God will not speak to me and tell me to mow my lawn today.

There are personality traits, or baggage from their backgrounds, goals that they have and the first thing I need to do is understand and then acknowledge and then accept those properties. That's kind of the baseline requirement to have a productive relationship.

The more you're drowning in familiarity, the better the fun is. It requires less novelty to produce even more gratification. And it's something that didn't come from you. It was about the other thing - the thing you were experiencing, or the people you were with, or the mechanism you were operating, or whatever it might be.

To me, being able to find gratification in more venues, rather than greater gratification in a few, seems like a much more sane way of living.

Wouldn't we all rather have the possibility of finding pleasure and delight in literally anything we might encounter? Instead of assuming that actually there are only these three things where pleasure and delight are possible. Like oh, it's television and socialization and work, and then everything else is the smoke I have to somehow choke my way through in order to get to the good parts.

The whole idea of play is in finding, acknowledging, and then working with the natural constraints and limitations that you find in the world.

We're stuck in these situations with other people and our stuff and our jobs, and thinking that we can extract ourselves from those seems doomed to me. Instead, how can we live within those systems of constraints? We don't have to enjoy them, exactly, but at least acknowledge that those boundaries are real and that they structure our response to the world. And then once you do that, you allow yourself to say "I did my best given the circumstances."