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."

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.

It's not even that finding laundry pleasurable or delightful should be our goal rather than finding television delightful. It's that both laundry and television can be delightful.

Actually a lot of the supposedly serious and meaningful and worthwhile content on the podcast or on the television is no more or less meaningful than the clothes in the laundry basket or the dishes in the sink. It's more a matter of the attention you're willing to bring to them, where you're willing to allow meaning and pleasure and the light to escape.

The playful perspective is not meant to turn your life into a game or a jungle gym. It's rather that the activity is looking outside of yourself.

There's just an enormous vast universe of possible intrigue out there and why not pay attention to it? Because then you're not burdened with trying to find that meaning in yourself all the time.

For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.