#247： The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Antidote to Excessive Irony
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
216.33022
Summary
Well, thanks to digital technology, modern life often promises us a world full of limitless possibilities. We ll never have to be bored again. But what if that promise of limitless freedom actually contributes to our lives feeling dull, flat, and full of anxiety? And what if embracing constraints and even boredom can give our lives more texture and heft? Well, that s what my guest today argues in his new book, Play Anything: The Pleasures of Limits: The Uses of Boredom and the Secret of Games.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast well thanks to
00:00:19.120
digital technology modern life often promises us a world full of limitless possibilities we'll
00:00:24.180
never have to be bored again but what if that promise of limitlessness and freedom actually
00:00:30.220
contributes to our lives feeling dull flat and full of anxiety and what if embracing constraints
00:00:35.920
and even boredom can give our lives more texture and heft well that's what my guest today argues in
00:00:40.820
his book play anything his name is ian bogost he's a professor of philosophy and get this a video game
00:00:46.720
designer today on the show ian and i discuss why modern life often can be filled with existential
00:00:51.440
angst why we live in an age of irony that's supercharged by the internet and how looking
00:00:55.800
at the world as a metaphorical playground can help you feel more grounded and present in reality this
00:01:00.280
show is full of counterintuitive wisdom and ready-to-work tools that can help you live a
00:01:03.420
more fulfilling life after the show is over check out the show notes at aom.is slash bogost that's
00:01:08.440
spelled b-o-g-o-s-t ian bogost welcome to the show thank you so much i'm glad to be here uh so you got
00:01:18.540
a great book out called play anything the pleasures of limits the uses of boredom and the secret of
00:01:23.880
games and really is one of the best books i've read this year because you hit on a lot awesome
00:01:28.000
you hit on a lot of topics and ideas that i've sort of felt and sort of couldn't articulate
00:01:33.360
about our modern day so i love it but before we get into the book let's talk about your background
00:01:38.980
because i think it'll uh help listeners get an idea of where you're coming from and also your
00:01:43.700
background is just really dang interesting you're a philosopher professor of media studies
00:01:48.380
and a video game designer which is two things you don't see paired together every day so how did that
00:01:55.100
happen how did you you know become a philosopher slash video game designer yeah yeah i mean it's
00:02:01.220
actually not as weird as it sounds but i admit it does sound very strange um and it's not as weird
00:02:06.760
as it sounds because actually there's a long history of philosophers um who worked in other media you
00:02:13.260
know as as artists and creators especially as novelists as playwrights you know sartre russo
00:02:19.000
nietzsche uh duchamp arsel duchamp is more more well known as an artist um eventually became a
00:02:25.840
a master chess player uh later in life so sometimes it goes the other way
00:02:29.700
too which isn't necessarily to like associate myself with with folks of that level of prestige
00:02:35.280
but just to sort of suggest that there's this there is this long history of of philosophy and
00:02:40.280
art intersecting and often it's because you know in in in games or in novels or in painting or in
00:02:45.740
chess even you know you see um you see aspects of of the abstract world which is what we think about
00:02:50.960
when we think about philosophy philosophy and philosophical questions they become they become
00:02:54.780
concretized and that's one way of of of bringing those worlds uh uh together but as far as me myself
00:03:01.960
i mean my background is not necessarily um that of of this sort of the sort of two universes that
00:03:08.460
never meet but the question of like what what does technology have to do with with arts and culture
00:03:13.660
and how do those how do those worlds converge it's kind of always been the the interest for me since i
00:03:18.140
was a since i was a kid even uh and games are a particularly interesting kind of of technology
00:03:23.700
kind of computer technology uh precisely because uh they were some of the first the sort of first
00:03:29.400
elements where computation became cultural you know uh entertainment became a place where we
00:03:35.560
tried to do something other than work uh with with machines and that's always been uh been
00:03:40.540
interesting to me um but also like games um offer this kind of like um this kind of way of getting
00:03:49.120
underneath some of the assumptions that we that we make there are these interesting philosophical
00:03:53.420
playgrounds they they kind of offer the this this strange skewed weird view of everyday life you know
00:04:00.120
like you take a a field and you add a ball and some lines to it and that transforms it into into a
00:04:05.640
soccer pitch into something totally different or you take some you know some cubes that are spotted
00:04:10.580
with dots and you hurl them onto a green felt and that becomes something entirely different this
00:04:16.500
trial for chance and and wagers or or even you know you stick four squares together in different
00:04:22.540
patterns and make them fall on the screen and that becomes tetris so so games are like this um
00:04:27.500
this this place where we trick ourselves into seeing and then working with things that we'd we'd
00:04:33.900
otherwise overlook uh and games certainly aren't the only way to do that but as i've sort of moved
00:04:39.400
through my my career as a as a philosopher and a game designer it's become clear that that's one of
00:04:44.180
the features of games that's most that's most interesting and kind of most relevant to both domains
00:04:48.020
right so i mean your your focus in philosophy is it games sort of like i mean it's like wittgenstein
00:04:52.300
right like wrote about games right if i if i remember from my philosophy had used games as an
00:04:56.720
example of of uh a particular problem with language uh because there's this this this challenge with
00:05:03.800
with uh with the word games so we don't really know what it refers to and games were an excellent
00:05:08.460
example of a a concept wittgenstein called family resemblance you know what what what different games have in
00:05:14.400
common is not that they're all instances of some superordinate uh category but that they share these
00:05:19.600
sort of overlapping features donuts are another example of that by the way it's sort of like what
00:05:23.720
makes what makes a donut a donut is that it comes in the donut box more or less uh but my interest in
00:05:29.400
philosophy is i mean you know it's related to games when it is but it's actually much higher level and a
00:05:34.200
bit broader the the area of philosophy that's of particular interest to me is called metaphysics
00:05:40.660
and metaphysics is a field that addresses the fundamental nature of of being so metaphysicians
00:05:47.860
ask questions like what does it mean for something to exist in the first place and what kinds of things
00:05:54.060
exist and what's the relationship between the things that do at some fundamental level at a level that
00:05:58.920
that is uh that sits before even a science before we begin engaging with how we might manipulate and
00:06:05.220
understand the material world uh and one of the problems in um in in this discipline in metaphysics
00:06:11.280
that i work on which which ends up being a theme of the book and i should clarify that you don't need
00:06:15.940
to know anything about uh philosophy to to get it in the book uh one of those themes is that people tend
00:06:21.960
to think of themselves as being at the center of existence and and this is true even like centuries
00:06:27.560
after the copernican revolution even when we know that the universe is enormous and we're this tiny
00:06:32.460
corner of it still nevertheless in in philosophy and and even in in science we tend to worry most about
00:06:40.040
the relationship between people and other things between ourselves or our communities and and the
00:06:45.740
rest of the world uh and that makes sense because we're we're in our bodies and in our neighborhoods
00:06:49.860
and in our countries and so forth but in doing that we we tend to overlook all of the equally
00:06:55.100
interesting and and kind of powerfully weird stuff that happens in between other stuff even the stuff
00:07:00.980
that we humans have have made so there's this this kind of infinite mystery in every toaster and on
00:07:06.740
every freeway and in every big box store and those problems at a philosophical level uh are of great
00:07:13.080
interest to me and there's some of the motivations for exploring uh the themes in the book right well
00:07:17.800
we'll get into uh that idea that we're the sort of the center of the universe how that kind of can
00:07:21.880
lead us astray um but how has your your philosophy career influenced your game design it's done so in a
00:07:29.100
