Thinking Hard. Thinking Playfully

I wrote about pulling the plug and how tempting it would be but how I am drawn to staying connected via the Internet. Recently, I read an article by Kevin Kelly where one paragraph really jumped out at me regarding the Internet.

“This waking dream we call the Internet also blurs the difference between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts, or to put it more simply: I no longer can tell when I am working and when I am playing online. For some people the disintegration between these two realms marks all that is wrong with the Internet: It is the high-priced waster of time. It breeds trifles. On the contrary, I cherish a good wasting of time as a necessary precondition for creativity, but more importantly I believe the conflation of play and work, of thinking hard and thinking playfully, is one the greatest things the Internet has done.” Kevin Kelly

I battle this “waste of time” model a lot. Work and play have always mingled for me. As a musician and performer in the 80s and 90s, not only was the actual time I performed, practiced or wrote mingled with play, but so was the time in between such as driving while on tour, planning and creating marketing materials and networking.

Whenever I’ve had jobs that start to feel like only work, I’m out of there. I quit and move on. This is not something I’m necessarily proud of, but it seems to me that if I have a choice, why choose work that is only work with no play mixed in? As a result, I’ve probably only said TGIF (Thank Goodness It’s Friday) a handful of times in the last 30 years.

I could have been a lot more productive and profitable, in the traditional sense of the word, had I not incorporated so much playful thinking into the work I’ve done or the projects I’ve taken on, but I only have one shot at this life and I’ve not wanted to spend my precious time in such a limited way.

So, I’ll continue to waste time—which I don’t think is really wasting time—by thinking hard and thinking playfully.

How about you?