You can experience play at work, not because you're messing around or wasting time or something, but because you're looking really deeply and seriously at things and asking what is possible, what can be done with them, what new ideas might emerge?

Once you get yourself on that path where you're willing to find something delightful in laundry and in dishwashers, it means that you train yourself to be able to find it almost anywhere in almost anything.

I think the most important thing to realize about play is that it's this thing that's in stuff, it's not in you.

If you stop someone who's talking about something being fun, and say "Well what do you mean?" it's almost impossible to answer.

My wife, there's certain kinds of housework that she just doesn't see as necessary to do in the way that I do. Things like the state of our closet or where things are in the kitchen. I have this almost unhealthily obsessive desire to have things in their place and she just totally doesn't. And this is a potential point of conflict, of course.

Normally if you're dating, you're looking for compatibility, and then the moment that there's incompatibility, you're like, "Well, swipe left on that, let's just keep looking." In some ways I think the same lessons apply to people that apply to objects. It's just much easier to see that lesson in things because they're these fixed intangible lumps of stuff. People are not. They can change.

Play is this process of operating the world, of manipulating things. It's related to experimentation, and it's related to pleasure, but not defined by it.