In which Our Hero muses on the interaction of these forces.
The question came up at dinner:
What’s the relationship between play and depression?
Is play the antidote? Is the lack of play the cause? Or are they simply two dancers who keep stepping on each other’s toes?
My take:
- I love Play. Play is enlivening and delightful and deeply satisfying.
- Play is a sign of a healthy environment: one that nurtures the growth and expression of its members.
- Some environments don’t require play or can’t support it, especially high-stress or high-stakes ones in intense moments.
- If you lack play long enough, you will feel like crap.
- If you can’t play with people, you won’t feel good around those people.
Blockers to play:
- Lack of safety. If you can’t experiment or express, you shrink. The body contracts. The options narrow. The world gets small.
I often think of depression as a kind of flatness. A greying-out of inner movement. And a lot of what prevents play, at least in my own experience, is fear/anxiety. So the loop becomes:
fear/anxiety → no play → depression.
It’s not the only description of the loop, but it’s a fair one.
Another view:
- Maybe depression is fundamentally the lack of experienced pleasure.
- If that’s true, then you can find pleasure through play. But also through other avenues, including observation and appreciation.
- In that framing, play is one antidote, but not the only one. (And it may not be the proper antidote for a specific situation, nor a permanent fix.)
Still, I think social play is necessary for social satisfaction.
It’s a treadmill you have to keep running on—just enough—for the system to stay stable.
Stop for too long, and you get flung off the end, cascading into a wall of lonesomeness. Start running again, and the world comes back into color.
However, you can’t force play. You can only create the context for it to naturally emerge.
Even if you’re a player?
Even if you’re the game.
Julian Wise 