in a number of ways uh so when i started working on uh on games uh professionally which is about 20
00:07:35.040
years ago sort of at the rise of uh of the internet and some of the games that that i worked on at that
00:07:39.760
time that i had the opportunity to work on um were very different than uh than than ordinary games
00:07:44.380
uh the the internet made it possible to distribute stuff uh uh directly and you know without kind of
00:07:51.200
the publishing apparatus that we were used to um in uh in store-bought materials and i happened to be
00:07:57.360
working in advertising at the time so i got involved in sort of the early days of of applying
00:08:02.700
games to to marketing and advertising and this was you know interesting enough uh at the time but one
00:08:08.180
of the questions i began asking myself then was well um you know i mean what other kinds of purposes
00:08:14.660
could gamers be put to you know this this is a kind of business use of an entertainment medium that
00:08:18.940
we tend to associate with kids we certainly don't associate with with utility uh and we you know
00:08:23.580
there'd been a long history of games as educational tools by that time you know everyone probably
00:08:27.500
played uh uh organ trail or other games uh like that in the in the 80s and 90s uh and that was one
00:08:34.160
one possible use uh and i began thinking about the relationships between those kinds of uses and
00:08:39.500
wondering what others there might be so i began working very extensively in uh games about uh kind of
00:08:44.920
social issues and politics uh at my studio we made the first uh official uh presidential campaign
00:08:51.240
game uh for howard dean and in 2003 we worked on on games about all sorts of strange issues you
00:08:57.200
wouldn't think of seeing in games like uh tort reform and uh uh errand running and uh uh you know
00:09:04.960
educational policy and we made some games about like airport security and the time when all of the
00:09:10.980
tsa stuff was happening um and the sort of philosophical motivation for some of those questions
00:09:16.160
was you know the field of of rhetoric the the philosophical domain of rhetoric how do you express
00:09:20.940
ideas how do you persuade people how do you change their opinions uh and games are different from speech
00:09:26.640
or from writing or from images in that in a game you can model something about the world you can kind
00:09:32.460
of like make this little miniature copy of it that you can work with that you can manipulate and in so
00:09:36.660
doing uh at least this is my contention as a as a philosopher as much as as a game designer
00:09:41.080
uh in manipulating that little model of the world you could experience something about like what it
00:09:46.260
what it might be like to live in a version of the world if those ideas have been implemented so
00:09:50.520
it's kind of like a natural uh a natural way of thinking about uh uh you know experimenting with
00:09:55.900
with social policy or with public policy or with uh with just ways of behaving and living
00:10:00.280
that are different uh from our own now now admittedly like you know this use of games is still
00:10:04.840
somewhat marginalized or hasn't hasn't become uh predominant in in the commercial sphere uh but it's
00:10:10.580
it's a good example of uh of one of the kind of underlying uses of games that like sits under
00:10:15.860
the radar and then yeah nevertheless is taking place every day awesome and we'll talk about your
00:10:20.420
game i think we can talk about cow clicker because i thought that was or click the cow or whatever maybe
00:10:25.460
we talk about that later on yeah we we can definitely i mean cow clicker is sort of the the my my uh
00:10:31.040
my uh my great infamy so it's it's always worth worth bringing up all right so let's talk about play
00:10:35.980
anything um where you take insights from your career as a philosopher and game designer
00:10:40.580
make what when i was reading it i was thinking as i was reading like this is a really counter
00:10:44.040
cultural case um on how to make our modern enemy filled lives more meaningful um but before we
00:10:52.200
get to the prescription let's talk about the cultural and philosophical problems you're trying
00:10:57.380
to address trying to address in the book um so start off like what and you mentioned it earlier
00:11:02.460
i think but i mean what are the underlying philosophical paradigms of our feelings of angst
00:11:08.900
and frustration and restlessness that we have a lot of people experience these days
00:11:12.440
yeah i mean one of the biggest uh problems of modern life i think is that we we live in this time of
00:11:20.260
enormous surplus enormous plenty uh we have more than we ever have had before we can get access to
00:11:26.720
almost anything uh immediately information is uh is is is so enormously uh accessible uh that it costs
00:11:35.940
nothing uh to access it uh but in spite of all this we still kind of feel miserable and we feel
00:11:41.140
miserable um more and more um and maybe even more intensely miserable kind of the more uh surplus the
00:11:48.020
more plenty we seem to acquire and this is kind of a paradox you know how is it that we ended up in a
00:11:52.860
situation where uh provided all of the all of the material wealth relatively speaking especially in the west
00:11:59.060
right um um that that we have access to that nevertheless we still feel like our lives are
00:12:04.860
getting worse uh worse and worse and you know there have been attempts to ask questions about this
00:12:09.960
problem uh before uh one of the uh one of the the figures that i talk about a little bit in the book
00:12:15.360
is the psychologist uh barry schwartz who uh who wrote this book called the paradox of choice
00:12:20.440
oh you know maybe a dozen years ago and you know one of his insights was that uh you know the the
00:12:27.900
when you have all these choices then in theory you should uh be more gratified because you have
00:12:33.600
uh so many options you have options for spouses and options for shampoo and mustard alike
00:12:38.820
um but the the problem actually is that the more options we have then the more a bad choice becomes
00:12:44.560
kind of kind of your fault you internalize that sense of of despair and of uh of regret
00:12:50.280
for having made what turned out to be a bad choice uh and it was really only a bad choice because
00:12:55.160
you felt like you had other choices um and you know if you kind of extend that to the the
00:13:00.920
contemporary world that condition hasn't gotten any better in fact it's only gotten worse uh and
00:13:06.440
online life has kind of amplified that you know in addition to uh infinite shampoos or mustards at the
00:13:13.640
at the store now we have access to kind of almost anything it's immediately accessible with almost no
00:13:20.100
switching costs and so and so we go through this anxiety of of all of the options we have all of
00:13:25.800
the missed opportunities or the potential missed opportunities that we face almost constantly you
00:13:30.840
know it's the kind of thing that makes you hold off until the very last minute to make plans with
00:13:36.160
people because you're just not sure if something better might come along that's like we do that with
00:13:40.540
everything um and in spite of all this we seem at the same time to believe that a relatively small and
00:13:47.580
maybe increasingly smaller uh number of things and people and activities uh could provide us with
00:13:53.500
the contentment that we that we supposedly that we supposedly savor um and i think fundamentally this
00:14:00.260
this problem it comes down to the idea of freedom of our interpretation of what it would mean to to be
00:14:06.340
free you know we're obsessed with this this idea of freedom but we think it means escape you know
00:14:13.420
if only i could kind of do what i want then i'd be content i need i just need to to rest myself out
00:14:19.300
of this this moil of stuff that i have to do that i don't want to do and then on the other side of it
00:14:24.240
i'll find the things that uh that can provide me pleasure once i overcome the supposed nuisances or
00:14:30.060
obstacles uh that are in the way uh but then once we do so those things that were supposedly going to
00:14:36.640
bring us pleasure only become additional nuisances and obstacles and so that becomes this sort of
00:14:43.320
endless chain of misery and that's the problem uh that we have to we have to overcome and and to
00:14:48.920
overcome it as you know as seems obvious once you start looking at the problem directly we'd have to
00:14:53.700
find a way of of finding not just not just contentment or satisfaction but but joy and delight in all of
00:15:00.700
those things that we previously characterized as as nuisances you know all of the the shopping trips and
00:15:05.700
the and the commuting and the uh and the and the lawn mowing and the ordinary stuff of daily life
00:15:11.420
right and i mean and i guess as you mentioned earlier too all these choices and all these things
00:15:15.940
like it puts us in the center of the universe right we live inside of our heads and when reality doesn't
00:15:21.500
match the ideal in our head like we get frustrated yeah which it never does because the world is outside
