It's helpful to be prepared to celebrate the tiny things that you can do, where you meet the world and you negotiate an outcome that's quite tiny. But you can still make it feel remarkable.

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

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.

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.

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.

I think a lot of the misery that people experience comes from that sensation of boundlessness, of infinite possibility.

With sports and games, you have fun despite working very hard, even despite failing repeatedly. Even the fun of a night out, you have to get somewhere and do all the conversational, social work of being out. There's effort involved. But then when you're finished, you can conclude, "Actually there was something gratifying about the hardship that I just encountered." That discovery of novelty is where the molten core of fun is.