Fortnite is the New Sandlot. We've Lost Play
Fortnite is the new sandlot. Kids have retreated to video games because it's the one place where adults can’t interfere, control, or critique.
And it's the one place where they can find autonomy and connection.
That used to be sports....But adults ruined it... We need to bring back play.
Research shows that kids don’t play outside anymore.
One survey found a decrease from 80 percent of kids in my parents’ generation playing outside to just 27 percent today. Yes, phones, an increase in traffic, and similar factors have an impact. But research also points to another culprit: safetyism.
An increase in parents’ protectiveness due to fear and a high need for control has led to a decline in unstructured free play.
When we need to control and monitor everything, we take unstructured and make it over organized. In schools, we increasingly limit anything that is deemed as not productive. Bye bye recess, see you later PE and music. And it's backfiring.
We have a physical and mental health crisis. In a 2023 paper published in The Journal of Pediatrics, researchers argued that, “A primary cause of the rise in mental disorders [in youth] is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults.”
Play frees us up. It helps us learn who we are in an environment where we can fail and screw up. According to psychologist Peter Gray, play functions to teach us to:
1. Develop intrinsically driven interests
2. Learn about rules and problem-solving
3. Regulate our emotions
4. Navigate relationships and make friends
5. Experience joy
The National Institute for Play defines play as “something done for its own sake. It’s voluntary, it’s pleasurable, it offers a sense of engagement, it takes you out of time. And the act itself is more important than the outcome.”
It's not just kids who need unstructured play. It's us as adults. We need our own version of sandlot. In a world where we are constantly judged, we need activities where it doesn't matter if we are.
We’ve convinced ourselves that everything we do has to have a productive outcome:
-Kids play sports to get the scholarship...
-Adults pursue passions to make $$...
-We exercise to increase our fitness score...
We’ve turned going for a walk with our dog, taking a nap, or eating breakfast into something we do to get a better score on our activity tracker. The cult of optimization and productivity has converted living life into a job scored by an external measure.
We need to let that go. To give ourselves time to play, even in work. For my writing, I instituted monthly “down the rabbit hole” days, where I spend a few hours going on a deep dive on a topic that caught my interest but wasn't related whatsoever to any project I was currently doing. It might not sound like play, but exploring an interest for the sake of it being interesting is freeing. Play rebalances the experiential and cognitive hierarchy, allowing us to feel and experience instead of becoming numb to our expertise. Taking time to do things with little point besides joy will remind you how to get back into exploration mode where you can be oblivious, free from the harsh comparison points that influence so much of our lives.
In your career, give yourself “recess” a few times per day. If you're a nonfiction writer like me, dabble in poetry, fiction, or short stories a few times a week. Or take note of 3M's 15 percent time rule, which essentially gave the company engineers up to 15 percent of their working hours to explore ideas that have nothing to do with their current projects. The side project time led to Post-It notes. Engineer Art Fry was trying to figure out a better bookmark for his church choirs' hymnals. Google borrowed 3M’s time rule, emphasizing 20 percent time in their early days. It's not setting an exact amount of time for side projects that matters. It’s sending a signal that it's okay to be off task, to play .
Researchers found that leisure activities actually help boost our actual work. But there was a catch. They only helped if they were different enough from the actual work
Bring back play...for all of us. Our kids desperately need it. But so do us adults. We need more activities where the point is to explore and enjoy, not achieve an outcome.
-This was excerpted from Chapter 3 of Win the Inside Game. Check it out today!