‘What Happens Next?’: What Happens When We Stop Playing?

Dr Susan Carland: Welcome back to What Happens Next?, the podcast that examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world and ask the experts, what will happen if we don't change? And what can we do to create a better future?

I'm Dr Susan Carland. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

Rob Walker: As children, it's very natural, you'll just fill in the gaps because you're so curious about everything and the world is just a huge giant adventure box. And by the time you get to be an adult, the world is different. And I don't want to be cynical, but maybe you're looking for a way out of the situation.

Margaret Barrett: There can be a danger that at times, unless delicately managed, that the introduction of formal education can close down possibilities.

Mike Rucker: So many of the things that we think are fun are really overtaxing our dopamine system.

Dr Susan Carland: Welcome back to an all-new season of What Happens Next?.

We're kicking our eighth season off with a fun one – fun itself, or rather, play.

Any educator worth their salt can tell you that play is an essential aspect of human development. When children play, it fosters creativity, social skills, and problem-solving abilities. But our adult world places a high value on productivity, and we're up against some extremely serious challenges. In the face of this, play is often seen as a waste of time or even a luxury.

Today we're talking to world-leading experts in music, creativity, psychology, and even video games about play's critical role in our individual and collective well-being. What happens when we stop playing and what happens when we let our creative muscles atrophy? Keep listening to find out what happens next.

All of us are born with a creative streak. In fact, many experts argue that the groundwork for innovation and ingenuity is being laid even before we leave the womb.

Margaret Barrett: The sense of hearing is the first sense to develop in utero, and there are studies that have explored the music that young children hear or infants hear whilst they are in the womb and have demonstrated that those children or infants are able to recognise that music. So even in the womb, they are developing musical tastes, they're developing a musical vocabulary, a repertoire of music and song. So it's there from the very earliest moments.

Dr Susan Carland: Professor Margaret Barrett is a music educator and head of the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance at Monash University.

Margaret Barrett: A lot of my research has focused around very young children. So the youngest child enrolled in one of my research projects was six weeks.

Dr Susan Carland: Whoa. Okay.

Margaret Barrett: So it's been looking at the way music occurs in families with very young children. And it started from an initial research project where I was studying young children, five-year-olds, four-, five-year-olds invented notations, so how they make up notations to record their music. And one of the questions that I asked in that process of the child was, do you ever make up your own music? And invariably they said, “Of course I do.” And they would then sing me their own songs. And so immediately I thought, well, here are children presenting at school, four and five years of age, singing their own songs, inventing their own songs, where does that start?

So my next study looked at children between 18 months of age and up to the school, looking, does it start here? And of course, yes, there's a lot that happens there. And the next study was looking at children from birth onwards. And so looking at the way in which music is part of being human, the way in which we draw on music, as parents, as children, to make meaning of the world, to engage with the world, to explore the world. Music is very much built into being a human. It is perhaps what makes us human.

Dr Susan Carland: Dr Xavier Ho, a lecturer in Monash University's Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, says play helps us discover who we are, who our friends are, what we like to do, and what our world is like.

Xavier Ho: Play is something that people do naturally. Kids play, children go out to play, and they play at home, they play with their friends, they play to learn. So there is a sense of we often learn by imitating action, and sometimes we're learning the rules of play, how societies work, who you are in society, who you want to be in the future. You're learning through play, you're learning through role-play. You're trying to follow models, you're trying to find people who you connect. You're trying to find the sort of industry, the sort of work that you enjoy doing, the sort of art that you enjoy picking up as a hobby, the sort of spare time thing that you like doing, learning through play. So what is the role of play? Play is how we become who we are.

Dr Susan Carland: Somewhere along the way from childhood to adulthood, however, we lose something. Here's Margaret again.

Margaret Barrett: The children with whom I've worked, they're all musical. They are all interested, engaged with music.

And indeed, if anything, where I see young children begin to disengage is in that shift to formal education, where sometimes the structures of formal education close down the invention and the experimentation because early formal education is bent on developing repertoire, learning songs.

So I've had young children with whom I've worked, who say, “Oh, I don't sing songs anymore because I can't remember the words and I don't know how it goes.” But these were young children with whom several months to a year before when I were working with them, they were inventing their own, lots of words, lots of invention that was going on. So there can be a danger that at times, unless delicately managed, that introduction of formal education can close down possibilities.

Rob Walker: Hi, I am Rob Walker. I'm a writer living in New Orleans, the author of the book, The Art of Noticing, and the related newsletter of the same name.

Dr Susan Carland: Rob, welcome to the podcast.

Rob Walker: Thanks for having me.

Dr Susan Carland: Why do you think adults in particular struggle so much to play?

Rob Walker: Well, because it seems childish.

