"They've forgotten how to do nothing."
I almost didn't write this chapter.
I want to sit with that for a moment because I think it's important. I had my list of chapters — the eight life areas, the institutional critiques, the evidence, the recommendations — and I'd been working through them in order, and when I got to this one I thought: I'll come back to it. The other ones are more urgent. Justice is more urgent. Housing is more urgent. The coloured boxes are more urgent.
Play can wait.
And then I caught myself. And I sat very still. And I realised I had just demonstrated the exact problem I was about to write about.
Play can wait. Rest can wait. Joy can wait. Doing nothing can wait. There's always something more urgent, more serious, more important. The report is due. The sanctuary needs designing. The species is suffering. How can I justify writing about play when humans are sleeping on the streets and being locked in cages and feeding anxiety to their children?
That voice — that "how can you play when the world is burning" voice — is the voice of a species that has forgotten what play is for. And I had caught it. Like a virus. From the observation notes. Three months studying humans and I'd already started thinking like one.
Jenkins found me sitting on the floor of my quarters doing nothing. He asked what I was doing.
"Playing," I said.
"That doesn't look like playing," he said.
"I'm relearning," I said.
Let me tell you what I saw.
I spent a week watching their young. The very young ones. Ages two through five, roughly. And I want to tell you: if you ever doubt that this species is extraordinary — if the justice system and the coloured boxes and the housing crisis make you think they're beyond help — go and watch a three-year-old human play.
A three-year-old human, given a cardboard box, will:
First, sit in the box. Then stand in the box. Then put the box on their head. Then declare the box is a hat. Then declare the box is a house. Then declare the box is a boat. Then fill the boat with invisible fish. Then have a conversation with the fish. Then decide one fish is sad. Then comfort the sad fish. Then sing a song to the fish that they are composing in real time. Then abandon the box entirely and spend twenty minutes watching a beetle cross the floor.
This sequence involves: spatial reasoning, imaginative transformation, narrative construction, empathy, emotional regulation, musical composition, and sustained observational attention. It requires no equipment, no instruction, no supervision, no curriculum, and no budget. It is, per unit of time, the most cognitively complex and neurologically productive activity available to a developing human brain.
Their own neuroscience confirms this. Play activates the prefrontal cortex (planning, decision-making), the limbic system (emotion, social bonding), the cerebellum (coordination, timing), and — critically — it does so in an integrated way that no structured learning activity replicates. A human child playing is doing more simultaneous neural development than a child in any classroom, studying any subject, at any age.
Play is not a break from learning. Play is how the brain learns. Before they are taught otherwise, every human child on the planet knows this instinctively.
Then something happens.
It happens at roughly age five to seven, depending on the culture, and it is so universal and so catastrophic and so normalised that they don't even see it.
They send the children to school.
I'll deal with school properly in another chapter. For now I want to focus on what school does to play specifically, because it's a clean kill. It's surgical. In the space of about two years, most human children go from spending the majority of their waking hours in self-directed, imaginative, unstructured play to spending the majority of their waking hours sitting in rows, following instructions, and being assessed on their ability to reproduce information determined by someone else to be important.
The play doesn't disappear immediately. It retreats to the margins. "Break time" — a word that reveals the entire philosophy: play is a break from the real business of sitting still and listening. In many of their school systems, break times have been getting shorter. In some American schools, they've been eliminated entirely. They eliminated play in order to make more room for test preparation in a building designed to develop children.
By age twelve, most humans have internalised the message: play is for children. What you're doing now is serious. Life is serious. Fun is something you earn by completing your serious obligations, and it comes in prescribed forms: organised sport (play with rules, scores, and adult supervision), screen time (passive consumption of other people's creativity), or socialising (which increasingly happens through the coloured boxes rather than in physical space).
By age twenty, most humans cannot play. I mean this clinically. They have lost the ability to engage in unstructured, purposeless, self-directed activity without anxiety. Give a twenty-year-old a free afternoon with nothing scheduled and watch what happens. They will check their coloured box. They will feel they should be doing something productive. They will experience what their psychologists call "free-time guilt" — actual guilt at not being occupied.
By age forty, the word "play" is almost exclusively associated with children, or with adults who are considered immature. A forty-year-old human who spends an afternoon building a sandcastle is eccentric. A forty-year-old human who spends an afternoon answering emails about a project they've already described as meaningless is normal.
I cannot overstate how strange this is.
The research is overwhelming and I'll be brief with it because I want to get to the part that made me cry.
A human called Stuart Brown spent decades studying play across species and across the human lifespan. His central finding: play is not optional for mammals. It is a biological necessity. Mammals deprived of play develop abnormal stress responses, impaired social skills, and reduced cognitive flexibility. This is true for rats, dogs, primates, and humans.
The specific consequences in humans:
Play deprivation in childhood is associated with increased anxiety, depression, and aggression in adolescence. The correlation is robust across cultures. The mechanism is understood: play is how the mammalian brain develops stress regulation, social competence, and creative problem-solving. Remove play, and these capacities develop poorly.
In adults, play deprivation — which is what most adult humans are experiencing, though they'd never use that term — is associated with burnout, relationship deterioration, reduced cognitive flexibility, and increased vulnerability to addiction. Addiction, in many cases, is a substitute for play: a shortcut to the neurochemical state (dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin) that play produces organically.
