The universe is not particularly concerned with you.

Today, all our wives and husbands have Blackberries or iPhones or Android devices or whatever-the progeny of those original 950 and 957 models that put data in our pockets. Now we all check their email (or Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, or) compulsively at the dinner table, or the traffic light. Now we all stow our devices on the nightstand before bed, and check them first thing in the morning. We all do. It's not abnormal, and it's not just for business. It's just what people do. Like smoking in 1965, it's just life.

This willingness to be frank and plain about the way that the world is, is a good first step. But that doesn't mean that you get what you want.

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 idea of thinking of our relationships with people as also being structured by limitations and constraints can be useful.

There are things about us that make us who we are, personality traits, or capacities that we have, or knowledge we possess or that we don't possess, habits we have that are good or bad.

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