The Drugs Don't Work

“The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk, they are sober.”

-William Butler Yeats

When was the last time you were out-of-breath? Heaving for air, heart racing. If you’re an adult (I doubt many children read a weekly think-piece blog), it was probably a recent time you were lifting weights, or jogging, or doing some particularly grueling yard work in July.

I doubt it was from play; those times where you’re having so much fun you hardly realize you’re gasping for oxygen. In fairness, I’m sure many of you have recently played tennis, basketball, or pickleball and felt this way. But, frankly, it often feels like we do those things as adults because it’s a fun way to achieve exercise, not simply because it’s fun. The play becomes a means, not an end. I understand disagreement on this. Maybe I’m being unfair to our still very-much-alive desire to play for fun. It’s fair to say that many adults still play for fun, without regard to how many calories they burn. For now, take that part with a grain of salt, and just hear me out on the substitute that I think has occurred.

When I say play, I’m talking those times you’re so caught up in the activity at hand, you don’t realize you’re exercising. It seems that to achieve that type of fun in adulthood, we have a different mechanism.

What mechanism do I think caused us to stop playing for fun? Drugs.

Hear me out.

As adults, it seems we made a trade at some point. In the physical prime of our lives, we sit in chairs and drink beer while the ones up and moving are the children. Is it because we’re tired? By nature, it shouldn’t seem so. From our late teens into our mid-30s, we’re more physically robust than we’ll ever be otherwise. I assume this tiredness is actually a result of our stopping of play, not a cause. Are we too busy? Just too wrapped up with work and family responsibilities to play around in the sun? Sometimes, perhaps, but our social media and streaming habits don’t seem to suggest this. The reason we stopped playing, I think, is drugs.

In the novelty of youth, play is something that checks the boxes of fun. It’s engaging, releases endorphins, and gives us a desirable objective. But, then, we take a sip of beer, or a drag of a cigarette, or puff on a joint, and things change. Our threshold for enjoyment gets pushed up. We feel the rush of that first buzz and know, deep in our subconscious, that hide-and-seek isn’t going to cut it anymore. We’ve found something far easier, and more enticing. It’s suspiciously incidental that we start forgoing play at the same time we start to experiment with these dopamine goldmines. Is this causative? Maybe. It isn’t time that steals our play, and it isn’t a lack of energy. It’s because we found a cheaper source of dopamine. When we find something that sends our brains crazy with pleasure, with such little effort required, we’re usually going to go that route. In a world with finite resources, animals evolved to be creatures that take the path of least resistance, and that goes for pleasure-seeking, too.

The issue is that the fun we get from these drugs of pleasure is short-lived, prone to tolerance thresholds, and frankly, bad for our mental and physical health.

You might wonder: what about the people who don’t drink, use nicotine, cannabis, etc.? Why aren’t they running around laughing, playing tag, and having water balloon fights? Well, that’s the other part of play, its filters: it must be primarily for exercise, and it must be socially acceptable. When we treat play as something that must meet criteria, we lose out on one of the best things about it: the sheer pleasure.

So, even with dopamine receptors that aren’t worn with the highs of our drugs of fun, the prospect of getting up and engaging in a “childish” game just doesn’t compute. We’ve been trained to think it’s weird… much more normal to package playtime with exercise, and leave the fun to Anheuser-Busch.

I don’t mean to put down the merry nights one can have after a few drinks. I’ve done this… many times. I will do it again. These activities aren’t going away, nor should they. I only mean to call into question their monopoly over a typical adult’s idea of “fun.” Consider trying play again. And don’t do it for the calorie-burn. Just play because it’s fun. Humans have used fun drugs for thousands of years, but they’ve played since the beginning (I realize I’m getting speculative here; I just find it plausible that once energy needs are met, stone-age humans are probably playing some Paleolithic dodgeball; I know I would).

If this were an essay for 10th grade English, here my patient teacher would find the conclusive paragraph: As animals, we love that path of least resistance. When you take something fun, such as play, and give it an alternative that doesn’t require a lot of movement, or a backup of energy reserves, or a period of figuring out what exactly to play, and replace it with an easy ticket to pleasure, such as a glass of beer or a breath of weed smoke, those animals will start to gravitate toward the latter. It constantly requires we raise the usage as our tolerance rises, and it hurts our organs the more we do it, but we will still pick it. It’s just too easy a path to pleasure. Pretty soon, we’ve forgotten how fulfilling and good it feels to scratch our entertainment itch the way we used to. If we replace some of that drug use with pointless, beautiful play, we may start to feel the effects of that sort of fun again… the fun that took a little effort. And hey, if you want to toss back a few beers afterward, I must say that sounds quite nice. Por qué no los dos?

Have some fun this week,

John