00:15:26.760
our head actually and you know the the the sense of entitlement that we have uh you know not not in the
00:15:34.260
sense that oh i think i deserve a certain kind of a job or a certain kind of partner uh but rather
00:15:38.580
just the sense that we are uh owed some some debt by the universe and that it should respond to us
00:15:45.260
uh in a in a way that gives us gratification uh you know this is this is a starting point of a whole
00:15:50.980
set of anxieties and and this is also where where anger and misery and even violence come from
00:15:56.020
uh but then to respond to that through negativity through nihilism to say oh well you know the universe
00:16:02.420
is fundamentally unconcerned and therefore nothing matters that that can't be the answer that can't
00:16:07.000
be the answer either uh it's understandable why we sometimes despair in that way but we know we know
00:16:12.940
exactly where that leads and it doesn't lead anywhere good so in in the face of the knowledge that we are
00:16:18.260
um that we live in this sort of you know secular age where we can't seek singular meaning outside of
00:16:24.260
ourselves whether it's in god or even in just culture because because culture is so multivarious now
00:16:30.160
um then we need a way for all of those individual encounters with ordinary objects ordinary things
00:16:36.320
ordinary people to bear meaning without that meaning having to be like produced from within us without
00:16:42.280
us having to invent it all the time right so it's kind of going against it sounds sort of like you're
00:16:47.420
going against existentialism a bit like that's the one thing i find existential is attractive but then
00:16:51.900
i'm think when you think about like that's a lot of pressure i gotta like come up with meaning for
00:16:55.840
my life that's hard it's it's too much pressure nobody can nobody can do it um and if you try you can do it
00:17:03.100
for a little while and then you become overwhelmed uh with the with the burden and and the the the the
00:17:08.220
funny thing about this this solution which is i mean one of the one of the people i talk about pretty
00:17:13.120
extensively in the book is the the the writer david foster wallace and and you know this is this is one of
00:17:17.880
the solutions that wallace uh suggests that uh you know if we can kind of um uh uh trick ourselves into
00:17:26.140
thinking that uh you know other people have it kind of might have it worse off than i do to kind of
00:17:33.160
flip the flip the bit on our sense of uh of despair or of uh of disorientation then this is one way of
00:17:40.780
uh of attaching ourselves to something to something larger and and you know like this is just a an
00:17:47.600
impossible um idea it's i mean it's it's nice to think about and certainly there are moments in your
00:17:51.760
life when you can calm yourself down or you can kind of you know resist ratcheting up a conflict or
00:17:56.120
something by by imagining that the you know the person in front of you at the supermarket line is
00:18:00.600
taking a long time you know has some some difficult challenge they're facing in their in their lives and
00:18:05.340
you should just chill out but that's just doomed to failure as a matter of course it's just a huge
00:18:10.060
enormous burden uh and even despite um the the the temptation maybe to to pursue that kind of logic
00:18:16.820
what why would we even have to like why why make up stories about the world uh as you might imagine it
00:18:22.780
to be uh when instead you could look at the world and see how much it has to offer uh for you to work
00:18:29.320
with uh and this requires you know a kind of different a different way of looking and then responding
00:18:34.720
to the things we find around us uh every day uh which is which is really the the fundamental idea
00:18:41.480
in the book that you can play anything and you know what i mean by that is that anything whatsoever
00:18:45.640
can become a source of of delight and pleasure if you work with it uh and treat it for what it is
00:18:50.980
right yeah that's i thought it was an interesting argument made with david foster wallace um because
00:18:55.560
yeah that that whole idea of like flipping the switch came from that essay that speech this is water
00:19:00.160
right yeah it was it was a uh uh commencement address at kenyan college right and but i mean
00:19:06.620
it sounds great but you're right though because like what it does is you're you're just basically
00:19:10.520
living reality in your head again like you have to create this reality in your head that might not
00:19:15.840
even exist oh right and you know and then like what are you supposed to do kind of come up with the
00:19:19.800
worst case scenario for every situation so that you make sure that you are kind of you know deferring your
00:19:24.680
own needs and desires to the worst possible response that someone else might have to it
00:19:28.840
you know it becomes this kind of like this like rat race for for worst case uh scenarios and so even
00:19:35.320
even the burden itself becomes its own burden as you imagine like even worse and worse and worse
00:19:39.820
explanations for for why other people or other situations are behaving in a way that you can't
00:19:44.080
respond to when you could be focusing all that energy and just actually working with the world doing
00:19:47.920
things with uh with the materials uh that are given to you but but of course it requires like
00:19:52.720
retraining ourselves um not not just you know in order that we don't get annoyed with the with the
00:19:58.520
slow driver in front of us or something which is you know where wallace's examples mostly live
00:20:02.640
but like with the act of driving itself or the act of shopping itself or the act of you know uh cleaning
00:20:08.240
up the leaves that are that are falling from the trees all of that stuff that we think of as chaff
00:20:13.640
you know it has to become meat it has there has to be some way that that we can that we can um we can
00:20:19.460
learn to attend uh to those opportunities and treat them as opportunities rather than as seeing them as
00:20:24.800
these these things that then we'd have to invent stories about in order that we could tolerate
00:20:27.920
being around them right so you you make the case that one response that we've um gone to in our
00:20:34.140
modern day to to handle this existential pressure this uh angst of so much choice and fomo is
00:20:41.640
irony um irony carries a lot of hip social cachet today everyone's trying to be ironic and be
00:20:48.220
meta and i'll admit that like i sometimes do i'll do that and but i i've i'd hate myself after i do it
00:20:54.800
i'm like why it's so dumb um so let's start off what how do you describe irony because i think
00:21:00.120
alanis morissette might have steered people in the wrong direction yeah i mean you know in its in its
00:21:06.260
in its kind of uh original meaning irony in its kind of literary sense is is uh language that says the
00:21:13.200
opposite of of what it means uh but it's actually become something slightly different and um and now
00:21:21.620
what irony means is saying or doing something in a way that prevents others from knowing if you even
00:21:28.860
meant to mean it or not to mean it you know yeah um so like when you when you wear the the trucker cap or
00:21:35.340
or drink pbr or you know post a an instagram of of some strange flavor of uh of potato chips that you
00:21:42.920
found or whatever it is that you do right uh riding the fixie bike all of these sort of these sort of
00:21:47.660
silly tropes of of hipster irony um it's not so much that they are treating things as these kind of
00:21:53.400
fetishes it's rather that you can't tell you can never tell uh whether you or anyone else uh means
00:21:59.720
to mean that they are attached and interested in those things or that they mean to spurn them and
00:22:05.020
score in them and kind of sneer at them so it's that like undecidability that that that that uh
00:22:10.480
uncertainty of knowing uh whether something is sincere or contemptuous that that characterizes
00:22:16.760
a contemporary irony and you know it's it's no surprise that we found ourselves uh in in this
00:22:23.560
situation uh because we have just all of this all of this stuff all of this this surplus of of ideas
00:22:29.160
and things and information and and encounters uh and in in the face of that of that surplus right
00:22:35.740
uh we're still not able to to find uh pleasure and delight in our lives uh we have all of the things
00:22:42.680
that we could possibly want and yet you know and yet we still find them we still find them wanting
00:22:46.720
and so you know we recognize that kind of under the surface that that there's this this inconsistency
00:22:52.140
and one response to it is to kind of hold things at this distance you know they they threaten us that
00:22:57.980
things might go awry i'm not sure if you know if that new that new ipa is going to be pleasurable or
00:23:03.480
not so i'll just you know i'll just kind of talk about what a silly name it has on the internet
00:23:07.140
um and some of the some of that anxiety that ironic anxiety does come from real social uh uh concern
