2026-09-15 · essay
When Someone Calls It a Waste of Time, What Do You Say?
I have spent three days rewriting the blurb for my own puzzle. Write "improves your focus" and you hand the reader a reason to play, ready-made. But the moment that line is there, the puzzle becomes a tool. Nobody calls Unpacking (Witch Beam, 2021) a waste of time, and that is because it wears the shape of tidying up — something that looks useful. This short piece in the Nature of Play series seats Aristotle, who treated play as mere rest, across from Schiller, who wrote that we are fully human only when we play. They disagree almost everywhere, and meet at exactly one point.
