145 - Is Your Life Missing a Dose of Pure Purposelessness? (Showmanship & Play 27 of 30)

What happens when we lose touch with play, friendship, and authentic human connection? This episode dives into the surprising links between playfulness, friendliness, and showmanship – revealing how these seemingly "purposeless" activities might be the very foundation of what makes us human.

I explore Belyaev's groundbreaking fox experiment, which demonstrated something remarkable: when researchers bred foxes solely for friendliness, playfulness emerged spontaneously without being selected for. This suggests these traits may be facets of the same evolutionary adaptation – our innate drive to connect meaningfully with others.

The conversation takes a sobering turn as we examine the concept of "play deficit" – the documented decline in children's free play since the 1960s that correlates disturbingly with skyrocketing rates of anxiety, depression, and even suicide among young people. Could our efficiency-obsessed culture be robbing children of something essential to their development?

This leads us to consider a parallel concept: "show deficiency." Using the COVID pandemic as a natural experiment, we look at what happened when humans couldn't gather for performances, cultural events, and community celebrations. The resulting 25% increase in mental health struggles suggests these seemingly frivolous activities might be as necessary as food and shelter.

Throughout the episode, I challenge the capitalist notion that values only productivity and efficiency. What if Hobbes was wrong about human nature? What if we're not naturally selfish and cruel, but instead born to learn, bond, and play? Our cultural expressions – from singing around campfires to magic shows – might not be diversions from "real life" but expressions of our deepest nature.

Join me as we reimagine what truly matters and discover how embracing the apparently purposeless might be the key to living fully human lives.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Previous Episode Recap
• 7:51 Friendliness and Play as Relational Phenomena
• 12:14 Belyaev's Fox Experiment: Friendliness and Play
• 18:03 Gatherings: How Humans Connect Beyond Necessity
• 25:38 The Play Deficit: Consequences for Children
• 34:03 Show Deficiency: Cultural Impact of the Pandemic
• 42:15 Concluding Thoughts and Next Episode Preview

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:11

Greetings, fellow travellers, and welcome to the way of the showman, where we view the world through the lens of showmanship. I am Captain Frodo and, as always on the way, I am your host and your guide. Along this leg of the journey, and actually along every other leg of the journey, I have had fellow interlocutors and people that I've called and people that I've talked to and all of this, but this is, I guess it is, mainly my thing, and this season here, more than anything that I have done for years, has been just me and you talking. Well, when it comes down to it, I guess I have been doing most of the talking, but hopefully you have been thinking along as if this was a conversation, because I have been writing this and I have been putting all of this together specifically with you in mind. So let's do one of the last synopsis of what we have been talking about.

Speaker 1: 1:10

In the last episode we talked about the second criteria, which is that play is apparently purposeless and it's done for its own sake, not for some purpose beyond that again. So that means is that also a feature of of um of entertainment, of shows? When you go and see a show, it's like the purpose, the key purpose to most shows, then, is that you're going to have fun. In the moment I start talking about um, a show that has a purpose beyond itself, and I'm jokingly, or whatever jovially calling it have Fun With Recycling, which is a kind of show where the message is much more important than what the joy that comes out through the show. So that's an idea, then. So to go, well, that might not be quite, then be playful enough, at least if it's not done in a very fun and clowny or something fun way. I am spend a bit of time, um, connecting um criteria two to criteria one, saying that one reason why it's apparently purposeless, as the criteria says, is because one of the key criterias, which is a mode of being in the world and a way that it is good to be, is to actually just have fun, to enjoy yourself, and that is something which is quite easily and offhandedly dismissed. So I make a long and strong case for why we shouldn't dismiss pleasure and why it's important and all of that.

Speaker 1: 2:50

And to do that I talk about George Saunders' essay, where he talks about reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five both Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five and his other books, slapstick and Cat's Cradle, and also George Saunders' books absolutely worthwhile checking out, and he makes the case there that when he just used to think that Saunders did up until he read Kurt Vonnegut, he thought that great literature had to be hard to read. And then he read Kurt Vonnegut, laughed along the way and realized that he's reading a modern classic and that it doesn't actually be hard. It doesn't have to be hard to understand what's going on in the book. It can be about aliens and all that sort of stuff and still be great literature. Talking about something important, talking about the Second World War, but without going into details about exactly what went on in the prison camps or the D-Day in Normandy or whatever. So I find that I went on about that quite a bit, because I find it important that the way that something is being presented, the fact that something can be entertaining, doesn't in any way make it impossible for it to be art or for the stuff that it talks about being supremely serious and interesting and even then getting the accolades that Slaughterhouse-Five did.