00:23:15.620
and you know i think we're living in this this this time of uh of austerity even as we are also living
00:23:23.280
in a time of great surplus uh and i think the rise of irony you know with the with the rise of the
00:23:28.640
internet also corresponds with uh uh with austerity and with the the kind of economic collapse of the
00:23:34.660
post 2008 uh uh great recession and all of these things that we once were able to take for granted
00:23:41.280
at least to some extent uh many of those have fallen away and so our fear is is somewhat founded our fear
00:23:47.540
that that things might kind of kind of you know bite us in the brain for having thought about them
00:23:51.700
uh there are reasons why uh there are good reasons why that that anxiety exists but we've extended that
00:23:57.080
anxiety to kind of everything everything whatsoever through this this ironic distance this detachment
00:24:02.560
from things so irony allows us to hedge our bets right like it's a hedge yeah it allows you to hedge
00:24:07.880
your bets you know i might or might not come back to this and treat it for what it is and then of
00:24:11.060
course uh by by doing so we ensure that we never will right right and how does and how does the
00:24:16.440
internet um rocket boost this sense of irony that we we have that in our culture almost almost everything
00:24:24.320
we do online is is ironic to some extent some of it is more ironic than others so any meme or sort of
00:24:29.980
you know uh uh image uh that you see online can very quickly enter that that that ironic uh that
00:24:37.500
ironic mode you know someone uh someone photoshops uh an image of something in order to turn it into
00:24:42.680
something else or you know you've got infinite numbers of like uh trump or hillary photos after
00:24:48.300
the debates that then get you know turned into uh uh their own memes that then get turned into
00:24:53.480
still further memes and then people screenshot the tweets or the facebook posts of other people saying
00:24:58.600
things that they find ridiculous or absurd and transform those into these all of these like
00:25:03.080
layers upon layers upon layers of of reconsumption and distancing um and you know the the pop cultural
00:25:10.220
uh version of this is is also quite common um you know the uh the tendance that we have to talk
00:25:16.500
about talking about things oh you know here's here's a television show or uh you know or a video game or
00:25:22.500
whatever it is and uh and it can always produce these sort of these sort of images or gifts or what have
00:25:27.480
you um that allow you to kind of take a portion of it and and and use it as a joke or a gag that
00:25:33.240
appears to be engaging deeply with the material but also distances um that actually distances you from
00:25:39.760
from you know really treating it for for what it is and and you know through that exercise of like
00:25:45.180
meme making and and internet trips and so forth uh we've also ironized kind of ourself and our
00:25:51.780
relationship to others just as much and you don't even know anymore like someone someone says
00:25:56.160
something to you online um and you know there's the old joke about on the internet nobody knows
00:26:01.020
you're a dog uh but in fact you don't know that you don't know that someone's a dog or not you're
00:26:05.260
not you're not sure maybe they're a dog maybe they're not um you can't take something seriously
00:26:09.580
because it might be in jest or even if it was serious then the the you know your interlocutor might
00:26:14.340
say oh no no i was just kidding you misunderstood me so we live in this this kind of this kind of vat
00:26:19.420
where we're online where we're we're never really sure what's happening or why uh and part of it is
00:26:24.240
because we don't know anything about many of the folks that we encounter in this sort of anonymity
00:26:27.800
of online life uh but also even when we start to there's just a whole barrage another wave of new
00:26:33.060
material comes pouring out uh as our as our screens scroll through the through the new content on on
00:26:38.440
facebook or instagram or what have you uh so the internet is has just amplified that that existing
00:26:43.500
sense of of irony that was that was already present and um and because we spend so much of our lives
00:26:49.880
online you know we have to do work and you have to do uh you have to interact with your friends and
00:26:54.100
your family online you know it's impossible to avoid you just can't avoid it anymore right right
00:26:59.480
and yeah when i was reading that it made me think of the three wolves t-shirt howling at the moon that
00:27:04.960
was a great example from a few years ago so i think a lot of people like i think a lot of people actually
00:27:09.360
like the t-shirt but like they couldn't say they like the t-shirt because that wouldn't be cool so
00:27:14.880
they hedged their bets by saying well i'm wearing this thing but isn't it funny ha ha all right it's a
00:27:20.480
good example yeah that that that's sort of you know it was it was ironic to wear it but then it
00:27:24.680
was ironic to talk about not wearing it or maybe you were wearing it maybe you just photoshopped it
00:27:29.840
onto yourself so you didn't really have to wear it um and i think the t-shirt is one of the prime
00:27:35.480
examples because it's so easy to make a t-shirt now that you find t-shirts for everything it used
00:27:39.640
to be actually quite difficult to get something onto a t-shirt and it was time and expense you have to
00:27:43.880
silk screen it um but we have all these services that we can use which which you know so we have all
00:27:47.980
like infrastructure this infrastructure for irony that we can tap into uh and i'm i'm just as guilty
00:27:53.400
of this you know as anybody uh it's so tempting and so easy to do someone makes a quip online and
00:27:59.500
you take a screen i did this just the other week like you know someone said something and i i took
00:28:03.700
the screenshot and put it on a on a t-shirt that you could get on one of those on-demand printing
00:28:08.060
services you know it's it's so easy to do that uh that then and then of course you know the person i
00:28:14.260
was talking to went and bought the t-shirt and took and on the one hand there's there's this
00:28:18.300
opportunity to kind of engage with the conversation that we're having but on the other hand uh it's
00:28:22.700
it's it's easier just to kind of hold it at this distance or to kind of kind of cover it in plastic
00:28:27.020
like you know like your grandma's sofa in order that you don't have to engage with it and instead
00:28:31.380
you can talk about the idea of engaging with it instead right and it's i mean it's a solution that
00:28:36.840
we've gone to to sort of deal with this this infinite choice that we have but it works in the
00:28:43.740
short term it always works in the short term because you can kind of go haha look what i did
00:28:47.100
you know look how i made a i made a joke out about about the world and then everyone laughs and you
00:28:51.540
get a bunch of likes or retweets or whatever it is you're looking for and then you know five minutes
00:28:56.000
pass and it doesn't make you any happier or more content you just have to find another source of
00:29:00.140
that material it's almost almost like the the logic of addiction right right so it does it's not a
00:29:04.440
long-term solution it's not a long-term solution and then it's not even a short-term solution in
00:29:08.660
the sense that you're not taking delight in the joy of the the three wolves shirt either right you're
00:29:13.840
you're you're you're neither uh building a kind of platform through which you could you could develop
00:29:18.100
a long-term interest and meaning in something nor are you developing a method by which you could um
00:29:23.380
you could get pleasure in these these you know these all these random individual things that are
00:29:27.680
constantly scrolling by us right right and how do most folks um combat this irony and why does like
00:29:37.340
the way they usually approach it or try to combat it fail so uh you know the the there's this this
00:29:43.080
term i coined in the in the book paranoia which is sort of like paranoia for things right so paranoia
00:29:48.660
is the mistrust of people then paranoia is the is the mistrust of of things and that that act of
00:29:55.500
distancing of sort of holding things at arm's length you know and and saying okay well you know
00:30:00.340
there's something but i'm gonna just wait see if see if something better comes along or or perhaps i
00:30:04.900
mistrust that it might it might be of use or of interest to me um that maneuver is like half right
00:30:12.320
and and the half of it that's right is in in like stopping you know stopping your ordinary life and your
00:30:18.500
ordinary attention and noting that there's something before you in the universe right like okay here's this
00:30:23.760
here's this shirt or here's this person or here's this problem or here's you know here's the this
00:30:27.980
task that i have to do whatever it is um and then and then kind of kind of uh circumscribing it you
00:30:33.620
know saying i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna draw a circle around this so that i can focus on it
