Playfulness is what makes us human. Doing pointless, purposeless things, just for fun. Doing things for the sheer devilment of it. Being silly for the sake of being silly. Larking around. Taking pleasure in activities that do not advantage us and have nothing to do with our survival. These are the highest signs of intelligence.
The great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said this: “one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” It is the chaos in ourselves that is divine. We can be trained to do almost anything, harnessed to almost any purpose. But there remains a wayward spark whose unpredictability lies in the fact that it is pointless. That is humanity.
In playfulness lies the highest expression of the human spirit.
Time for us to uphold the virtue of idleness, to play down the demands for productivity.
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