Speaker 1: 4:23

So we talked about that. Then we talked about how I do believe that shows and play are both done for their own sake, and that's where I then get into this idea of making sure that we're not there for some other reason, that the kids will smell that you're there to talk about religion or you're there to talk about fun with recycling. Then we went into a little bit more of a philosophical thing where I talk about authenticity and art, and I do that by putting up against each other something from JF Martel's brilliant and deeply resonant book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, where he talks about art as being something which experience, and the experience of it, elicits astonishment, and I connect that together with Paul Harris's opening essay of his book of magic tricks called the Art of Astonishment. So two things that are. J jf martel, the one of the hosts of weird studies, is someone I had just discovered, and paul harris is a magician that I discovered possibly in the late 80s or early 90s, and me and my dad were going to magic conventions.

Speaker 1: 5:45

So, um, I don't know if I caught all the things and made all the points for last time, but if you want all the points from last time, go back and listen to the other other episode. You might be surprised at how much different stuff you pick up this time when you're not listening to it. The first time I have done that a few times with lecture series, where I thought I had a measure of that series and then I went back and I realized that, oh, wow, there's so much there that I didn't hear the first time Because I just was busy taking in other parts of the ideas. So you can do that and all of that is free. And it's free because I am the sponsor the sponsor today's sponsor and the sponsor of every episode.

Speaker 1: 6:29

And if you want to do me a favor, then what would be really awesome? What was if you went to apple podcasts, left me a five-star review, um, or, even better, tell someone actually tell someone that this podcast exists and that if you want to deepen your relationship to your art and your craft as a circus performer or as a magician or whatever that is, as a performer, as one who faces the other way, looking at an audience with an, with you having an authentic desire to present something that can move them, then this podcast is for you. And if your friend is interested in those things, then this podcast is for them. If they're just an enthusiast for play, if they're just interested in being in the world in a way that is sweet and that takes in the finer, subtler things so that you're in a deeper and more beautiful conversation with the world, then this podcast is for you or for them. I am. It'd be great if you did that. Anyway, enough of me trying to ask something for from you that would be free. Now let me give you one of the final episodes of this here season for free. Let's jump into the world of ideas again.

Speaker 1: 7:51

All right, we're kind of swapping gear now in the exploration of Criteria 2 on whether that play is apparently purposeless and done for its own sake and how that relates to showmanship. And the swapping gear is to jump into friendliness, because I believe there is a strong similarity between the concepts of friendliness and play and thus also with showmanship. One important thing is that they are all relational rather than solitary phenomena, are all relational rather than solitary phenomena. They are more about relationships than who or what's relating. Friendliness and play are ways of being in relation to someone or something. We can be friendly with other people, with animals, with trees, and if someone said we should be friendly with the Rocky Mountains, then I reckon we would understand the gist of what they meant. If you're friendly with a mountain, you would not explode away, its peak with mountaintop removal mining. I think that's fair to say. Play is a way of being in relation to someone or something, but particularly someone, like when we are playing a game or doing a show, or friendly with something, as in when a child relates to her toys, or even in relation to themselves, as in solo role-playing, when a kid is in the backyard imagining that they're a superhero.

Speaker 1: 9:23

All three showmanship, play and friendliness seems to be ways of relating, which takes the reality, experience and value of someone or something serious. It's to take the reality, experience and value of someone or something, something else, someone other, take that seriously. It is to acknowledge the other and cherish the opportunity to connect. It's about care for the other and care for the relationship itself. It's about wanting everyone or everything involved to get the best out of the situation. We are friends to be friends, not to get something else from the other. If this is the goal of the friends that you want to get something more from them then it's not really friendship in a pure sense.

