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.

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.

Any phrase that suggests play is this domain that's the opposite of work, or the thing that you do when you're done working, should trouble us. Because it means that play is always relegated to the exhaust of life. It's the thing that you do after you do the important stuff, it's what you do on your own time.

My lawnmower can't change in the way that my son can or that I can.

Generally speaking, when people use the word fun, it's like a placeholder. You know, "How was your evening?" "Oh it was fun."

If you think about the contexts in which we talk about things being fun, often there's a certain kind of misery or effort that's involved with it. The difficulty of travel, getting all your bags packed and your work done and navigating the airports and all that. That sort of struggle.

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.