Homo Ludens; Tomorrow's Working Human is a Playing Human: Recent Episodes
Michele Rochon-Wood
In 1938, a Dutch cultural theorist named Johan Huizinga, suggested that the primate species that dominates planet Earth is misnamed as Homo sapiens, which translates as “wise man.” He suggested a new one: Homo ludens, which broadly translates as “playing man.” The old name was chosen by Carolus Linnaeus in 1758, and if our history since then has told us anything, it is that the human is anything but wise. A long list of things fits under the title, Things Humans have Fouled Up Beyond Repair. We are not born with wisdom and in life it quite gravely eludes us, as we have learned with the many disastrous social and technological structures we’ve brought to life since then. What we are born with is the ability to play, which is not what you think. Play is not goofing around or in any way indulging carelessness or childishness, even though children do it more naturally than adults and sometimes they are quite careless and silly. Play is how we naturally venture into our environment, put our remarkable, many-boned and capable hands on things and learn about them. Play is how we observe, form hypotheses and test them, sample building materials and ways of growing food, find new art media, music, and other sources of inspiration. It is how we form connections with others of our species, find ways to inspire and lead them, and how we take ever more extraordinary risks in exploring what is possible. Play, not thinking or wisdom, is the mechanism that has enabled the advancements we have made up to now. Every scientist, philosopher, engineer, writer, poet, artist, musician, or explorer who ever stumbled across or created something amazing and became recognized for it, did so through play. Play is how we invent ourselves as children, and if we retain in adulthood the curiosity, courage, and willingness to fail that served that purpose in childhood, we draw on the most decisive survival advantage of our species. Thinking and wisdom don’t actually get us very far – in fact, taking wisdom for granted as the defining characteristic of our species might be what is holding us back from making real strides. This podcast is created by Michele Rochon-Wood of Workplace Culture Store. Join us for a fascinating exploration of what makes work worthwhile, and why we need more play and we need it now.
In 2009, an American neuroscientist by the name of Andrew Newberg, MD, along with his writing and research partner, spiritualist Mark Robert Waldman, published a book titled, How God Changes Your Brain. This was a successor to another book the pair wrote: Why God Won’t Go Away. I found How God Changes Your Brain in a place called Sanur in Bali, Indonesia, and read it on the long flight home. I had just spent two weeks touring a lot of very old temples, so it was timely.
Newberg and Waldman conducted a series of studies on behaviors associated with religious rituals and their effects on the human brain. He explains at the start that the book is ultimately about compassion. As the antithesis of anger, compassion lives in the anterior cingulate, the small structure at the center of an important communication junction between the frontal lobe (which governs thoughts and behaviors) and our limbic system, which processes emotions. It is adjacent to the amygdala, which gives us our fight or flight response. The anterior cingulate is arguably the most evolved part of the human brain. Dr. Newberg explains that it is the newest, and regulates disagreements between thoughts and feelings, something our distant reptilian ancestors, and even our nearer primate ancestors, can’t do. If you want to stop feeling angry, jealous, afraid, frustrated, and sad all the time, this is the lump you’ve got to exercise. It’s capable of helping you think your way out of feeling lousy. Based on what I’ve learned, I’m guessing it is also the command center for play. It basically decides how you’re going to respond to pain – punish or play. Destroy or build. Clear cut or cultivate. Drain or energize.
Alfred A. Tomatis, a French otolaryngologist, pioneered 20th century research in the neurophysiological effects of chanting on the minds and bodies of listeners. According to his theory, there are two kinds of sound: "discharge" sounds (those that tire, fatigue and drain the listener) and "charge" sounds (those that give energy, life and health). In the 1960s, Tomatis was brought in by the Vatican to study the Benedictine monks of Nursia, Italy. After a three-month period of decline, the monks were all mysteriously exhausted. The abbot (top dog) at the monastery was at a loss to explain the phenomenon, which seemed to have coincided with his arrival exactly three months earlier. When this abbot arrived, he had learned that the monks, according to Benedictine tradition, were singing seven times a day. When he added it up, the total hours amounted to about six in every 24. The abbot believed this was a waste of the monks’ time. Singing produced nothing useful, he posited, so he reassigned them. If they weren’t working, they would spend their time in silent prayer and reflection.
Within three months the men were physically and mentally drained, sapped, sucked dry, so to speak. They all reported various related ailments: headaches, lethargy and bad moods. The doctor analyzed their diet and a variety of other possible factors in exhaustion. He wondered if it might be anemia from lack of protein, or bacteria or metals in the water. He found that nothing had changed in those three months, and certainly nothing that could explain what happened. Nothing, except cancelling the singing. As one of those activities associated with religious rituals, singing is good for you, a fact confirmed in Dr. Newberg’s research. Singing to oneself or with a choir falls under that category. It is energizing to the mind, and that’s why when the monks gave it up, they found themselves knackered. No other form of play was there to fill the gap, which makes this a revealing study. Remove the only playful outlet, and you have a strictly controlled study group, all engaging in the same activities every day, whose emotional tanks are running on empty. The result: exhaustion.
