‘I don’t think of life as work and play. It’s all just living.’ - Richard Branson, founder of Virgin
Workaholic or Drive?
Outside of work, household chores, DIY maintenance and study we have leisure time. We set aside a fair amount of leisure (or ‘play’) time because we want a relief from work and we believe if we don’t set aside this time we’ll drive ourselves mad.
We know that isn’t true though. While workaholics may have trouble with various parts of their lives (such as relationships) they’re not typically insane. A compulsive need, an addiction, to work is only a bad thing in as far as addiction itself is bad. If the work isn’t damaging the body or mind - and if the workaholic can keep the other parts of his life in check - then the massive amounts of work he does actually don’t harm him.
To some extent we actually label people workaholics by how successful they appear to be. Self-made millionnaires tend to be workaholics, too, but we’re more inclined to call such individuals ‘driven’ or, even more positively, we say that they ‘have drive’. Do lawyers, doctors, teachers and lower to middle level managers who work long hours have drive? More often than not it is they who will be called workaholics.
Oprah Winfrey may work the same number of hours as your local solicitor, but while the former is seen as an iconic figure of how to win at life the latter could just as easily be seen as pitiful.
This illogical distinction between what qualifies as a healthy or unhealthy work ethic makes you wonder about just how much we need those activities which are supposed to relax us. What is work or play, anyway?
Work or Play?
The truth is, at a cerebral level of focus and emotion, there’s no difference between me typing this document and me playing a video game. You wouldn’t think so by how society and I treat them, though. A video game equals fun and writing a non-fiction instructive article equals tedium.
This isnt true though: games have moments of very real tedium in them and are much more frustrating than most work you could ever find yourself in. Years ago, before save game points, if your character died in a game you’d often have a lot of ground to recover - sometimes starting back from the start of a level. And you’d have to keep recovering that ground if you kept failing to keep your character alive. From the early 90s backwards games were not forgiving for a lack of skill.
These days games are much easier and give the player much more support - but this doesn’t mean they’re not occasionally boring and frustrating: particularly when you’re trying to get the high scores.
Nearly two years ago I had the rare experience of actually feeling the bounds of leisure activity and work activity merge seamlessly and disappear. I was a games tester. For about eight hours a day, five days a week, I ‘played’ a game in production (’Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’). That playing was holding a game controller and controlling Harry on his misadventures throughout Hogwarts. On a physical level it was indistinguishable from what thousands of children all over the world have since done as recreation.
However for me this playing was work. The testing required me to do particular actions over and over again and try to make the game crash or do something otherwise wrong. My job, all our jobs, were to play this broken and incomplete game endlessly looking for flaws in it that the programmers, stationed elsewhere in the country, would gradually fix as we reported them.
What I did was of value to the company that made the game and I was paid for my efforts. This was what made it a job. But for how it affected me emotionally you’d think there was a lot more in the distinction between making the gaming work rather than play.
Mental distinction
‘Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work another day of your life.’ - John Lennon
I worked as a games tester alongside Sam - who’d been a tester a lot longer than I had. And he liked working there. And our colleagues liked working there. We all agreed that our employer, Electronic Arts, was horrible. Many of us also had quite tense relationships with our team leaders (read: supervisors). But generally the testers did like their jobs and wanted their contracts renewed and to stay at EA despite the lack of promotion opportunities, the low pay, the inflexible and often unsociable hours and our unpleasant bosses.
I couldn’t understand why games testing made me utterly miserable while everyone else was really comfortable with it. Looking back on it now I realize that everyone could see what they were doing as fun while I could only see it as work. I was so hung up on my definition of what was an enjoyable way to play that I lost sight of how physically, and even mentally, the work was no different from recreation.
With a little imagination I could have seen what I was doing as play - but I didn’t because I was so focused on how it was labelled a job and how I couldn’t really get out of it. In the end it was only through working there for weeks on end that I got used to the work, almost numbed to it, and by the end I was in a sort of stupor with it that I could comfortably put up with - like my life was running with a local anesthetic in my brain. It wasn’t Zen, but it was tolerable.
I used to think that a key part of what made something ‘work’ and something else ‘play’ is the repetition factor. A play activity is often varied and a work activity is often repetitive.
That’s not true either though - they’re both equally varied and consistent. A sports match is more or less the same throughout. A piece of music usually repeats on itself with a chorus and a particular beat. A film has a particular structure but its themes are constant. The same is true of TV shows. The same is true of books. A video game has different levels but all the levels will share much of the same gameplay.
Jobs may often include the repetition of the same duties, and we can complain about them a lot (I know I do) but if you take a step back you’ll find yourself doing similar repetition for fun in your leisure time. In the end we’re really hard pressed to find any real inherent difference in what we call work and what we call play.
Let’s take games testing, for example. Something which is somehow work and play simultaneously. A job which I hated and others enjoyed.
Was it work because I was being paid to play?
No.
Was it work because I had to go to an office to play the game?
No.
Was it work because I had to work a set period of time each day?
No.
Was it work because I couldn’t choose what game I was playing?
No, but we’re very close to the right answer.
In fact, it was work because I wasn’t playing the game in the way that to me qualified as play.
What qualifies as work in the end is actually all down to you. Nothing is work and nothing is play. You just apply these labels to different activities based on what you think they are, but the labels can actually be applied to anything. It’s all up to you.
Nearly a year ago I wrote this article about how I tried to live a life without play and found that such a life really wasn’t worth living. Back then I was trying to save myself more or less through working harder. I concluded at the time I wrote the article that by avoiding play I had ended up leading a poorer life - but this wasn’t true.
I was indeed leading a poorer life, but the problem was actually that back then my thinking was the same as it had always been. I was still rigidly caught up in what I believed was definitely work and what was definitely play. Thus my denying myself of play was only a denial because I couldn’t see my work as play and I couldn’t see that fun meaningless activities weren’t really play either. I didn’t realise that neither of the two labels can really be applied to anything when it comes to human experience.
As Richard Branson, one of the most fantastically successful people alive today has implied - there is no work and there is no play. It’s all just living. It’s how we perceive this living that makes the difference.
If you liked this article and would like to make a donation to Reaching A Better Place please click below.
Related Articles:
Leave a Comment