Finally, it would require that we develop the skills and capacities to play – to give ourselves over to those things that are intrinsically motivating, those things that are not ‘overshadowed by the dark clouds of purpose’.

But we should also be careful not to fall into the self-help trap. Any injunction to ‘find your inner child’ or to ‘seek out your play personality’ without structural change risks being a toothless act. It’s not just an act of personal rebellion but a social imperative.

Since the 1970s, productivity has grown at 3.5 times the rate of pay for American workers. Precarious employment has risen by 9 per cent since the late 1980s, and we have seen extraordinarily high levels of burnout in the workforce. In short, we are underpaid, insecure, and burned out. And yet the achievement society – with its injunction to be

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Third, it would require a movement away from efficiency and productivity as primary indicators of social wellbeing.

A call to playfulness is not an individual psychological prescription – it is a call to collective action against the achievement society.

What would it mean to live more playfully? First, it would require us to reject work that is not intrinsically motivating and to build working conditions that are joyfully engaging. Second, it would require that we de-emphasise the importance of work for finding personal fulfilment and meaning in our lives. Despite work being central to who we are... See more

The problem is, as achievement-subjects, not only do we burn ourselves out, but the meaning and value of our lives is always deferred. Once we have our dream job, the perfect home, a perfectly optimised life – once we are productive enough, efficient enough, successful enough – only then will we arrive at meaning. But just like the fruit that

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In his work ‘On the Meaning of Life’ (1927), Schlick writes: ‘[T]he deification of work as such, the great gospel of our industrial age, has been exposed as idolatry.’ He argues that true meaning in life can be found only in those things that ‘exist for their own sake and carry their satisfaction in themselves,’ only in ‘free, purposeless action …

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for Schlick, it is possible for our work to become play. If work can take on the creative and self-sufficient character of play, then the distinction collapses: ‘Human action is work, not because it bears fruit, but only when it proceeds from, and is governed by, the thought of its fruit … It is the joy in sheer creation, the dedication to the

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