[Laughter]

Because we grow up, we grow out of these curious mindsets, we get serious. And it's good that we do this. If entire societies are made up of people who had childlike mindsets, and maybe sometimes we feel that they are, it would be a disaster. We need people to be able to concentrate and focus and pay attention to serious matters. So as a result of that, you, quote, unquote, “put aside childish things,” and one of those childish things is that sort of curiosity and openness and playfulness. It just seems silly.

Dr Susan Carland: We leave play behind as we grow older and more serious, but also as our diaries fill up. Here's Xavier.

You mentioned that kids play, do you think adults play enough?

Xavier Ho: Oh, adults totally play as well, for sure. But play enough? Interesting.

So I used to play video games and tabletop games all the time. So easily four hours a night, eight hours on a weekend because that's how I found my social friends. That's how I spend time over the summer, especially over the summer break, that was a really good time to spend time with my friends.

But now as a, I guess professional, mid-30s, it's quite hard to align that adult schedule to like, “Can we get up together?” “Oh, when are you free next time?” “Oh, September.” Literally, we have a board game session with a friend, we've scheduled it in September. This is our lives now.

Dr Susan Carland: So we've gotten a little too old, a little too busy, and these days we're all feeling a little too tired to have much fun. But according to organisational psychologist and behavioural scientist, Dr Mike Rucker, author of The Fun Habit, using our exhaustion as a reason not to have fun is only making our burnout worse.

Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Mike Rucker: Thank you so much for having me.

Dr Susan Carland: What is fun starvation?

Mike Rucker: So what I've been looking at is this idea that especially in adult life, a lot of us aren't engaging in leisure or really enjoying the things that we do. And there are a whole host of various headwinds for that, especially depending on the social norms that you live in and sort of where you find yourself in life. But I think what's becoming really apparent is the folks that aren't enjoying the things that they do, at least part of the time, are really ending up burning themselves out.

And so in a similar fashion to how we looked at sleep deprivation kind of in the '90s and 2000s, we're starting to now see that with a lack of leisure and fun where people are deriving too much self-worth from productivity, and when they kind of get stuck in that mode, they don't realise that they kind of stop enjoying the things around them. It becomes this downward spiral.

Dr Susan Carland: So what's stopping adults in particular from prioritising or having fun?

Mike Rucker: Yeah, I think there's a whole host of different reasons.

For folks that find themselves in the sandwich generation, which certainly I do, I think for the first time ever, you're seeing people have kids later in life. And also, I meant, fortunately, but also it comes with some additional responsibilities, our parents are living longer than they ever have. And so that kind of meets in the middle where folks that find themselves between 30 and 50 are now not just taking care of their children, but also taking care of ageing parents. The old Protestant Puritan work ethic's still at play.

And then kind of this construct, especially in Western society where we've been brought up with a meritocracy driving our self-worth, we really do equate time with money. And so if we're wasting time, then somehow our self-worth is degraded. And so when we're sort of idle, somehow some of us have this mental construct that we're also wasting money, which is very strange when you illuminate it, but it does because a lot of us will live in this sense of scarcity if you've kind of been brought up that way.

If we're just kind of “wasting time,” quote, unquote, then it can feel uncomfortable. But what we know is that when you live a balanced life, oftentimes an interesting byproduct of having fun is actually being more productive. And so similar to sleep deprivation, which you kind of actualize sooner, you go without sleep for a couple of weeks, everything starts to kind of drag.

Unfortunately, being fun starved is a little bit more insidious, that you can kind of go a month or two and be like, “Eh, I just need to grind it out and I'll get that reward at the finish line.” But what you don't realise is slowly but surely, you're just not happy in what you're doing, so your productivity goes down.

There's this psychological concept called emotional contagion, so not only is it affecting your psychological well-being, but it's creating an environment where you see poor mental hygiene around your immediate cohort. So it has all of these ripple effects, but because it's a slow burn, sometimes we don't realise, wait a second, this actually is a powerful force when I'm not enjoying the things that I'm doing.

Dr Susan Carland: As you were speaking, I was thinking about a friend of mine who's a surgeon, obviously very demanding job, and his home life is incredibly stressful as well. And he was saying to me the other day, “I just don't feel like I can be creative at all. Even when I try to be creative, I can't.” And I think it's because he's just permanently stressed.

When you are constantly in a state of stress, you cannot be creative. It's kind of like a clenched fist. And to be creative, you need the open fist, the open hand. And I feel like play is the boundary between the two, between stress and creativity, the way to get there, the tunnel is play. Would you see it that way?

Mike Rucker: Yeah. So a lot of my academic research has been with physicians, so I have a lot of empathy for what your friend is going through. Unfortunately, I know the US statistics the best, but we're in the worst year ever with regards to physician burnout.

And you're spot on, in adulthood, and we should show adults grace, I'm certainly in that cohort, we have all of this incoming information. So on top of what I've already shared with regards to domestic duties that are more complicated than they ever have been, we have the internet, we have smartphones, we have what we call knowledge work now.