00:30:38.120
but but then the ironic maneuver what it does is says okay i've you know i've i've captured it you
00:30:43.040
know i've i've sealed it inside of this bubble like plastic wrap like i'm gonna put on the shelf
00:30:47.440
and now i can dispose of it you know i've i've i've successfully captured whatever that thing is in the
00:30:52.640
world uh and and i've i've caught it it's not going to be a further uh it's not going to do me further harm
00:30:58.160
and i'll just i'll just dispose of it as quickly as possible and move on to the next thing
00:31:01.900
um so the half that's right you know the kind of approach that's right is is in recognizing things
00:31:06.640
as they exist but then instead of instead of uh casting them aside you know waiting for the next
00:31:12.140
thing to come along you want to take that thing and begin to work with it to manipulate it
00:31:16.540
okay to figure out what you can do with it all right so let's talk about that let's talk about that
00:31:20.880
so i mean your solution to that is you you play with it right you play with it right but um i think
00:31:25.940
most people the way most people define play it's not exactly how i mean it's not exactly how you
00:31:30.500
define play um so how do you define play what do you mean by play because yeah most of the time when
00:31:36.920
we hear play we we think it's like the opposite of work you know play is what you get to do after
00:31:41.300
you're done with what you have to do a play is this uh this experience of a freedom or of being
00:31:47.080
unfettered you know not not being kind of held down by obligation or duty um and instead i would
00:31:55.120
suggest thinking of play not as the opposite of work but as as this thing that exists in materials so
00:32:02.440
when um one good analogy for this that we actually talk about as play is the the play that's present
00:32:08.920
in a mechanism you know like a steering column there's there's a little bit of play in the in the
00:32:13.980
mechanism before it engages and begins and begins turning the wheel um or if you think about other
00:32:19.440
uh other domains in which we that we use the word play uh uh for like uh instruments we play instruments
00:32:25.500
you play the guitar you play the piano it's not that you're like doing whatever you want with the
00:32:30.080
guitar or the piano that doesn't make any sense whatsoever when you play the guitar um you're taking
00:32:35.300
its its material properties the the strings and the fretboard and the body of it and you're holding
00:32:40.180
it in a certain way and you're and you're uh and you're manipulating it to produce the sounds uh that
00:32:44.840
it's capable of and and through that manipulation you can produce uh music that's what it means to play
00:32:49.900
so if you take that kind of analogy of of the way that you play the guitar and you apply it to anything
00:32:55.120
else anything whatsoever and then play is a process of of uh evaluating understanding and then responding to
00:33:02.760
the the the material properties of things so seeing what you can do with them how you can incorporate them
00:33:07.680
into your experience and and how you can treat them uh based on the the constraints and limitations that
00:33:13.960
they present to you rather than kind of seeing them as uh as these potential tools through which to
00:33:20.100
achieve your own desires as if you even knew what you wanted right so it was kind of take a step back
00:33:25.920
here so like um going back well so we we play in playgrounds like you make this analogy of playgrounds
00:33:31.360
and playgrounds are sort of these areas like we'll talk about like a typical playground you see the park
00:33:35.340
it's an area where you engage in play but you say you can create playgrounds anywhere like a playground
00:33:39.780
would be the musical instrument right like you have this they have these strings they have frets they
00:33:44.820
have this board and you have to that's the playground you have this constraint that you have to deal with
00:33:49.260
and then by dealing with that constraint you can actually create something pretty cool right and if
00:33:53.440
you if you were to sort of reject it if you say well this is preposterous look at this this this
00:33:57.040
idiotic object that someone claims i can i can play music with you know obviously i can't like i and and this is what
00:34:02.680
happens when you pick up something like a guitar for the first time or a piano or a or a set of golf
00:34:08.260
clubs is they're hard and they resist you because they don't they're not that concerned about your
00:34:12.460
pleasure the pleasure you derive from using them uh and in order to make good on them you know you
00:34:17.400
have to you have to engage with you have to take it seriously for a while okay like like how do i learn
00:34:21.420
to play the guitar what do i need to know about it what have other people done before me how does it
00:34:24.980
actually operate and then over time you can you can develop this relationship with it um and you know
00:34:31.100
some people would say well you know that's a guitar but you can you can't possibly do that with you
00:34:35.100
know errands or commuting or what have you um but i think that's that's absolutely false you can do it
00:34:40.240
with anything the trick is in is in delivering bringing that that um that deep attention and
00:34:46.300
commitment to it in the first place which is where like the idea of the playground you know is useful
00:34:51.400
you see kids do this all the time kids are just like so good at finding play in in anything um
00:34:57.400
and you can think of the playground as like a physical enclosure like like you see in the park
00:35:02.200
but it's also a conceptual one you know like if you if you send your kids outside you're like go play
00:35:06.880
outside and and they'll run outside and then you know very quickly kind of say okay what's here oh
00:35:10.840
there's some sticks what are these sticks oh let's make up some rules about what the sticks are for what
00:35:15.040
they do and then taking into account like the material properties of the stick is a thing that could be a
00:35:19.620
sword or that you know you could throw or what have you um and that sort of activity is is possible with
00:35:24.720
anything it just requires you know being willing uh and and um and open uh to seeing it for what
00:35:31.120
it is and asking how you can manipulate it how you can play it right so i mean it's not so it sounds
00:35:36.080
like what people do with irony they they make the playground right they like kind of take this object
00:35:41.500
they see it and they put a boundary around it but then they just like you said throw it away they stop
00:35:46.640
there yeah that's exactly right uh you know the first maneuver uh that ends up being an ironic one
00:35:52.360
is to to you know to take something to kind of remove it from the world to draw this this this
00:35:56.780
playground or this circumscription around it to say huh here's a thing here's the thing before me
00:36:00.980
that thing could you know i'm worried about it couldn't it couldn't possibly produce the pleasure
00:36:04.580
it promises or that it doesn't promise let's just talk about the idea that it might and then let's
00:36:09.660
dispose of it uh but if you if you engage with it really deeply uh if you sort of accept that invitation
00:36:14.900
to enter that sphere and take it seriously um then you find uh just impossible depth um you know one of
00:36:22.200
one of the examples i have in the book is the uh the uh the mcdonald's filet-o-fish sandwich which
00:36:27.920
is a favorite of mine and there was this uh there was this uh story a number of years ago about like
00:36:33.880
how to make your own filet-o-fish sandwich at home it's a great example of of a a moment online that
00:36:39.780
could go toward irony or could go toward play and you know the the kind of ironizing move is to is to
00:36:45.780
do this in order that you can kind of laugh at the the low quality food at mcdonald's or you can
00:36:51.000
take a picture of it haha i made a filet-o-fish at home or that you can kind of uh suspend
00:36:56.440
this uh uh this uh this sense of whether you mean to sort of exalt or to or to scorn uh the sandwich
00:37:04.580
by talking about it or making it in your own kitchen but the truth is that it's actually super
00:37:08.840
interesting to understand uh how industrial food is made and where it comes from and how you might
00:37:12.920
recreate it um in your own kitchen and by engaging with it in that in that in that serious way even
00:37:18.540
something as preposterous as a fast food sandwich um you've you've discovered something new about
00:37:23.900
the world and that discovery of of novelty is is where the contentment comes from if you allow it
00:37:29.060
to uh if you allow it to percolate you quoted this one i think it's philosopher anthropologist where he
00:37:33.800
makes he makes the case that play is actually the driving force of humor human culture yeah i mean if
00:37:39.600
you think of play in this very general way that you know play is the process of of of encircling
00:37:44.600
something and then manipulating the contents that are within it then all we're really doing
