uh-hu! Great weekend read

Remember the parable of the ant and the grasshopper, where the ant works all summer and the grasshopper lazes about and eventually starves? In the traditional version, the ant is the hero — the ceaseless hard worker — and the grasshopper is the object lesson in the perils of laziness.

Bernard Suits The Grasshopper from 1978 flipped this on its head... jumping off at with Plato and Socrates' last days...

In Plato’s dialogue, Socrates has been condemned to death and waits for execution. His students visit him, begging for him to escape, but he refuses. He would rather die for his commitment to justice than be a coward. Suits’ book is also a dialogue, which begins with the grasshopper dying of starvation, surrounded by his disciples. They beg the grasshopper to let them feed him, but he refuses. He would rather die for his commitment to idleness and play than force his disciples to become ants.

"The book was initially ignored when it was published in 1978, probably because of its unconventional topic and joyous style. But it has slowly gained an ardent following."

Imagine, says Suits, utopia — some future paradise where technology has solved all our practical problems. We have perfect medicine, unlimited energy and boundless resources. What would we do with our time? We would play games, says Suits, or we would be bored out of our minds. And if playing games is all we do in utopia, then games must be the meaning of life.

Ah, I've heard of this place, somewhere between Keynes' possibilities for our grandchildren (#1476087, #1537872) and current AI dreams (#1545916).

the praising of play via the grasshopper is EITHER

• supporting our deepest instincts about what truly matters
• or a silly, make-believe argument in favor of an unserious life

"Suits meant it very seriously. The book is an argument for the centrality of play. For him, play is not just a side dish for the main meal of work. Play is at the core of a meaningful life."

To play a game, [Suits] says, is to voluntarily take on unnecessary obstacles to make possible the struggle to overcome them. To play a game, therefore, is to be inefficient on purpose.

Interesting.

This is like my blueberries:

[Fly fishing] is stupidly hard. If you want a fish, almost any other method is easier. (Hell, if all you want is a fish to eat, you can just buy one at the market.) But that wouldn’t count. When you fly fish, you don’t just want a fish. You are playing a game: you want to get that fish by a specific, difficult and fascinating technique.

My last round of blueberries were picked with me humming to music and thinking "You pay with everything using money, time, or dignity." (s/o @SimpleStacker ) #1545954

THE LOGIC OF GAMES and the deep wisdom of play

1. goal of a game
2. purpose for playing a game

My philosophy mentor, Barbara Herman, put it this way: when you invite your friends over to play cards, the goal is to win, but the purpose is to have fun. You have to try to win to have fun, but winning isn’t the point. Not all of us approach games in this way. For some people, the goal and purpose are one. They want to win, period. Call those people achievement players. The Olympic runner wants to win the marathon by running it — but they do truly care about winning it.

we're either achievement players, like the elite competitors, or striving players ("It's alright if we try and lose")

"What is the point of life? Is it to make stuff? Or is it to take difficult actions, think rich thoughts, weigh subtle decisions? Is it having a pile of stuff — or does the stuff just support our quest for interesting action?"

I’ve spent a lot of time in serious research environments talking about games and play. Most serious adults — even people who research play — are usually anxious to show how play is actually, secretly, useful for actual adult stuff. They are anxious to show how play encourages some future productivity. Chess teaches logic, football teaches teamwork, Minecraft builds future engineers. Or, at the very least, play is useful because it relaxes and restores you, so you can renew your vigour and get back to work. Suits argues something different. He argues that play itself is the point, and that we work in order to survive so that we might play.

Chess is that; it's also fun (and frustrating and competitive and soul-sucking and a prism for all of human existence... Kasparov's How Life Imitates Chess)

"closeness to misery" is a wonderful phrase... I shall keep that one with me.

tl;dr for the entire piece.

Rephrase Suits’ definition this way: play is wasting resources for fun. But also: the whole point is that, deep down, it’s not a waste. A truly wasted life would be one spent working hard, stockpiling goods like the ant and never using them to support joyous play. And to truly waste humanity would be to push people so hard to work productively, to make more stuff, to the point where nobody had time to play.

Beautiful.

https://archive.md/M2qgv