So we have access to all of these complicated mechanisms sending us so much information, that to be able to survive, quite frankly, we need things called heuristics and essentially a roadmap on how we operate. But the problem is, once we develop all of those algorithms, you're exactly right, we start to lose the ability to think in an innovative way, to get curious, because we don't have that time.

And it's kind of tied into fight or flight. I mean, it's more complex than that, but if you think about it inherently, when you're so overwhelmed that you're really just trying to get through the day, you're not trying to think of creative ways to solve those problems. You're just like, “I know what I know, and if I keep my head forward, I can do it.”

And what's unfortunate there is again, we start to get depleted, just the same way we need to charge our smartphones and our laptops, if we're not charging ourselves, we don't have anything else to give. But paradoxically also, we're not able to kind of think our way out of those problems. And so it does become insidious, where slowly but surely you're getting more depleted, but it's really hard to make that connection unless you start to do a little bit of self-experimentation.

The good news is it doesn't take much. I think one of the problems too that has made it interesting and is a headwind of truly having fun, is that so many of the things that we think are fun are really overtaxing our dopamine system. And so now what we know-

Dr Susan Carland: Like what? What are those sorts of things?

Mike Rucker: Those things that are designed for us to anticipate a variable reward, so certainly social media and then things like TikTok where everything is this immediate gratification without having to work for it, and so what happens is that we need more and more arousal really to feel like we're enjoying it. But that's not true enjoyment, that's not contentment. It's anticipation of something interesting happening.

Dr Susan Carland: In his fight to win the attention war. Rob Walker's greatest nemesis may be the smartphone.

You get on a train or you're waiting at a bus stop. Everyone is on their phone, everyone is just looking, and maybe one person is sending an important email, but most people are just mindlessly numbed out looking at something.

And yet, when you mentioned the game that you played and you talked about the games that other people play, they're so fun and they're so rewarding and they feel kind of sparky inside us, and yet we keep defaulting to the mind-numbing, scrolling that no one leaves mindlessly scrolling Instagram or Reddit feeling sparky and fun and engaged. Why do we keep going back to that instead of doing the thing that you suggested, that sort of mindful play-based, attention-focused activity?

Rob Walker: Yeah, I mean, sharper minds than mine have tried to explain this and the consensus seems to be that, well, a lot of what those people on the train are doing is in fact literally playing a game that has been engineered to give short-term attention like dopamine rewards for the best... In fact, one of the games that I like to play, to make this a little bit meta, is to look at what people are doing on their phones. I move around the train trying to spy on people.

And I remember once in San Francisco on the Path train, seeing a guy who, and I looked at it and he was playing a game where you would, with your finger, flick a little piece of digital trash into a trash can, sort of playing basketball, and I was like, “What possible reward could you get?”

But I guess they tell me that they have many experts and people spend a lot of money designing these games in such a way that they give you quick hit dopamine rewards.

And the stuff that I'm talking about might not give you quick hit dopamine rewards, or it might, or it might give you a more longer-term, it's more of an engagement-based activity rather than a sort of quick hit-based activity. And that's the best theory that I can come up with. I wish I really knew the answer, and then I would design a digital game that would make millions of dollars.

Dr Susan Carland: No, please, no more digital games. That's not what we need.

I wonder if it's that staring at our phone is extremely cognitively light. It asks absolutely nothing of us, even playing the rubbish game, it doesn't really require us to engage anything too deep in our brains. Whereas your game is fun and interesting and creative, but it does ask something from us. It does ask us to go, “Okay, what do I do here? What do I think about this?” The load is in our brain as opposed to in the phone.

Rob Walker: Right. I think that's right. And I think that that's what I mean when I try to say that there's a creativity involved in these things. That is not, I don't think it's that complicated a creativity, but we build up a resistance to it that we don't ... as children, it's very natural. You'll just fill in the gaps because you're so curious about everything and the world is just a huge, giant adventure box. And by the time you get to be an adult, the world is different.

And I don't want to be cynical, but maybe you're looking for a way out of the situation and you're looking to ... the way you put it is good, that this sort of a shift of cognitive load. Let me coast on someone else's creativity and do the digital throw a piece of garbage in the trash can game, rather than go with my own creativity. But I think that my own creativity is actually more energising.

Dr Susan Carland: So how do we get that energising spark back into our lives? Join us for part two of our series on play next week, when experts will teach us how we play to learn and how to learn to play.

Thank you to all our guests on today's episode, Professor Margaret S Barrett, Dr Xavier Ho, Dr Mike Rucker and Rob Walker. Be sure to check out Rob's newsletter, “The Art of Noticing”, for a fortnightly jolt of creative inspiration delivered straight to your inbox. We'll put a link in the show notes, along with information about all our guests’ work.

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