00:37:49.140
uh when we when we produce culture is is playing it's just that it's not it's not play as this this
00:37:54.500
kind of uh uh release or or um uh or as the opposite of work or of duty it's play as the the serious and
00:38:02.660
deliberate manipulation uh of the materials that we that we find and and you know when you think about
00:38:07.840
some of the examples this this is a a dutch anthropologist named johan hoitzinger and uh and one of the
00:38:13.820
examples that hoitzinger uses is the uh the court the courtroom you know so the courts are a stage
00:38:19.180
of play and they actually have something uh very much in common with uh with the theater in some
00:38:23.800
sense this is one of the reasons why we like to watch courtroom dramas on television in fact uh we
00:38:28.840
kind of have have individuals uh the judge and the and the jury and the and the attorneys and so
00:38:33.920
forth who are playing roles and they are they are speaking and using uh the rules of law in a way
00:38:39.500
that's different from the way that we ordinary use use language and performance uh in day-to-day
00:38:43.780
life and and through that manipulation of legal code of uh of rhetoric of performance uh they
00:38:50.860
create a very real outcomes right this is this is uh this is a a serious context um and you don't
00:38:56.880
necessarily need a serious context like that to understand how play produces uh culture rather
00:39:02.200
to understand that that when you see play as this process of of manipulating what you find rather than
00:39:07.760
this process of escaping the world into into the the dreams in your own head then you're always being
00:39:13.340
productive uh when you do it you're always being productive when you uh when you perform it all
00:39:17.540
right so it's interesting you brought the the the courtroom there's these roles these defined you
00:39:22.940
know words you're supposed to say so there's constraints which makes it awesome right like
00:39:27.000
we don't like as you said most people think of play as like oh you just do whatever you want
00:39:30.180
but you say in order for play to be actually fun we'll talk about what fun means there has to be
00:39:36.300
constraints and i thought it was interesting you argue in the book that the way we often go about
00:39:40.200
trying to find improve our lives is through restraints can you talk about the difference
00:39:44.660
between restraints and constraints and why constraints are the better way to go yeah uh
00:39:50.080
so we're obsessed with with asceticism uh suddenly right like uh and it's it's one of the responses to
00:39:56.580
this this world of of plenty uh that we live in right oh you know i shouldn't i should that or i
00:40:01.860
should i should really exercise more um you know i want to do this thing but i'm going to try to
00:40:06.700
resist uh doing it because it's it would be better for me to do this other thing you know
00:40:10.700
those are these sort of negative and potentially ironizing moves that uh that that the logic of
00:40:16.000
restraint uh demands that we perform um and if you kind of flip that on his head and you instead accept
00:40:21.780
the the natural sorts of constraint that are built into the things that we find which are sometimes
00:40:26.600
exactly the same things right like it's not that i'm going to resist eating cake it's that oh i'm
00:40:31.200
gonna you know i'm gonna if i'm interested in a certain kind of diet then i'm going to stock my
00:40:35.160
pantry and kitchen uh with the kinds of foods i want to eat let me figure out how i'm going to go
00:40:38.780
and find those uh and and purchase them in a way that puts the right stuff around me such that when
00:40:43.960
i when i go to eating i'm eating the things i want right or um the active constraint that you uh that
00:40:50.040
you accept when you um when you when you enter the sphere of a game right the the pitch or the or the
00:40:55.700
playground if you find yourself on the football or the soccer field and you say well you know i just
00:40:59.960
refuse to accept the rules of the game then you're not playing uh but by accepting those constraints
00:41:04.800
you're able to enter into the experience of sport and if you if you stop yourself as you know you
00:41:08.760
watch a soccer or a football game and you go this is ridiculous like what are these people doing they
00:41:12.880
could do anything they want um you know why why are they adhering to the rules of the game it doesn't
00:41:17.020
make any sense this is what makes the game what it is so by by looking for accepting and even inventing
00:41:23.040
and applying new constraints to our lives we can we can flip this this this ironizing uh tendency
00:41:29.280
to try to restrain ourselves like oh i'm you know i'm not going to have that second glass of wine or you
00:41:33.520
know i i i really shouldn't do this into uh into a a method of structuring our behavior around the
00:41:40.660
limitations that we've either deliberately set up or that we've accepted uh in the world that we find
00:41:45.200
you know what one example of a set of constraints um is the the constraints of uh of of the people and
00:41:51.980
uh uh and and things that we find in our in our daily lives right the the actual properties of our
00:41:57.460
family or our significant others the the actual properties of our of our homes or our jobs
00:42:02.380
um and we we complain about those things all the time right oh if only you know if only my wife or
00:42:07.400
my husband didn't do this thing then things would be better in my marriage or you know if only uh if
00:42:11.840
only my my uh my job weren't so miserable then i wouldn't hate going to it and you know even despite
00:42:17.080
those sensations you can always kind of flip them on their head and figure out okay well like what are
00:42:21.000
the properties of those circumstances what are the what are the limitations and constraints that i can
00:42:24.920
work within what can i do in these situations rather than and then how can i uh obsess over what is
00:42:30.260
impossible right so yeah accept the world as it is and work with it deal with it in a way right and
00:42:36.920
you know of course there's a point there's a point at which you know accepting the world becomes absurd
00:42:40.720
or or or unpalatable or even destructive so it's it's it's not kind of like a fatalistic suggestion
00:42:45.600
that we you know just take everything that already exists that's all that there can be we can always
00:42:49.580
alter that world too but we have the sense that um that we kind of have to dispose of things much
00:42:55.340
more rapidly than we really need to and and we and so we fail to to accept and to uh to evaluate to
00:43:01.400
find the the constraints that are present and to work within them and instead we kind of move
00:43:05.380
immediately to rejection uh and you know because there's so many other options now there's so many
00:43:10.520
other options for everything oh you don't like you know that beer or that shampoo there's another one
00:43:14.100
you didn't like this uh this potential significant other no problem you know just just swipe and find
00:43:18.200
another one um that we've kind of enculturated ourselves to that to that notion of rejection
00:43:22.820
rather than than admitting the opportunity to stop and say okay like i'm going to treat this for what
00:43:28.140
it is for a minute see if there's anything more that i can find and then inevitably inevitably there
00:43:31.920
is there's always these hidden depths and things uh once you allow yourself to discover them the other
00:43:36.600
problem with restraint is that it's exhausting it's like existentialism it's like trying to come up with
00:43:40.560
meaning like restraining yourself all the time just exhausts you and it ends up failing in the long run
00:43:45.820
right how many things can you reject before you're you're out of things and then you've got to find new
00:43:50.060
things which you then have been in the habit of rejecting and so you reject them too and you know
00:43:55.480
changing that attitude uh from from restraint to constraint is is difficult but we have these models
00:44:01.180
for it and you know games and play are one of the are one of the places we can look for those models
00:44:06.020
there are places where we um a game is a place where you accept the the arbitrary absurdity of the world
00:44:12.700
and instead of rejecting it you say okay like i'm going to take it for what it is and mess around with it
00:44:16.980
and that's what play is uh and if we can bring that same attitude to to ordinary life not just
00:44:22.520
to entertainment or not just a sport or not just to the places where we normally think of play
00:44:26.480
as taking place then we can apply that same that same ad that same attitude that same strategy for
00:44:32.100
seeking pleasure to to ordinary things as much as extraordinary ones right so the you talk about
00:44:37.120
in the book the result of play is fun like you usually we we put the two together well it's not play
00:44:41.340
if you're not having fun if you're not having fun well i'm going to stop doing this thing because
00:44:44.300
it's not playful um but fun is a word that gets thrown around quite a bit and we kind of use it
