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.

The modern world is very wealthy, it's full of options. It's not like "This is the land I was born on and I have to make the most of it, and these are the people who are near me, and so they will become my family."

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 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.

Forcing your spouse to stop doing that bad habit that drives you crazy, or making your kid be better at math or at art or at swimming, or making your parents or your in-laws not be annoying in the way that they're annoying, these are sometimes doomed goals.

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.

We don't like to think of ourselves as subject to the forces of the world, we like to think of ourselves as exerting that force.