Speaker 1: 10:17

Situations like these are absolutely valuable in and of themselves and like friendship, that meaning not wanting to get something else from your friend. I'm friends with you because I want to get the benefits or I want to have you have access to buns, cinnamon buns, and I want a cinnamon buns. Situations like these, like friendship, are absolutely valuable in and of themselves and to be pursued for their own sake. And I think that the chance to stand in front of an audience, meet them and truly be there and share a moment with it whether it is just through a moment where you're just sharing it in front of a group with some jokes or whatever, like improvised in the moment, that's one thing. But if you've already you've presented something for them that you have carefully crafted and done, this is a very unique and rewarding experience. You're kind of giving them a gift, so, and I think that is valuable in and of itself just to be together and we know that from our life just in general. But then when you're in these situations that you're actually kind of giving them something and, as we've spoken about before, the goal of standing in front of them is to enrich the time that they give you, so that they go away richer than they were. Not richer in terms of cash, because you hope that they've left some sweet, hard-earned cash with you, but richer on experience, which, when it comes down to it, is the only thing that you can take with you throughout your life. There are no pockets in the final shirt, there is no uh trailer on the back of the hearse, it's just you in the dirt and with all your experiences, lying there and talking about friendliness.

Speaker 1: 12:12

How can we talk about friendliness unless we talk about Belyaev and Ludmilla's foxes? Because from that friendly fox experiment, we also saw that when the foxes chosen to breed were selected purely on the basis of friendliness, playful behavior just emerged without ever having been selected for. As the foxes became tamer, they began to play more and longer, until they became so much like dogs that they wagged their tails, came and called for by name and remained playful throughout their lives. Friendliness, playfulness and sociability are part of the same suite of traits. The foxes were selected for friendliness, but it's quite probable that they, had they been selected for playfulness, then they might also have become more social and friendly. They might also have become more social and friendly, and I also imagine just now, in saying that it would probably be hard to tell whether someone was just being friendly or whether they actually wanted to play. Are those perhaps more closely related than I had previously thought, maybe so. So if you breed for one, you breed foxes for being more friendly, then I think, even if you nurture that aspect of it, then I think the others follow.

Speaker 1: 13:33

In fact, when I'm writing this and speaking it to you, these three traits, they seem to be aspects of the same friendliness, play and showmanship. Similar, similar, more like. I would say they're like three facets of the same crystal. Maybe that we think we are breeding for, or perceiving or studying one thing, but we might actually only be studying an aspect of a greater phenomena which has the three as features of its being. It's like playfulness, showmanship and friendliness. Are these things just three facets of the same phenomena? And exactly what that is? Who knows? But it has something to do with relations, about connecting. It's also significant to remember that these three traits are deeply related to Rutger Bregman's trio of traits that we looked at earlier.

Speaker 1: 14:34

Rutger Bregman, in his book Humankind, a Hopeful History, says we're born to learn to bond and to play. We, human beings, are born to learn to bond and to play. Human beings are born to learn to bond and to play. Those are the three things. He boils it down wonderfully essential there. Boil down love those, those kinds of things, when you can take these small things like learning, bonding and playing and exploding it up. That's how he puts it and it's also very close to the three traits of curiosity, play and sociability which Peter Gray highlights as the foundation of what make human beings an educable animal, an animal that can learn and can be taught.

Speaker 1: 15:16

Through curiosity, play and sociability, peter Gray argues, we find the necessary aspects of human nature to afford cultural transmission. Curiosity gets us exploring, playfulness motivates us to pursue and practice, and sociability makes the discoveries and skills spread like wildfire in a tribe or a population. And to me, this trio of traits are all things which has value in and of itself and that we willfully engage in for sheer pleasure of doing so. Curiosity play and being social are their own rewards. So there you go curiosity, play and being social, also relational, also curiosity. You can be curious about a person. Curiosity, you can be curious about a person. You can be curious about a thing, but it's still about relation.

Speaker 1: 16:12

The point I'm making is that these two seemingly trivial relational behaviors of play and friendliness which is where we started, which wants to have been triggered as evolutionary possibilities, will be happily pursued by the species for its own sake, but which nonetheless leads to great benefits for a species. The process of selecting from one simple trait friendliness and of engaging in one simple activity play has a panoply, just a myriad of positive properties piggybacking on them. We reliably live better lives, happier and healthier lives, when we let ourselves give in to this greater whole, of which friendliness and playfulness are parts. And this is why criteria two has to say apparently purposeless, because although it is done for its own sake and no, and not immediately, and not for some immediately apparent long-term purpose, the benefits it affords are still many and valuable, and that's.

