Nothing more now

When faced with a board game like Catan, a child doesn't see points to score or rules to follow: they take the tiles apart, invent islands, and build bridges that don't exist in the rules. They are using the game as material to create a new world, not to win a game. The surprising thing is that this freedom only seems normal to us in children, but in reality, it is the most authentic form of humanity for adults too. We are convinced that play must serve a purpose: to relax us, to improve us, to make us compete, or at least to produce a measurable result. But this is a recent distortion. The argument here is clear: the more we gamify life, the more we lose the ability to truly play — and with it, we lose something profoundly human. When everything has a leaderboard, even leisure time becomes work in disguise: apps that turn meditation into a streak contest, step counters that make walking a competition, badges for consistency in one's personal journal. We fail to realize that metrics are devouring meaning. The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen calls this mechanism value capture: when the simple, visible values of play invade real-world activity, dictating what we should want simply because it is rewarded with a score. As early as the 1930s, Johan Huizinga saw the risk that Western society was losing the magic of free play, trapped by the need to produce and measure everything. He described it with the image of the “magic circle”: the space where ordinary rules are suspended and anything becomes possible. But today, that magic circle has been transformed into a dopamine machine. The author of this reflection is not speaking as a detached theorist: he is a professor who has spent his life pursuing competition — soccer, skiing, climbing, ultramarathons with more than 50 races and two national titles in his category. Yet he confesses that he does not find the true meaning of life in agôn, the Greek word for struggle and competition, but in spaces without scores: building islands with his children on the carpet, walking alone for 30 blocks in New York, letting his thoughts sort themselves out, watching his son work with copper and wood in the basement with no purpose other than the pleasure of making. One detail that stands out: when his son makes a knife or a figurine, he doesn't sell them; he gives them away. Because when the result emerges from a process without expectations, the most natural response is generosity. And it's not just an impression: a Stanford study showed that walking increases the ability to find solutions to open-ended problems by 60% — and it even works on a treadmill in front of a blank wall. The scenery is not necessary; movement is enough. But there is an even more radical step, which comes from the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. He argues that play is not a way to prepare for adult life, but the way we feel alive. His idea of transitional space is that zone where we are neither completely within ourselves nor entirely outside ourselves, but somewhere in between, where creativity is activated and reality becomes something in which we truly participate. Creativity, Winnicott says, is what makes life worth living, while conformity — living by other people's rules, following pre-packaged scores and scripts — only leads to a feeling of worthlessness. And here comes the line that turns everything on its head: most people experience enough creativity to sense its absence, feeling that they live primarily in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine. These words, written in 1971, seem like a perfect diagnosis of the age of algorithms. But the solution is not to abandon play; it is to engage in it differently. Two centuries earlier, Friedrich Schiller had already written: “Man plays only when he is man in the fullest sense of the word, and he is only fully man when he plays.” This is not about work-life balance, but about eutrapelia, the ancient virtue of those who know how to play well. It is not something you earn: it is something you cultivate, every day. The question is not whether to play, but where and how this practice can exist today, and how we can restore its value. There is a paradox: our age reveres competition and measurement, but the secret to feeling alive is knowing how to do — and give — something that is not needed, that does not count, that cannot be sold. And true play—play without purpose—is the only space where we can be real. Authentic play doesn't ask you to win, only to be there. If this idea has made you think about leisure time in a new way, on Lara Notes, you can say so with I'm In — it's not a like; it's the signal that this perspective now belongs to you. And if, while talking to someone, you find yourself explaining why giving away something handmade is more joyful than selling it, you can mark that conversation with Shared Offline: on Lara Notes, it's a way of saying that a genuine idea has come to life away from the screen. This journey through Catan, marathons, and impromptu workshops comes from Aeon and saves you 8 minutes.