We have so many choices that it's only always our fault if we're malcontent.

We know exactly where the path to despair and insanity lies. It's in that sense that life is meaningless, there's nothing about today that's worth doing because it's just like yesterday and it's going to be just like tomorrow.

Normally we think of play as the opposite of work. Work is the thing you have to do, and then there's play, the thing you choose to do.

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.

Even when we tell kids to go play, what do the kids do? They come up with a set of constraints and structures. "Oh, we're gonna build a fort out of clothes, and now that we're in the fort we're going to pretend that we're prisoners," or whatever.

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.

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.