Speaker 1: 17:22

We spoke about that back in the place. I don't want to go too deep into that, but there's many things, and actually today there is a little section of that. I wrote earlier on about further some ideas about the negative effects of not playing enough, particularly as a child, and it's something that I based on an article by Peter Gray that we've just spoken about. So I figured because this episode, I thought it was going to be a little bit short, but now I think I'm going to read that as well before I then highlight that and contrast it with a little sojourn into seeing. Is there such a thing, then, as a if there is a play deficit that you might not play enough? Is there such a thing as a show deficit? Anyway, we'll get back to that in a minute, because also it's interesting that play and friendliness um that these are so frequently looked at as unimportant or suspicious in our capitalist reality.

Speaker 1: 18:33

Big business sees friendliness as weakness. Big business subscribes more to Thomas Hobbes' idea of humans as naturally selfish evil than not to be trusted. Capitalism follows the logic that only by assuming that everyone else is out to get you can you survive. Friendliness might be of some limited value if you want to boost the morale of a team of investment bankers, but it is never to be relied on in business deals. Yet from the fox experiment we find friendliness as a prime factor, not only in shaping the shaping of foxes into dogs, but as Belyaev did with his mic drop at a genetic convention in Moscow that time pointing out that this has been this breeding, self-breeding and shaping our own species.

Speaker 1: 19:29

Bifriendliness could have been what has shaped us and separated us from Homo erectus and made us into Homo sapiens, so suggesting that perhaps the primitive, so-called natural state of humans, that it isn't violent and cruel, but rather, as Bregman beautifully and convincingly argues in his book Humankind A Hopeful History, it might be that the natural state might instead be friendly, playful and social. If this is the case, which I believe it is, then certain activities would naturally flourish in the process. To a species whose origins lay in friendliness and social playfulness, we should expect that their preferred activities and behaviours would strengthen their relations to each other in playful ways which, remembering criteria one, would be fun and enjoyable in themselves. This is, of course, exactly what we find. We find these activities in all human cultures singing, dancing, poetry and stories in the forms of fairy tales and myths about heroes and the sacred. We find rituals and ceremonies of unions between individuals, such as marriages or strengthening the bonds between all members of a tribe through the power of shared stories, history, shared dances and shared songs, and they all shape our identity.

Speaker 1: 20:58

All early human culture has these participatory aspects of song, dance, music and storytelling. And along the way, these activities have also become specialised, so that now we have not just musicians, but we have somebody who just plays the pickle of flute. We have people who are so good at expressing themselves on an instrument that it simply blows our mind when we experience it. Yet the professional music never completely got rid of the singing around a campfire and singing your child to sleep and singing along to your favorite band at a concert. It is a gloriously unifying experience to scream out the words to a song, surrounded by a crowd of others who also know all the words. It unites and substantiates you. It validates your taste and all that you find valuable and meaningful in that band's music, all that you find valuable and meaningful in that band's music.

Speaker 1: 21:57

So when humans gather, be it in the caves around the fire, as in the past, or at more modern occasions such as the aforementioned music festivals, circuses and magic shows, then this connection stuff here. This is like, and also let's not forget the many religious and cultural festivals such as Christmas, passover, thanksgiving and Valentine's Day, and regardless of the dubious origins of the last two and specific religious affiliations of the first two, they are specific times of the year when humans gather for other reasons than are strictly necessary, and it's times like these which affords us a different relation to each other, a different relation to reality and even to time. When we gather to celebrate with family or with our community, we make space for being together in a different way than we are the rest of the year. I am, of course, aware that many families fall short of the optimal festival experience, but that doesn't change the important aspect at the heart of these festivals of being together, not just for the practical, not just because we have to to survive, but because to just survive is just not enough. We got to thrive as well. So, um, again, we're gonna now.

