Why don’t we let adults embrace play more?

Here’s another idea I got from Rob Poynton, whose book I read on a train from London to Paris. (He lives off the grid in Spain and writes/blogs about a lot of issues related to making work more enjoyable and productive, including the idea of improv sessions for organizations.)

So here’s an interesting concept: you can point to different times in a person’s life where the notion of “engaging in play” ends, but almost all of the possible spots occur before the age of 23. In fact, if you’re out there at 25/26 messing around and looking purposeless, most people start viewing you as a deadbeat or someone with no arc/track/story (unless you have a trust fund, in which case people envy the shit out of you). There’s a dividing line somewhere — be it high school, college, or immediately post-college — where the idea is that you stop playing and start working. This could come from the concept that “work is a virtue,” which is a whole different post. (In fact, it almost assuredly does come from that idea.)

But adults are still human beings, and human beings want to play. Play is a natural expression of who we are inside, writ large. (Have you ever seen a woman in her 40s, with three children under 12, on Halloween? Adults like to play.)

Articles about “the importance/value” of adult play abound on the Internet — hereand here as…