00:44:50.380
just sort of as this filler just to describe things even though we don't really mean it was fun it was
00:44:55.580
just sort of interesting um so how do most people use fun and how do you define fun fun is one of
00:45:02.340
these amazing words that means almost nothing if you stop yourself the next time you find yourself
00:45:07.380
saying fun or you hear someone saying something was fun and kind of ask well what am i saying what do
00:45:12.800
they mean you'll quickly realize i actually i'm not sure you know we have this intuitive sense that
00:45:17.960
fun means pleasure that that that fun is a kind of uh synonym uh for pleasure something was pleasurable
00:45:23.520
something was fun and that's what we desire most is to is to have fun to gain pleasure from things
00:45:28.060
uh but in fact many of the many of the experiences uh that we describe as fun they tend to be actually
00:45:35.400
quite difficult even even kind of miserable you know they the the you you come back in from a a long
00:45:42.200
run or uh uh or or a difficult uh uh day at the office um and uh you know you've you've taken some
00:45:50.100
gratification in the work that you've done it was harrowing but nevertheless it was it was positive
00:45:54.260
something something pleasurable uh emerged from it and so that like that like idea of fun is this sort
00:45:59.020
of lightweight um uh easy pleasure it just turns out to be to be totally wrong um and if you kind of
00:46:06.880
kind of dig under it what you find instead is that you know fun is like a placeholder for naming a
00:46:12.640
process of discovering something new in something familiar fun is that that that that process of
00:46:18.620
discovery of of novelty um and and the reason it's such a lightweight or um or thrown around placeholder
00:46:26.080
term is because we you know we tend not to be able to see and discover those those moments especially
00:46:31.380
when they occur in ordinary um in ordinary life when they're not part of something remarkable you
00:46:37.580
know you go out for for an evening or like after dinner drinks or whatever or you're you're hanging
00:46:41.980
out with some friends or some co-workers or whatever and you get back home and uh and your roommate or
00:46:46.920
your spouse or whatever says you know how was it oh yeah i had fun it's like what you really mean by
00:46:51.800
that is that you know you've you found yourself in a situation that was the same one that you did
00:46:56.620
last week that you've done a million times um but there was still something new or there's still
00:47:00.980
something to learn about your friends or there's you know there's still something interesting to be had
00:47:04.780
in commiserating about about life at the office uh or there's still something interesting and novel
00:47:09.440
uh to discover about this you know the exact same path that you take on your on your uh on your jog or on
00:47:15.620
your on your bicycle route um and that's what fun is it's uh it's the discovery of novelty and
00:47:20.780
especially the discovery of novelty in the kind of the kind of uh you know uh almost almost sickening
00:47:27.440
context of familiarity when you can dig through and under familiarity and still find something new
00:47:32.400
that's where fun comes from right so it's like taking a look at the playgrounds in our lives the
00:47:36.880
conceptual and the real ones and then playing in them and then finding new things in the playground
00:47:42.500
that you didn't see before which which demands repetition right i mean this is one of the features of
00:47:47.560
games is that they're very repetitive you go back again and again you do the same things over and
00:47:52.740
over and over again rather than trying them once and then kind of you know testing whether they're
00:47:57.760
worthwhile and asking okay well if so i'll continue if not i'll give i'll give it up because
00:48:02.880
there's something else i could pursue instead so that that need to return to something uh is part
00:48:08.700
of it's intrinsic to play and it's also required uh for fun for fun to emerge uh it's very very
00:48:15.480
easy now not to uh not to bother trying something a second time or to kind of go back and go deeper
00:48:20.260
but there are many things that we can't resist trying a second time like you're going to have
00:48:24.560
to empty the dishwasher tomorrow just like you did today and you're gonna have to drive to work
00:48:27.940
tomorrow like you did today and you're gonna have to balance your checkbook and do your taxes all
00:48:31.680
this stuff that we construe as miserable we still have to do we have to do it every day um and if we
00:48:37.760
can dig under that that familiarity and and through play find novelty in those experiences
00:48:43.640
then they can be just as fun uh as the supposedly delightful uh uh activities that we pursue in
00:48:49.920
order uh to to seek pleasure that's awesome so the sub part of the subtitle of your book is the
00:48:55.700
pleasures of boredom why i mean we often think that boredom is terrible like that's like that's
00:49:00.060
how people get into trouble boredom is what leads to people through the bottle to porn to all
00:49:04.760
these sort of distractions to distract them from the boredom but you argue boredom's a good thing
00:49:09.900
why is boredom a good thing boredom is a sign it's a signal it's like a flare that goes up that says
00:49:16.200
okay you know now you're ready to start uh when you find yourself bored you've you've kind of
00:49:22.140
expended all the obvious choices you know you've you've you've done the easy things uh and now the
00:49:28.060
work can start and really determining what's you know what's in a situation what's something what
00:49:31.920
something means so you know one of the places that you might find yourself a board is at work or you
00:49:36.800
know in your car or you know you've got to go out and do do errands or you you know uh you find
00:49:41.000
one of the examples i use in the book is the the long haul flight you know at 14 hours on a plane
00:49:45.940
and you know you start and you you kind of do all the things that aren't being on a plane you watch
00:49:50.480
watch the movies and you eat the food and you read a book and you listen to music and play some games
00:49:55.060
and you do all this stuff that's meant to distract you from the experience of being of being stuck in
00:50:00.120
this metal tube five miles above earth hurtling through space at 500 miles an hour
00:50:06.060
and then once once you kind of get over that once you've done all the things that are not being in a
00:50:10.580
plane just by being in a plane um then you're faced with its reality and that's terrifying it's one of
00:50:16.660
the reasons why when we when we when we feel boredom we also feel anxiety i don't i don't know who i am i
00:50:22.520
don't know what i'm going to do next uh and that's where the fear begins to come from but when when you
00:50:27.820
find boredom kind of percolating up uh into your brain it's it's a good sign that um that you're you know
00:50:33.440
you've you've done all the easy work you've sort of you've sort of expended the um uh the the obvious
00:50:38.300
choices and then and then the invitation of boredom is to look again you know rather than to kind of go
00:50:43.300
okay there's nothing there's nothing more to do here i got to go find something else to look again
00:50:47.340
you know what else can be played what are the other uh the other opportunities that are presented by the
00:50:52.100
uh by the experience you find yourself in uh and often you know that is the kind of prerequisite
00:50:57.540
uh to finding meaning you know after you after you get through the the easy tasks of doing whatever
00:51:04.060
it is that you do in your job over and over and over again you know then you can say hmm okay how
00:51:09.160
could i improve this or why am i even doing these things in the first place let me try to go find out
00:51:13.120
or how could i make it better uh or even like okay well maybe i need to be some doing something else
00:51:17.700
entirely all of those kinds of revelations um almost you almost require you first to face boredom
00:51:24.200
and then through boredom uh to um uh to direct your attention to what might might overcome it what
00:51:31.440
might be possible in the face of that boredom so let's let's let's put these principles into action
00:51:35.740
we've kind of done it a bit we've given some examples uh throughout the conversation but like
00:51:39.560
let's take the airplane example right so you're bored you've done all the the the low-hanging fruit
00:51:44.780
you've read you played your games you're still on the plane how do you play right how do you approach
00:51:50.560
the airplane with a playful mindset right and you know the airplane is like uh it's it's my my
00:51:57.120
kryptonite almost i find it so difficult and so you know as an example it's it's it's uh an
00:52:02.460
interesting exercise i think for all of us because you know what it means to be uh to be on a plane is
00:52:07.480
you know to face uh the the sense of being uh uh uh crushed inside of your seat or to be next to
00:52:13.400