Speaker 1: 23:26

I was gonna talk about this um, about show deficiency, but I am going to go a little bit back and um and talk. Just before we go in and talk about show deficiency, we're going to read a little bit here that I had planned to say earlier on but that I, for some reason, that now kind of eludes me, but let's just look at this. So, before we look at the possible bad consequences of show deficit, what happens if someone doesn't't get enough to watch and participate in enough shows? Let's lead into that by talking a little bit about play deficits, because in large part, play is considered a useless activity, which we've talked about, or even today as well but as a result of this, we have seen a decline in the amount of time that's available to children to play, whether it is just because people see it as useless or whatever, but people certainly see it as well. If we have to cut something, we've got all these important things to have in the curriculum. So let's just cut down on the play, get more to the point, get more learning in there.

Speaker 1: 24:42

So Peter Gray describes this decline in his article, the Play Deficit. Actually, I think I've linked to that before, but anyway, there where he says that in the beginning of the 60s, or perhaps even a little earlier, there has been a steady chipping away at the freedom of children to engage in free and self-motivated play. School and the ensuing homework has taken an enormous chunk of the available time. Play has been substituted with learning, but not the kind of learning which play stimulates, but the kind of learning that we do in schools. It's interesting that today, when we talk about learning, it is almost synonymous with school, as we briefly looked at already. But learning has become something that we do in schools or something that we pay for someone to give us.

Speaker 1: 25:33

The self-motivated aspect has become a whole lot more abstract. We choose a university course so that we can receive the necessary knowledge to get a certain job, and in that way it is self-motivated, but it's not self-motivated with the immediacy of self-motivation and exploration which comes from play. The learning that we do in schools is all designed to have a direct and specific purpose the room to get intimately acquainted with our true desire. As Watts stresses the importance of Alamort's, that is neglected in this. Each subject is organized, planned and executed by a teacher, and the teacher follows a plan and curriculum designed by whatever department in the government tasked with deciding what the children of a nation must know to become productive as well as integrated citizens. Each class lasts 45 minutes and then the child is expected to switch their attention over onto a completely different subject and along the way, the children are expected to just receive and get their heads around what's presented and to be able to show on standardized tests that they have retained facts from the lessons, at least until the time of the test. It seems to me a pity that the specific skill of discovering one's true desire is neglected in this form of adult-steered learning.

Speaker 1: 27:00

Is there a problem in this play deficit, though? It turns out that there is. In his article, peter Gray goes on to say that, mirroring the decline of play through the last decades, we see an increase in childhood mental disorders, and this following quote from the Decline of Play article shows the severity of the situation. Quote it's not just that we're seeing disorders that were overlooked before. Critical questionnaires aimed at assessing anxiety and depression, for example, have been given in unchanged form to normative groups of school children in the US ever since the 1950s. Analysis of the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalized anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. And over that same time period the suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has more than doubled and that for children under the age of 15, suicide rates has quadrupled. Of course, correlation is not causation. Just because the two things coincide in time does not necessarily mean that one causes the other causes the other.

Speaker 1: 28:42

But if you go beyond the article of the play deficit and further into his book Free to Play, gray argues very convincingly that if one takes away the freedom of children to play, one should expect exactly the kind of consequences described above. What children gripped by anxiety and performance pressure needs is not more schooling, more adult-stared activities or more testing. They need more freedom. They need the relaxed field where play is king. If, given this kind of freedom, all children as the example of children in concentration camps so darkly shows I talked about that many episodes ago given the chance, they will play and through that play they will work through and process their environment themselves and they'll work out how to fit in. By understanding the environment and by understanding themselves they can make it fit and by being the chance to discover what they like doing and what they really desire, they will then learn to fit in, they will master and they will then become masters of their own situation. So getting back on a playful track is far from trivial and non-serious as you might think. It is In fact, being on a playful track and being playful in life, particularly for children, who are the king players, queen players of the human species. Getting onto that track being playful, that's about as far from trivial and non-serious as you could possibly get.

Speaker 1: 30:19

If we consider the findings of Peter Gray as at least part of the problem, then we see that play is as serious as life and death. Yeah, so, yeah, that's some rough stuff right there, but it does then mean that there is absolutely such a thing and child psychologists are talking about this, not whether it exists but how it manifests and all that. So people talk about play deficiency and there some really really terrible people noticeable for being terrible. So one of the terrible mass murderer dudes in Norway, his history, which was through the trial, came out as some of his childhood no playing Big red flag being waved by many of the people who were in contact with him. So I'm not saying it's a one-to-one ratio here, that if you don't play enough then you're going to become an absolutely terrible person. But hey, might as well play just to avoid that. So let's look a little bit more playfully here on a show deficiency Because, as I said when we began the exploration of Criteria 2 in relation to showmanship in the last episode, an entertaining show also seems to be apparently purposeless, apart from it being a really good time oh, we're having a great time.