In the year 4 b.c.e, give or take a couple of years, a Jewish baby was born in what was then a province of the Roman Empire. Though now under Roman rule, the region was still known by its ancient name of Judea for the south, Israel for the north. The nations of Israel/Judea had been established by the tribes that, millennia before, settled and prospered there. They had one of the best-maintained written traditions in the world. They could trace lineages for many generations and by preserving the writings of prophets and scribes over centuries, had meticulously upheld the continuity of their culture.
Part of the man’s youth was spent in Egypt, but he returned to the country of his birth and grew to adulthood in a small fishing village on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. He apprenticed with his father as a carpenter but was literate and had early exposure to scripture. Accounts of his life report that he spent time in the temple with priests and dazzled them with his knowledge thereof. He later devoted his life to preaching a new interpretation of the firmly entrenched, centuries old system – Jewish law. At the time, Jewish law was interpreted and enforced by priests known as Sadducees and Pharisees, elite castes whose religious authority was endorsed by Roman governors. They made decisions about people who caused trouble, namely those who challenged authority or interpretation of the law. They weren’t allowed to execute anyone for this crime, however, without the consent of the local Roman governor.
After traveling and teaching in the region for about three years, sometime between 30 and 36 c.e., thanks to this peculiar give-and-take of authority between Romans and Jews, the man died. As far as the modern world knows, in answer to pressure from the local priests, the regional Roman government had the man publicly executed for speaking out against the established order. In those days many spoke out against the Roman occupation and the corrupt priests. As it happens with colonies, people’s rights were constantly being trodden upon, particularly in carrying out their rather frequent and time-consuming religious rituals. The region was also prosperous, so they were taxed to the eyeballs - it stands to reason that people would protest. This man had such an impressive following in this regard that the priests thought it prudent to dispose of him before he could do any real damage.
After his death, the man’s disciples carefully documented his teachings and carried on the philosophical movement. The documents contained records of the man’s exploits, the stories he told, miracles he performed, and an account of the bizarre events surrounding his public execution. Several claim that he was seen alive afterwards, and this meant the man had solved a problem people grappled with since the beginning of time – death. Following the man’s execution, others joined the movement and established a community of followers across the Roman empire. These folks exchanged encouraging letters about how best to manage their local churches and uphold the values as taught by the man from Galilee. The stories of the man’s life and the later letters represent the most studied words in the history of humankind. For a working-class tradesman, that guy made one hell of an impact.
This man, if he truly said and did everything the records claim, had extraordinary gifts of compassion, and given the time he was living in, not only did he see a lot of sickness, poverty and brutality towards slaves, minorities and women, he was witness to some of the worst crimes against humanity committed up to that point, and these weren’t isolated incidents. They were daily life. For entertainment, any given Tuesday could mean men, women and children being put to death through prolonged torture by stoning, burning, or crucifixion. Naturally, he wanted to do something about it. He wanted it to stop.
In the last episode, I briefly touched on the concept of employee motivation. Let’s look for a moment at motivation in general, specifically how humans synthesize it. This is where most of us go off course, because we don’t understand what happens in the brain to make a working adult want to complete a task. We immediately think of the tree branch on the ass end of the donkey, and alternatives don’t often come to mind unless we really work at it. After all, punishment has been used on us since we were toddlers, so why would we think of alternatives? Every time a human has to do something that isn’t automatically pleasurable, that human must find a way to convince him or herself to do whatever it is. This might include getting up early, working out on a treadmill, going to brunch with the in-laws, attending the annual staff meeting, going to the dentist or cleaning the downstairs bathroom, the one your 19, 16 and 13-year-old sons masturbate and shit in during breaks from online gaming in the rec room. With these and many more common tasks, the first step is always the work of synthesizing the motivation. To do that, we must decide which pain we would rather endure: doing the unpleasant thing or living with the consequences of not doing it. If the consequences are more disagreeable than the task itself, we get to work.
Every minute of the day, the working adult has a cost-benefit analysis running inside their head. They are constantly evaluating things, making sure that they’re investing their engagement resources wisely. And I do mean wisely. Humans, and particularly employees, are shrewd investors of these “resources,” the discretionary items they have to give at work, like enthusiasm, energy, creativity, ideas, anything they’ve got to give that goes beyond showing up on time and completing assigned tasks. They make all decisions based on the returns they get on those investments.
