The highlight from “The Play Deficit” is an eerie mirror, reflecting the dwindling emotional expressiveness, energy, and creativity in today’s society. If we roll this narrative back a couple of decades, perhaps even just a generation, we’d see an entirely different story. It’s as if we’re steadily erasing the colorful lines that define our innate creativity. But why? In our quest for productivity and structured lives, we’ve sidelined the one thing that fed the flames of our imagination: play.
The statistic from “The Creativity Crisis” is both an indictment and a wake-up call. Here’s a puzzling paradox: we live in an era of unprecedented technological advances designed to make our lives easier and more fun, and yet the levels of natural expressiveness and creativity among children are in decline. Let’s not kid ourselves; it’s not just the children who are affected. The adults, too, are victims of this paradigm shift, trading imaginative breaks for structured conference calls and PowerPoint presentations.
Here’s a groundbreaking perspective: “You can’t teach creativity; all you can do is let it blossom, and it blossoms in play.” I resonate with this deeply. Play isn’t something to fit in after we’ve finished all our ‘important’ tasks; it IS the important task. Just as a muscle withers without exercise, so does creativity shrivel without play. In the name of efficiency, have we forgotten the essence of being effective? If we’re too rigid to see beyond the script, how are we ever going to improvise, adapt, and ultimately, thrive?
This notion circles back to some of my earlier notes on hormesis and the concept of “good stress.” Could the decline in play and creativity be a form of societal hormesis gone wrong? By stripping away the play from our lives, we’ve inoculated ourselves against the unpredictable, challenging, yet ultimately enriching circumstances that hone our creativity and resilience.
We’re not merely organisms striving to reach a KPI; we’re creative beings yearning to live, express, and connect. The absence of play isn’t just an absence of fun; it’s the suppression of our human spirit.
So what’s the game plan? No pun intended, but it’s high time we play.
Read more at: Children today are suffering a severe deficit of play | Aeon Essays
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