Speaker 1: 31:53

How was it to see the circus today? Oh, it was so fun, so fun, it was a good time. Or even if it goes, oh, it made me think that's also a good time. The reason that we see a show is because the stories it tells, the tunes that it plays, the skills it exhibits and the way that it moves us in the most human ways. And in this way, I would say that if we were to attempt or to argue that we can do away with festivals, secular and sacred, do away with circus and theater and magic shows because they aren't necessary to live, we would know that it would be a lie. If we take away all of this stuff and even you take away the movies, take away the actors and all this, for in our hearts we all know that survival is not enough. We require more than mere survival. In fact, I would say that a good life is directly proportional to the time we waste with friends, with family and culture in all its rich and varied forms. So if there was a large collective event that prevented us from gathering for these kinds of cultural festivals and celebrations of life and being in it together, then we would expect that this culture deprivation, or deprivation of live, in-the-flesh shows where performers face audiences and we even got less of the everyday and private gatherings and celebration, then we should expect that this deprivation to manifest. Then we would expect that this would manifest symptoms similar to play deficit. So to remind us what these play deficit things are now, I just reminded you with a whole bunch of terrible stuff and suicide rates and I don't know what, but just to remind us of these, dr Brown.

Speaker 1: 33:47

Dr Stuart Brown writes in his 2014 book Play how it Shapes the Brain, opens the imagination and invigorates the soul. Not sustained, but that moderate to severe play deprivation, particularly during the first 10 years of life, is linked to major emotional dysregulation, ie increased prevalence of depression, a tendency to become inflexible in thought, diminished impulse control and less self-regulation, poor management of aggression, and fragility and shallowness of enduring interpersonal relationship. Well, if that's not a list of things you don't want to struggle with depression, inflexible thought, diminished impulse control, less self-regulation, poor management of aggression, fragility and shallowness of enduring interpersonal relationships that is a dark time indeed. So, as it is, we did relatively recently have such a cultural deprivation event in the COVID-19 pandemic. Covid-19 pandemic and one year into the pandemic, world Health Organization reported a 25% increase in depression and anxiety-related illnesses. Whoever lived through the pandemic and didn't experience major emotional dysregulation which is many, I hope, but few, I think.

Speaker 1: 35:25

The reason for this increase in emotional dysregulation during the pandemic are, of course, complex and varied, but a key feature of what came to define this time, from 2020 and for the next few years, was social isolation. Those of us who make a living in places where people gather had a hard time in this period, since the main tool in curbing the spread of the virus was to avoid group gatherings. This became a time of Zoom shows, of digital conferences and home offices. So it was not only the lack of shows and concerts, but also a lack of social gatherings, and all the way down to schools and kindergartens, it was a time of being alone. And all the way down to schools and kindergartens, it was a time of being alone. Whilst, all the while, there was a pandemic raging and a media, social and traditional, which naturally amplified every single thing which could scare or anger people into keep clicking. And, that said, there was also, of course, an extraordinary amount of love going around, people coming together in virtual spaces and doing shows outside the windows of nursing homes.

Speaker 1: 36:28

As Dickens said, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light and it was a season of darkness. It was the spring of hope and it was the winter of despair. It's almost impossible to pass out, though, these effects of being deprived of the activity of partaking in showmanship, of watching shows, and it might even be a rather diffused question to ask, as art gatherings are so varied on the spectrum from highbrow activities of fine art exhibitions, ballet and opera to the lowbrow of street performance, circus, stand-up, comedy, magic shows and so forth. And the exact effects of missing out on these cultural gatherings would depend also to which extent that they play in your life. So those who, for whatever reason socioeconomic or just taste participates in these kinds of events often would miss them a lot during the pandemic. And, of course, those who spent no time on such events before the pandemic didn't miss them. They didn't know what they were missing out on.