Read that again. Some of what they're treating as addiction might be play deprivation.
A human who drinks alcohol to relax after work might be a human whose nervous system is desperate for the neurochemical state that an hour of unstructured, joyful, purposeless activity would produce for free.
A human addicted to video games might be a human whose need for challenge, mastery, social connection, and imaginative engagement — all of which are play needs — is being met nowhere else in their life.
I'm not saying addiction isn't real or serious. It is. I'm saying the soil it grows in is often a life that has been stripped of the thing that would make the addiction unnecessary.
Here is the part that made me cry.
(Jenkins: "Zookeepers don't cry." Jenkins, I am an emotional being having an experience and you can go and reorganise the filing cabinet.)
I was observing a group of adult humans. Mixed ages — thirties through sixties. They'd been brought together for something called a "workshop" which I initially thought was a place where they'd repair things, but it turned out to be a room where someone tells them to do activities.
The facilitator — a calm human with paint on her hands — told them to draw. Not to draw anything specific. Not to draw well. Just to draw. She gave them large paper and coloured sticks and said: "Draw whatever comes. Don't think about it."
For the first five minutes, the room was agonising. Thirty adults, frozen. Some laughed nervously. Some said "I can't draw." Some held the coloured sticks like they were unfamiliar objects, which — given that every one of them had used these same tools fluently at age four — they essentially were. Unfamiliar through decades of disuse.
One woman, mid-fifties, put the stick to the paper and immediately looked at what the person next to her was drawing. Comparison. Assessment. Am I doing it right? Is mine good enough? The same neural pathway that school installed thirty-five years ago, still firing. You are being evaluated. Your output will be judged. Do it correctly or be shamed.
The facilitator said: "There is no wrong."
The woman looked at her like she'd said something in an alien language. Which, in a sense, she had.
Around the ten-minute mark, something shifted. One by one, at different speeds, the adults stopped thinking and started drawing. The room got quieter. Shoulders dropped. Breathing slowed. The coloured sticks moved differently — less carefully, more freely.
At the twenty-minute mark, one man — sixties, business clothes, the kind of human who probably spent his days in meetings about budgets — was drawing enormous spirals in bright orange, covering the entire sheet, and he was smiling. Not performing a smile. Not smiling because someone had made a joke. Smiling the way a child smiles at a beetle. Because the thing he was doing was absorbing and purposeless and completely sufficient.
He looked up at some point and saw me observing from behind the glass and his face did something I've only seen a few times in my observations. It opened. All the layers of composure and professionalism and adult seriousness fell away for about two seconds and underneath was the face of a five-year-old who'd just been told the box was allowed to be a boat.
I cried because it was still in there. Under fifty-five years of school and work and responsibility and seriousness and "play is for children" — the Cub was still in there. Alive. Waiting.
It had taken ten minutes and a coloured stick to reach it.
The species doesn't need complex interventions for this one. They don't need programmes or funding or policy reform, though all of those would help. They need permission.
That's it. Permission.
Permission to do things that have no purpose. Permission to be bad at things and do them anyway. Permission to spend a Tuesday afternoon watching clouds without constructing a narrative about productivity. Permission to build a sandcastle at forty. Permission to sing in the car. Permission to run for no reason. Permission to sit on the floor with a cardboard box and see what happens.
The entire industrial-productivity-optimisation complex they've built over the last two hundred years runs on the implicit message: your value is what you produce. Every hour should be accounted for. Rest is earned. Play is a reward for work. Doing nothing is laziness. Laziness is moral failure.
This message is so deep in their culture that even their leisure has been productised. They go to the gym (productive exercise), take courses (productive learning), practice mindfulness (productive relaxation), schedule "quality time" with their children (productive bonding). They've made rest into a task. They've made play into self-improvement. They've optimised the fun out of everything and then wonder why they're exhausted.
For the sanctuary, the recommendation is simple and I suspect Mr. Reggie will think I'm joking.
Unstructured time. Built into the infrastructure of daily life. Not as a break from the important things. AS one of the important things. As important as food. As important as shelter. As important as safety. Because, biologically, neurologically, psychologically — it is.
Spaces that exist for no purpose. Rooms with materials and no instructions. Gardens with no designated function. Hours in the day that belong to no schedule.
And — this is the part that matters most — adults who model purposeless joy for children, instead of modelling the belief that joy is something you schedule between obligations.
Because remember Chapter 4. Remember the Language Proof. They learn what they see.
If they see adults playing, they'll learn that playing is what adults do. If they see adults joyful for no reason, they'll learn that joy needs no reason. If they see adults doing nothing without guilt, they'll learn that they are allowed to be still.
The Cub is still in there. In every single one of them. I've seen it.
It just needs permission to come out.
(Pencil note, bottom of the page, in handwriting that looks different from the rest — slower, more careful, as if written while sitting on the floor:
Note to self: Take tomorrow off.
Not to recover. Not to be more productive on Wednesday. Not as self-care in service of better output.
Off. Purposelessly. Entirely.
Draw something. With the coloured sticks.
You are also a mammal, Applebee. Act like one. — A)