someone that you maybe do or don't want to talk to uh or to or to uh to ask what you know what
00:52:18.300
what the magazine says that uh uh that you might read instead of uh instead of pursuing some other
00:52:23.940
activity all of those kinds of like little meaning seemingly meaningless activities right
00:52:28.420
they're kind of what make flight what it is uh even like the the cramped bathroom with the you know
00:52:34.480
with the the strange smell uh walking down the aisle uncomfortably and being and being uh uh kind
00:52:39.940
of tilted off your feet by turbulence you know those kind of small experiences as they add up
00:52:44.700
uh they produce this sort of sum total effect of of being on the plane now you know maybe this isn't
00:52:49.720
something that you know you can kind of do over and over again or that you even find yourself in
00:52:53.320
a situation where it matters but it's an exercise it's like an exercise you perform in order that you
00:52:58.180
can do it later with anything else so i'll give you another example uh which is which comes from i mean
00:53:04.280
many of the examples in the book you know just come from my own life because if the x if the if the
00:53:08.380
if the premise i'm advancing is that you need to find a way for your ordinary life to be meaningful
00:53:12.500
then i better be able to look in my ordinary life uh to find meaning uh so one of the things one of
00:53:18.140
the things that uh that i've you know been facing in in my community is uh a few years ago i got like
00:53:24.500
kind of accidentally involved in in local local land use politics and this sounds like the most boring
00:53:30.640
thing ever right like zoning and uh and all of the kind of regulations of zoning variances and how to
00:53:36.400
change zoning and then uh you know how to how to manage uh approvals for for new and old construction
00:53:41.440
in a historic district and these sorts of activities um i as i was thrust into them they
00:53:47.100
just seemed like overwhelming ridiculous um but as i got more and more involved uh in in this process
00:53:52.900
of sort of you know being a a citizen member of uh of a community and and engaging with the the
00:53:59.200
aspects of planning uh the the development of the future of my of my neighborhood and my and my city
00:54:04.380
and my county and so forth i realized huh like there's there's this whole universe underneath where i
00:54:08.960
wanted to stop you know and the place i wanted to stop was oh somebody wants to build something i
00:54:13.240
don't like or something right but in fact you know once you dig below that you realize there's actually
00:54:18.660
a whole jolly pillar urban planners and there's a whole universe of of knowledge that you can you
00:54:23.040
could do your whole career around this um like who am i to kind of cast it aside and pretend uh like
00:54:28.700
there's nothing meaningful to to be found there and as i begin to understand the constraints and
00:54:32.740
limitations you know legal uh dealing with with individuals in the community uh uh managing the
00:54:38.220
time that's required to kind of meet with a builder or or or to uh to figure out how to how to you
00:54:44.060
know get something done on the calendar of the of the planning commission all of these sorts of things uh
00:54:48.920
those became the aspects of play and you know it's it takes it takes a bit of squinting it takes a bit
00:54:53.620
of work before you can kind of see um these these supposed nuisances like you know like dealing with
00:54:59.060
land use politics as uh as a game like anything else right and i even like i've you know i read
00:55:04.820
the book just a few weeks ago but like even just like trying to like do you know squint and try to
00:55:09.880
find those things it's helped me um look at things that i otherwise would have think as thought of the
00:55:14.900
nuisance as like that's an opportunity to like play with it and it suddenly becomes not such a nuisance
00:55:20.700
actually kind of it's kind of fun it becomes an opportunity because what else were you going to be
00:55:24.920
doing with your time uh you know and every time i find myself faced with something that i where
00:55:30.580
we're news like either it's either boredom or it's nuisance where those are the sensations that
00:55:34.980
kind of well up in me um then i just try to kind of stop and say oh okay well like what more is there
00:55:41.120
that i'm not seeing you know like my my uh my my sink uh my kitchen sink got uh clogged a few weeks
00:55:48.480
back like pretty seriously clogged um and you know i've become reasonably handy over my life but uh but
00:55:54.240
this was this was really puzzling me uh and so you know you can get annoyed i got instead of watching
00:55:58.960
tv now i have to clear the sink but this is an opportunity to understand something else about
00:56:02.940
how plumbing works i can kind of kind of improve my uh my competence in uh in uh in diy home maintenance
00:56:09.900
and and and through doing so also learn something more about how my particular sink is constructed
00:56:14.500
and maybe if it's not constructed properly i could i could pursue the remedy of that either through
00:56:19.280
my own hands or or by hiring my plumber which you know then also requires you to find a plumber that
00:56:24.940
you want to use so like all of those like little moments um even though they seem like just just like
00:56:29.560
detritus the things that we we don't want to think about so we can get on to the good stuff
00:56:33.480
there's still meaning there too it's just that you have to treat it as such right um and as you said
00:56:38.620
earlier um this isn't a fatalistic approach like you're not just supposed to you don't necessarily
00:56:43.440
have to accept everything the way it is right there's sometimes you have to just like
00:56:47.900
take the reality that or the ideal in your head and you actually have to make that a reality
00:56:52.040
um because like the current reality is like is completely unacceptable yeah and you know play
00:56:57.280
it doesn't mean accepting all of the conditions of a particular set of constraints forever like you
00:57:03.180
know as if they were sort of sort of brought down from the mountain or dictated uh by by fate play can
00:57:08.320
also involve applying new conditions new constraints new limitations or disposing of old ones and and this
00:57:17.020
is like minor or major matters you know the kind of play that involves remedying the leaky faucet that
00:57:21.960
i just mentioned it's not like well you know this is my life my my uh you know my uh my my sink's
00:57:28.300
gonna leak and my and it's gonna be clogged and that's all i can do you know no i have to i have
00:57:32.100
to involve something else i have to introduce new concepts and new materials into the playground that
00:57:36.880
is my my sink uh and the same is true of of much weightier you know matters uh if you think about
00:57:42.880
you know like social conditions or injustices and that you want to remedy because the you know the
00:57:47.300
the limitations of living in a world of of of racial violence for example are unacceptable
00:57:52.180
you know then it's not that you say well that's it you know there's nothing i could do about it it's
00:57:55.880
that you you have to muster kind of a different imaginary circle different playground around those
00:58:00.500
elements of the world and then say well how could we manipulate them differently to produce a
00:58:04.280
different outcome right so you create a new playground that's what you're doing yeah but but you know like
00:58:08.060
to make that change in the first place to make that new playground you first start by acknowledging
00:58:12.300
the reality that you want to change you have to treat it for what it is and part of that part of
00:58:18.160
that process is accepting and understanding the circumstances rather than buying them awesome well
00:58:22.760
ian this has been a great conversation where can people learn more about your book yeah so uh you
00:58:26.880
know the book's available at your favorite bookseller and you can also check out my website at bogost.com
00:58:32.060
b-o-g-o-s-t.com there's information about the book and links to other conversations and articles i've
00:58:36.860
written that are on the same theme all right ian bogost thank you so much for your time it's been
00:58:40.620
a pleasure thank you my guest is ian bogost he's the author of the book play anything it's available
00:58:44.980
on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can also find more information about ian's work at bogost.com
00:58:50.280
and also check out the show notes at aom.is slash bogost for links to resources where you can
00:58:54.580
delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast
00:59:09.840
for more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at
00:59:12.920
artofmanliness.com our show is edited by creative audio lab here in tulsa oklahoma if you have any
00:59:17.660
audio editing needs or audio production needs check them out at creativeaudiolab.com and if you have a
00:59:22.740
moment i'd really appreciate it if you give us a review on itunes or stitcher that really helps
00:59:25.780
us out a lot as always i appreciate your continued support and until next time this is brett mckay