We Love to Play. We Hate to Work.

“Play” is the opposite of “work.” When we play, we engage in recreation and entertainment. We play for the fun of it. We get to relax and do things we enjoy. There’s no responsibility in play, no strict rules we have to follow except in games, and even there, if we’re just playing, we can relax the rules. We can recapture a bit of our childhoods for a while, be carefree, drop our burdens, and just be ourselves. We get to choose the location, the activities, have no schedule to adhere to. Vacations are for fun. Fun is…fun.

After the vacation is over, we go back to “work.” Another word for work is labor. There are schedules to follow, dead lines to meet, pressure from those in positions above us, activities that we must perform whether or not we want to. Some work is physical; some is mental. Both require effort and are stressful. The majority of us work to earn a living. If we were independently wealthy, either by birth or inheritance or a great lottery ticket purchase, the first thing most of us agree on is that we would quit working. We’d be able to play all the time, and life would be perfect. Like childhood, only we would be in charge of our own bedtimes. And snacks.

There is an interesting concept (several, actually) in the Netflix series “A Good Place,” starring Ted Danson. After a few hundred (or thousands) of years in Heaven, people start to get bored. They’ve been everywhere they ever wanted to go. They’ve done everything they ever wanted to do. They’ve enjoyed themselves in every conceivable way, and there’s nothing…