Everyone needs playtime, not just children.

As we dig deeper into this growingly complicated

world, playtime has mostly diminished. In pursuit of productivity, economic concerns, etc, we stopped
giving ourselves time to procrastinate or play. I believe we can all agree on the personal benefits of
play or so-called “procrastination”, or “wasting time”.

Play and recreation is not exclusive to recent times, from the records we have way before the
Anthropocene, we have found traces of recreational activities. From an evolutionary biology point of
view, it's not immediately obvious why humans spend so much time on recreation and play. In humans,
as well as other animals, time spent playing is time not spent looking for food. Play could be a
distraction from looking out for predators. Play could cause needless injuries—even traumatic death.
Viewed from the lens of species survival, the drive to play seems like it would be a huge disadvantage.
But yet, all humans in all cultures like to play.

There are many forms of play, like visual art, and music, and dance. In September of 1940, an
18-year-old French mechanic named Marcel Ravidat discovered a cave with walls covered with
paintings, including over 900 paintings of animals, horses, stags, bison and also species that are now
extinct. It would eventually be established that these artworks were at least 17,000 years old, in what’s
now known as the Lascaux Cave. The paintings were made from pulverized mineral pigments that were
usually blown through a narrow tube on to a wall. After this discovery, many others were found all over
the world.

The reason for the creation of these vivid and wonderfully complex paintings is unclear. It is
difficult to find a practical reason for such art, for example, the paintings do not contain any
representations of reindeer, the primary food source for the paleolithic humans whom created the
paintings. The paintings were scattered in areas of the wall that required the construction of scaffolding
to reach, and the paint required the seeking and blending of specific rare pigments. It is hard to imagine
why our hunter and gatherer ancestors, whom time we knew had to be entirely dedicated to finding
food to survive, would take these enormous measures to create art, almost like art, like finding food, is
necessary.

Just like eating and food seeking, behaviors like play will be carefully honed over time by
natural selection. Behaviors that enhance survival and/or reproduction of individuals will develop
through the generations and become part of the innate “nature” of the species. So why did play, a
seemly useless behavior, last through thousands of generations of natural selection?

It is really a shame that our ability to play and to create art has diminished in favor of economic
benefits, and productivity. If our paleolithic ancestors took time out of their short and brutal lives to
create wonderfully beautiful, yet useless art, then why can’t we take sometime out of our wonderfully
busy schedule to simply enjoy ourselves. Without play, we are like machines in a factory, buzzing and
vibrating like they are alive, yet if we take them out of their factory environment, they are useless and
dead.

娱乐活动并不是近代独有的，从人类世之前的记录中，我们发现了娱乐活动的痕迹。从进化生物学的
观点来看，人类为什么花这么多时间在娱乐和玩耍上并不是显而易见的。对于人类和其他动物来说，花在玩
耍上的时间是寻找食物上的时间。玩耍可以分散人们对捕食者的注意力。玩耍可能会导致不必要的伤害——
甚至是创伤性死亡。从物种生存的角度来看，玩耍的驱动力似乎是一个巨大的劣势。但是，所有文化中的人
都喜欢玩。
就像躲避捕食者和寻找食物一样，玩耍这样的行为也会随着时间的推移被自然选择精心打磨。提高个
体生存和或繁殖能力的行为将通过世代发展，成为物种固有“天性”的一部分。但是, 玩耍这种看似无用的
行为在自然选择中延续了数千代.

玩耍有很多种形式，比如视觉艺术、音乐和舞蹈。1940 年 9 月，18 岁的法国机械师马塞尔·拉维达

(Marcel Ravidat)发现了一个洞穴，洞穴的墙壁上布满了绘画，包括 900 多幅动物、马、牡鹿、野牛以及现
已灭绝的物种的绘画。最终证实，这些艺术品至少有 17000 年的历史，在现在被称为拉斯科洞穴。这些画是
用矿物颜料粉制成的，通常是通过一根窄管吹到墙上。在这个发现之后，世界各地发现了许多类似的画。

人类创作这些生动复杂的画的原因，尚不清楚。这种艺术很难找到一个实际的原因，例如，画中没有
任何驯鹿的表现，旧石器时代人类的主要食物来源。这些画散落在墙上需要搭脚手架才能到达的地方，颜料
需要寻找和混合特殊的稀有矿物。很难想象为什么我们必须完全致力于寻找食物来生存的狩猎 和采集者祖
先，会采取这些巨大的措施来创造艺术，几乎像艺术, 玩耍，和寻找食物一样，是必要的。
 现代人类的玩和创造艺术的能力下降了。如果我们的旧石器时代的祖先能在他们短暂而残酷的生命中
抽出时间来创造美妙却无用的艺术，那么我们为什么不能从忙碌的日程中抽出时间来简单地享受自己?
没有玩耍，我们就像工厂里的机器一样，嗡嗡作响，振动着，就像它们是活着的一样。然而，如果我们把它
们从工厂的环境中拿出来，它们就是无用和死的。