What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun?

Whatever work we do to engage people in making change can be deepened and expanded if it has play at its heart.

If the world were truly random and accidental, without any intrinsic purpose, agency, or telos, then why were our physical laws fine-tuned with such precision? How did nature come to display what the physicist Paul Davies once called “a fiendishly clever bit of trickery: meaninglessness and absurdity somehow masquerading as ingenious order and rati

struggle cannot be all serious and dutiful, that social change should revolve around what makes life nourishing, delicious, and erotic. “We all need and deserve pleasure,” she writes, and “our social structures must reflect this.”

Most people don’t like disagreeing, or introducing discomforting facts and observations. This can be as true in apparently egalitarian settings as it is in hierarchical ones. Play and fun make it easier for us to suspend our tendency to edit out sideways thoughts, and all of these methods help to cultivate a more dialectical way of thinking rather