Speaker 1: 37:47

But this leads me to my feeling that entertainment, and also the highbrow arts, are like colors in the tapestry of culture. They're woven in and around everything else. Each different branch of art and entertainment is its own shade. Each enriches the tapestry of a healthy and engaged life. But if one color disappears, washes out in some event or isn't present in someone's individual tapestry, it doesn't ruin the greater picture, though it does surely diminish its richness, even if it's just one color. If all kinds of cultural gatherings disappear at once, then there will be a more substantial negative space in the tapestry, thus showing more negative effects. Art and entertainment play subsidiary roles in the tapestry of life, and almost infinite proliferation of content producers for social media such as myself, I guess, youtube and podcasters and these content producers immediately filled in the gaps in the performance market. As soon as there were people with surplus time and attention from no longer spending these fundamental human resources of time and attention on catching up with extended family, friends or any other social gatherings, there were literally millions of content creators that stepped up to fill the gaps.

Speaker 1: 39:35

There are, though, plenty of studies that all agree that social isolation and loneliness reliably leads to adverse health consequences. Symptoms such as reduced immune function, sleeplessness, depression and anxiety are the most common, but also the ultimate personal expression of loneliness suicide. That, too, increases, and a 2020 study put out by the National Academies of Sciences, engineering and Medicine states that more than one third of Sciences, engineering and Medicine states that more than one-third of adults aged 45 and older feel lonely, and nearly one-fourth of adults aged 65 and older are considered to be socially isolated and in an article describing their findings, the effects of social isolation increased a person's risk of premature death to a degree which rivaled smoking, obesity and physical inactivity. So what we see here and what I want to point out and to point our attention to is the general gist. It's the vibe really, as the lawyer says in the gorgeous Australian movie called the Castle it's the vibe really, your Honor that's at fault. It's the vibe.

Speaker 1: 40:53

I'm painting in big brushstrokes and with big emotional brushstrokes. I can paint as an amateur thinker and an artist and a writer about these topics, but I find that the general vibe shows without a doubt that there is a link between a lack of social gatherings and a negative psychological and even physiological way. So those things there like I realize that I've sort of drifted away a little bit from that kind of direct thing of shows and purposeless and all of that. But all of this stuff here I guess it's a. Yet again it's kind of playful. I'm playing with this concept and I am saying here that you know there are. There's no doubt that lack in play is bad for you and there's also here in this, even though this is not something that that comes from a book, where, where it's all I'm pulling these things together myself and I believe that it is truth in it.

Speaker 1: 41:53

But don't, um, don't, quote me on it. But, uh, quote me on it and say you would like to look into it. Maybe you would look into it, maybe you know somebody, maybe you know a play expert or something. Get them to think about that. There might be some better papers out there that describes just exactly what the mental state of the people were when the circuses closed down, but I haven't been able to find them. I hope maybe you do, maybe you contact me.

Speaker 1: 42:21

Anyway, next episode we're going to talk about the importance of self-motivation in play and how it directly leads to showmanship, and I got some interesting thoughts there too interesting in my own opinion about are audiences actually self-motivated when they're just watching me rant on and do cool tricks? Are they actually self-motivated when they're just watching me rant on and do cool tricks? Are they actually self-motivated there To find out? Tune in next exciting episode and I am excited to talk to you about it Then. All right, we get to the end of this and we're getting towards the end of the whole run of these things and it feels like we've been on a big journey together.

Speaker 1: 43:15

I really hope that you've enjoyed it and I hope that you've been getting the most out of it.

Speaker 1: 43:21

I hope that you're making these connections yourself, because this whole season has been an attempt for me to put you into this metaphoric kind of way of looking at life, and looking at that there's always more to it. Whatever it is that we look at, we are always naming things too small. So I'm trying to grab onto all these little details and basically make these huge connections between performance, between showmanship, between facing the other way before a loving and interested audience, and life in all its aspects evolutionary, biologically and culturally and all of this and I hope that it's giving you a depth to what you do that might not have been there before. What is it that I'm doing? Is it self-help? Is it personal development? Maybe a little bit of both, maybe all of the above. Anyway, I'm really glad that you're here with me and I thank you for it. So until next time, just take good care of yourself and of those you love, and I hope to see you along the way.