If you are looking for a profound and immersive read on a Sunday morning, this article is it. In fact, this article is about exactly such experiences and why they are central to mental health and healing.
Have you noticed how much of modern life now comes with a score attached? “We track our sleep and score our calm,” writes Justin Neuman in this lovely Aeon essay. “Fitness apps turn the morning run into a contest; meditation apps gamify stillness with streak counters; language apps award achievement badges for what used to be called curiosity. Even journaling apps nudge users toward consistency scores.”Somewhere along the way, he argues, leisure stopped being the counterpoint to work and became “a third shift with its own metrics, its own guilt, and its own sense of falling behind”. This thought-provoking piece one is worth reading slowly.
Neuman begins on the floor. His children had taken the strategy game Settlers of Catan and dismantled it, rearranging its hexagonal tiles into islands and inventing a game about bridges that no rulebook recognised. “They were not playing Catan. They were playing in Catan, using its materials as components to make a world the designers never imagined.” His own instinct, he confesses, was to reach for the rulebook and then to work out how to win, before he grasped that what he really needed was the courage to ask whether he could sit down and build with them.
That small scene holds the essay’s central distinction. “You can play a game or you can play in a game,” Neuman writes. Follow the official rules and measure yourself against opponents and that is competition, which the Greeks called agôn, after the god of struggle and contest. But when his children turned the board into a world, they were doing something older, which the sociologist Roger Caillois named paidia: “free, spontaneous, unstructured play. The kind with no winner, no score, and no optimisation.” It is, Neuman adds, “the kind of play that has almost no place in adult life and, arguably, the kind we need the most, especially now, when even our leisure comes with leaderboards.”
The philosopher C Thi Nguyen has a name for what has gone wrong, and it is one every investor will recognise: “value capture”, the process by which a game’s simplified, legible values start to colonise the real-world activity the game was meant to serve. Games, on this view, smuggle in a vision of the good, telling you what to care about “by virtue of what the game rewards through scores”. Run only to hold your place on the app’s leaderboard, and the reason you first laced up has been quietly eaten. In Neuman’s blunt formulation, “The metric ate the meaning.” Anyone who has watched a fine business run for the quarterly scoreboard rather than for the thing it was built to do knows the pattern exactly.
None of this is new. Johan Huizinga saw it coming in Homo Ludens (1938), arguing that play is generative of civilisation, and that law, poetry and even war emerge from play’s “magic circle”, the bounded space where ordinary rules are suspended. He feared the play element had been draining out of Western life since the 18th century, and Neuman’s grim update is that the fear came true in an unexpected way: “It’s not that we killed play; we captured it and harnessed it to a productivity framework.” The magic circle, he writes, “was instrumentalised into a dopamine hit.”
What has been lost is neither fun nor competition, and Neuman is no ascetic scold: a former rock climber, he is now a competitive ultramarathon runner with fifty-odd races and two national age-group titles behind him. “Agôn is what I do on weekends,” he writes. “But it’s not where I find meaning, build community, or figure out who I am.”The real trouble is that we have eliminated the conditions in which free play arises. “Watch the subway car on any morning commute. Every head is bowed to a screen. Not working, not thinking, just filling the time,” he writes. Yet boredom is not the problem; it is “the condition in which the mind, left alone, begins to play by itself, to wander, associate, drift toward the transitional space where unexpected connections assemble unbidden.” His prescription is pointedly unhelpful to a productivity culture: “We don’t just need different games. We need more nothing.”
The deepest stretch turns to the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who in Playing and Reality (1971) argued that play is not a rehearsal for productive adulthood but part of how human beings stay present to their own lives. His key idea is transitional space, a condition rather than a place: think of a conversation so absorbing that you “say something you didn’t know you thought until you heard it leave your mouth”. You are neither locked inside your own head nor performing for an audience, but somewhere in between, and that, he held, is where creativity and “imaginative living” begin. The distinction Neuman draws is exact: “in ordinary perception, the world is simply there and the self adjusts to it; in creative apperception, we co-create the world, forging something between self and environment in the zone of play.” His most radical claim still lands like a diagnosis: “It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living.” Its opposite is mere compliance, life lived on someone else’s terms, which “carries with it a sense of futility”.
It is Winnicott’s next line, written in 1971, that Neuman calls the most prescient insight of 20th-century psychology for our moment. Most people, Winnicott thought, feel just enough creativity to sense its absence, feeling that they are largely “living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine.” Long before the algorithm, before we installed surveillance engines in our pockets and called them phones, he had named the condition and offered the cure, which was simply play. Friedrich Schiller had made the same case from the other side two centuries earlier, in his claim that “man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.”
So where does the practice live? Wherever we stop keeping score. It lives in walking, which Neuman treats as play for the mind: he has crossed thirty blocks of Manhattan on foot for years, telling himself it was exercise, when really the lecture he could not outline at his desk would “assemble itself somewhere around 34th Street”. He is in good company, from Nietzsche, who insisted that “Only thoughts that come by walking have any value,” to Einstein, for whom the daily walk to the Institute was reportedly where the real thinking happened. A 2014 Stanford study found walking lifted divergent thinking by roughly 60 per cent.
It lives, too, in his son’s basement workshop, where the boy carves wood, shapes copper into rings, and gives away what he makes, the knife to a friend, the carved animal to a teacher. “Play pursued for its own sake, with no metric and no market, overflows into generosity precisely because nothing was extracted.” And it lives in an ultramarathon at the point where the split times stop mattering, which Nguyen would call “striving play”: “The goal exists to make the experience of striving possible, not the other way around. The finish line is just the means; the journey is the destination.”
Neuman even turns the ranking of activities on itself. Aristotle placed contemplation at the summit of human life because it was done purely for its own sake, but, Neuman notes, “The question ‘What is the highest human activity?’ is itself a competition, an agôn. Play doesn’t enter that contest. Play dissolves it.” He closes by reaching past the language of self-improvement to an older one. Aquinas, following Aristotle, treated eutrapelia, the habit of knowing when and how to play well, as a genuine virtue, so that “A person who never plays is as disordered as one who never works.” This is not work-life balance, which still treats play as recovery time for the next productive thing, but the claim that a good life requires play as a discipline you practise rather than earn. Wherever adults stumble into that in-between zone where inner life meets outer material and something unpredictable emerges, he writes, “play is doing its work even if we’re not keeping score.” The reward is not a score at all, but what he calls “the ordinary magic of being real.
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