When Work Became the Only Game
My colleague Michel asked me last year if I had any hobbies. We were standing by the coffee machine at 7 PM, both of us still in the office long after everyone else had left. I opened my mouth to respond and realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done something purely for enjoyment.
“I work,” I said, attempting a laugh that came out hollow.
She nodded, understanding completely. “Same.”
That conversation stuck with me because it shouldn’t be remarkable—two competent professionals unable to answer a simple question about play. Yet here we are. The word “playtime” sounds almost absurd when you’re managing projects across three time zones, responding to Slack messages at midnight, and treating your calendar like a game of Tetris where everything must fit perfectly or the whole day collapses.
As a child growing up on Mahé in the Seychelles, play wasn’t scheduled. It was the default state. After school, my siblings and I would disappear into the ocean until hunger or darkness brought us home. Nobody asked if we’d “made time for our hobbies” because the question itself would have seemed strange. Play wasn’t a category of activity—it was just living.
The Professional Disappearance of Play
Somewhere between university and middle management, play becomes professionalized. We don’t play anymore; we “engage in leisure activities.” We don’t mess around; we “pursue wellness initiatives.” The language alone is exhausting.
I’ve worked in Harare, Pretoria, Brazzaville, Geneva, and Antananarivo, and the patterns are consistent. The more senior people become, the more they talk about work-life balance while simultaneously treating non-work activities as items to be optimized. Meditation becomes another metric to track. Weekend hiking trips get justified by their team-building potential. Even vacation photos seem designed more for LinkedIn than for memory.
A few months back, I was on a video call with a colleague. His background was his home office—tasteful, minimalist, professional. His five-year-old daughter ran through the frame chasing a balloon, laughing with that unselfconscious joy that small children somehow access effortlessly. He apologized, embarrassed. I found myself envious of the balloon.
When did we lose that? The ability to chase something purely because it brings us joy?
What Actually Counts as Play?
Here’s what I’ve learnt about play as an adult: it’s not what you think it is.
Play isn’t necessarily relaxing. I’ve taken up gyms, karate, and classical guitar in the past few years—things completely unrelated to my professional life. It’s frustrating sometimes when you do not see progress. My body and fingers are occasionally sore for days. But when I’m in the gym, dojo or immersed in guitar lessons, time disappears. I’m not checking email. I’m not thinking about the presentation due Monday. I’m just present and satisfied with creating something.
That’s play. Not the outcome, but the complete absorption in the process.
A colleague in Antananarivo plays by learning languages nobody asked her to learn. She is currently working on Korean “because it seems impossible.” My sister continues to enjoy diving, but now she dedicates her time to it before the start of her nursing shift, a time when the water is still cool and the fish are at their most confident.
None of these activities are “productive” in the economic sense. They don’t advance careers. They don’t build professional networks. They certainly don’t optimize anything.
They’re valuable precisely because they’re useless.
The Return on Playfulness
The paradox is that play makes us better at work, though that shouldn’t be why we do it.
After I started karate, I noticed changes in how I approached problems at work. I became more patient with iterative processes. I stopped thinking of every setback as a disaster and started thinking of them as information. When a campaign we had designed underperformed, instead of spiraling into panic, I found myself thinking: “Okay, what did this teach me?”
A study I came across from the University of Birmingham found that employees who regularly engaged in creative activities unrelated to their work showed improved problem-solving skills and higher resilience under stress. However, the research seems irrelevant. We shouldn’t need academic justification for remembering how to be human.
The cultural context matters here. In part of Asia, there’s often intense family and social pressure around productivity and success. The concept of doing something “just for fun” can feel almost transgressive. In the US and parts of Europe, there’s lip service to work-life balance. Still, the reality often involves performative leisure—activities chosen more for their Instagram potential than their actual joy.
The tropical-island perspective I grew up with wasn’t perfect, but it had this right: time spent doing nothing of consequence isn’t wasted. It’s an essential time.
Making Space for Pointless Joy
I’m not going to offer you a five-step plan to “incorporate play into your routine” because that’s precisely the kind of productization that kills play in the first place.
But I will tell you what works for me: I protect Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings the same way I protect official meetings. I say to my colleagues I’m unavailable. I don’t schedule calls. If something urgent comes up, it can wait until morning.
What do I do with that time? Sometimes I go to karate at my sensei’s dojo. Occasionally, I swim at the beach near my home in Beau Vallon, reconnecting with that childhood version of myself who lived half in the water. Sometimes I read books that have nothing to do with marketing or business strategy—recently, a novel about Antarctic explorers and a biography of a jazz musician, like Dizzy Gillespie.
Sometimes I do nothing at all, which might be the most radical form of play available to us now.
The point isn’t what you do. The point is reclaiming time that belongs to no one but yourself, time that produces nothing, proves nothing, advances nothing except your own sense of being alive.
The Question We Should Ask
“Do you play?” isn’t really about activities. It’s about whether you’ve kept any part of yourself that the professional world hasn’t colonized yet.
When Michel asked me about hobbies, what she was really asking was: Are you still a complete person, or have you become just a function?
I think about that five-year-old chasing the balloon, and I wonder what we’d need to unlearn to find that again. Maybe it’s not about finding time for play. Maybe it’s about remembering that we’re not machines requiring optimization but humans requiring joy.
So yes, I play. Not as much as I should. Not as unselfconsciously as that child. But I’m learning again, slowly, to do things purely because they make me feel alive.
That’s what playtime means to me now: permission to be gloriously, inefficiently, beautifully human.
L J Padayachy 
Leave a comment