They believe that returns on these investments are owed to them, because for the modern employee, fairness is an automatic expectation. They live in a Tit for Tat world where an infraction gets you punished. An investment earns you returns, and when it doesn’t, that becomes an infraction of the other party, so they must administer some form of punishment. If an investment of enthusiasm gets them no recognition, no gratitude, nothing at all, not only will they probably not invest that enthusiasm again, but they will be right pissed about it. If they invest a creative idea and it goes nowhere, they might at first chalk that up to the idea being lack luster. They’ll try contributing a few more times, and if their ideas still go nowhere, they will be far less likely to invest any more creative ideas, and they’ll also get really crusty when someone in authority says the words: “we value your ideas.”
Through this process, the working human must synthesize motivation to do their work every day. Over time, the more strenuous the work of synthesizing motivation, the further they must stretch their tolerance for disparities on the scales of Tit for Tat justice, the less engaged an employee will be, because the cost will inch toward outweighing the benefits. When fear, punishment or shame are the only inspiration, and any sense of fairness or generosity are repeatedly flouted, the process becomes so strenuous, the cost-benefit reaches a tipping point.
After sex, which will be the subject of our second season, the largest casualty in the pain-punishment religion is the workplace. Work has always traveled in the same circles as punishment, but it is especially worrisome now.
Isn’t it ironic, though? At this point in history, we have employment standards. Companies are no longer allowed to enforce inhuman hours or pay ridiculously low wages. Statutory holidays are guaranteed to workers by law. Employees are protected from bullying, harassment and violence. Workplaces are required by law to be safe and contribute to healthy lifestyles. Rules prevent companies from playing favorites based on family relationships, race, or religion. In many countries, mothers enjoy paid maternity leave and the flexibility to work from home. Even fathers can take time off when a baby is born. The gender pay gap is slowly closing.
Working people are still miserable, though. And we don’t know how to fix it. This episode and its sequel, episode 7, explore the possible reasons that all of these enormous strides haven't made the changes to workplace experience we hoped they would.
Social media is excellent evidence of pain-punishment in daily life. There we get to see outrage at the moment it is born, fresh out of the womb of the psyche, so to speak. And because we can all birth this outrage this easily at any time for millions to see, the world is now drowning in it. Every message or image we share is subject to it. Outrage is how we punish each other for having opinions or trying to have a laugh once in a while. We simply can’t handle the mild discomfort of realizing a person exists – the very nerve of them - that disagrees with us. We say whatever pops into our heads in the moment and it goes viral. And when someone else has the nerve to do the very same and we don’t like it, we get to pass on our mild discomfort again by typing it right back into the social media vortex. That way no one ever has to actually process discomfort or exercise any self-control, or heaven forbid, be the bigger person and stay silent – we can just pass it on. That’s what pain-punishment is – passing on pain as punishment for those that caused us pain.
Social media has provided a globally accessible, omnipresent, and instantaneous delivery mechanism for bullying.
Bullying is a pernicious sort of pain-punishment we use against one another. It’s what people do when they can’t process their emotions with any adult responsibility. That’s why it is common among children – they haven’t yet had the chance learn how to exercise adult responsibility. Adults bully because they would prefer to save themselves the trouble of being an adult.
The Inuit people of northern Canada have thirty different words for what the rest of us call snow. That’s because they experience snow in that many forms. Humans have literally thousands of synonyms and modifiers for pain because we experience pain in that many ways. That is a highly advanced nervous system at work. Through pain, it detects the slightest danger, the slightest offense, the slightest oversight. It remembers hurt in gritty detail and works to prevent it from recurring. What’s really baffling about it is that the brain is so enthusiastic in its response to pain, that the fear of pain is worse pain than the pain we’re afraid of in the first place. This particular pain is known as anxiety, otherwise described as the excruciating terror one experiences when fear of future pain, real or imagined, completely takes over. Our labyrinthine psyche is fascinating that way. It has elaborate methods of processing pain that, in the absence of any conscious, rational effort on our part, step in to take charge. The problem is that they are only effective at processing pain in the short term. In the long term, they rack up an emotional credit card debt, one that – guaranteed - will be back to claim what it’s owed.
In this episode, I will let you in on what became evident in my research, which involved a variety of sources, participants and exercises, one of which I will describe to you in this episode. This was the exercise I conducted with subjects most often. It has informed many of the discoveries I made on what drives people to work and enjoy it at the same time.
First, I’m going to introduce you to the Japanese concept of ikigai. I’m a bit of a Japano-phile – from the Samurai to Pokemon, it seems like Japan is the gift that keeps on giving. In the podcast we will examine many more aspects of Japanese culture and the many things it can teach us. Ikigai has no direct translation in English. Put simply, it means finding your purpose in life, but as the Japanese are apt to do, it is much more developed than that.
