a game.

I mean, you obviously can only do things right if you take them super seriously, right? At least as seriously as they are important, anyway.

But that’s a dangerously shortsighted way to see things. There is actually no correlation between how important something is and the optimal level of seriousness with which it should be treated.

Sure, if you’re not taking it seriously enough, you risk disaster. But the same goes for taking it too seriously. When you take things too seriously, you end up wasting a lot of mental resources by trying to pour more mental effort into something than it can hold, and that excess energy spills into things like anxiety and distress.

And all because of a deep fear of not taking things seriously enough that causes you to wildly overcompensate in the opposite direction.

Which is why I am trying so hard to learn to calm the fuck down about things. I would not be nearly as terrified of life and reality if I could learn to treat it all like a game (a video game, even) and fundamentally stop caring so much about outcomes.

I mean, yeah, bad outcomes suck. It’s good to avoid them. But taking everything too seriously turns almost all outcomes bad by raising the stakes way too high.

So what I really want is to somehow learn to ease way back on the throttle in order to stop throttling myself with tension.

But where does all that throttling come from? Energy looking for a way to express itself, I think. I have talked about how unspent energy manifests as anxiety in this space before. It’s like whatever gets generated but not used spills over into anxiety and neurosis like unused energy in a system turning into waste heat.

So what do you do about that? Do more work, basically. Use more of that energy up. Shout down the energy miser in your head and do everything you can to use up all the energy you produce so that you are completely exhausted at the end of the day.

And if I can figure out how to get myself to do THAT, I’ll have it made.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.