You’re supposed to find something that:
You love
You are good at
The world needs
You can be paid for
Ikigai is more accurately described as what brings you well-rounded joy in your daily life. It’s not something you need to find, but rather something you already have. Knowing how to see it allows you to enjoy what you do rather than chase what you think you might enjoy.
In Japan, only 31% of people consider their job their ikigai. The others choose friends, family, hobbies, and even pets. It’s not about money — it’s what matters to you.
Here in the West, many of us set our identities when we are young and then rigidly stick to them. I know people who were sure they wanted to become teachers, then the first year they spent in the classroom they realized they’d made a mistake. I spoke to a fellow Canadian last year who loved hockey as he was growing up, then got a job in the NHL promoting events and hated every minute of it, which prompted him to explore what makes a job truly rewarding, and now he is a motivational speaker and business consultant on that very topic. In 2020, Netflix published a beautiful documentary about a South African journalist who left his high-stress job and took up diving. He soon met an octopus that he called his “octopus teacher,” which became the title of the film. Beautiful story about finding ikigai. He decided to keep visiting her den and tracking her movements every day for a year. The two form a bond where she plays with Foster and allows him into her world to see how she sleeps, lives, and eats. In the film, Foster describes the impact on his life of his relationship with the octopus.
Wikipedia claims that at least 15 ancient and modern theories divide all humans into personality types. None contain more than 20. Types A and B include only two. These systems classify and organize temperaments, humors, traits, habits, and all the other adorable or infuriating things that make humans interesting. Personality typing became a thing for the same reason that weekly horoscopes became a thing – to provide the illusion that we can accurately predict and reliably control our destinies beyond what is within our actual control, with good behavior and such. Types promise to decode the puzzle of the homo sapiens and bring some clarity to what ensues when you make them work and live together. Thanks to the Barnum Effect, the tendency to accept information as true, such as character assessments or horoscopes, even when the information is so vague as to be worthless, a horoscope or personality type doesn’t have to be rooted in any real evidence for people to see themselves in the descriptions.
Play-playfulness tells us that it is in our nature to create new things, new inventions, new stories, new ways of interacting with others. It tells us that there are no leadership styles, no relationship styles, no styles at all. Style is an illusion. Personality is an illusion. Just because you haven’t liked exercise in the past, doesn’t mean you can’t learn to like it. If you adopt one new behavior, there is no rule saying that you have to adopt all the others that go along with that “style” or “personality.”
If you’re in a workshop at the local Holiday Inn with your office mates and the facilitator asks, “What is your leadership style?” and then makes you submit to a seven-question multiple-choice quiz, you don’t have to accept what the guy tells you about who you are. If you abandon a behavior, you’re not betraying your personality type or your zodiac sign. Genes are real, but they only dictate behavior to a point. We still have an anterior cingulate, which is the part of the brain capable of making decisions that don’t always draw inspiration from raw emotion. Some of us favor certain behaviors and seem to do them more frequently, but only because of the way habits form over time, based on experiences. It is not because we were born in a certain month during a certain year or because certain habits tend to cluster together in certain humans. We are not stuck with any traits besides physical ones. True, some habits are not easy to break. The goal is to first understand that all behavior can change.
In 1938, a Dutch cultural theorist named Johan Huizinga, suggested that the primate species that dominates planet Earth is misnamed as Homo sapiens, which translates as “wise man.” He suggested a new one: Homo ludens, which broadly translates as “playing man.”
The old name was chosen by Carolus Linnaeus in 1758, and if our history since then has told us anything, it is that the human is anything but wise. A long list of things fits under the title, Things Humans have Fouled Up Beyond Repair. We are not born with wisdom and in life it quite gravely eludes us, as we have learned with the many disastrous social and technological structures we’ve brought to life since then. What we are born with is the ability to play, which is not what you think. Play is not goofing around or in any way indulging carelessness or childishness, even though children do it more naturally than adults and sometimes they are quite careless and silly. Play is how we naturally venture into our environment, put our remarkable, many-boned and capable hands on things and learn about them. Play is how we observe, form hypotheses and test them, sample building materials, ways of growing food, find new art media, music, and other sources of inspiration. It is how we form connections with others of our species, find ways to inspire and lead them, and how we take ever more extraordinary risks in exploring what is possible.
Play, not thinking or wisdom, is the mechanism that has enabled the advancements we have made up to now. Every scientist, philosopher, engineer, writer, poet, artist, musician, or explorer who ever stumbled across or created something amazing and became recognized for it, did so through play. Play is how we invent ourselves as children, and if we retain in adulthood the curiosity, courage, and willingness to fail that served that purpose in childhood, we draw on the most decisive survival advantage of our species. Thinking and wisdom don’t actually get us very far – in fact, taking wisdom for granted as the defining characteristic of our species might be what is holding us back from making real strides.
This podcast will explore the possibilities of play in the human species and how it might open the door to a new and promising future.