The Play's The Thing.

More than 25 years ago, my brilliant elder daughter, Sarah asked me to take she and her best friend, Elizabeth, to the second Austin Powers movie, "The Spy Who Shagged Me."

Such movies, I thought snobbily, are below my laughter-pay-grade and as much as I knew I'd have a good time hearing two tweens laugh, I was somewhat dreading leaving work early to go to something dumb. I had forgotten that the things that have brought the most laughter to our benighted planet are not sophisticated comedy but a pie in the face or a pratfall. 

On my way up to the sticky-floored theaters on East Eighty-Six Street I was reading a "plannery" article on the disintegration of "play" in amerika. The author wrote that when she was a girl kids would gather after school, throw baseballs, kick cans, fly kites, chase each other and generally cavort. Now, they go to a field, there are parents on either side of the field, referees and two teams playing an organized game of football. 

Play has gone from "free-form" to regimented.

No wonder our nation and our world is falling apart.

The things I learned playing reckless ball with friends, besting bullies, arguing, fighting, looking one way and running the other and a thousand other ruses are no longer learned. We get 1, 2, 3 instructions. And have thereby eliminated "figuring it out."

About four years ago, I received a gift in the mail from a company I ordered some stuff from in England. The person running their online business had miscalculated the postage they were supposed to charge me. He wrote me a note asking for more money to cover his costs. I sent it to him. As a thank you, he sent me a "MYRIORAMA" by the great artist Tom Gauld.

A what?

You can begin trying your own here.

Play.

It seems to me that the same lack of play I was reading about on the Six train to the movies a quarter of a century ago, has further infected our world today. It has certainly infected the remaining shards of the ad industry where the number of deliverables due every day has sky-rocketed and the use of imagination has accordingly plummeted.

This might be just a coincidence that I am rounding up to a conclusion. But while the quintillionaires and their willing executioners are cramming the use of electron-induced pattern-matching down our throats, imagination has become sere. Laughter is barren. Joy is a dishwashing detergent.

Last week, I've noticed what might be (or it might be a stretch on my part) two new books that have just been released bemoaning our societal loss of productivity. 

That might be related to our societal loss of play.

We might be so busy optimizing that we have instead pessimized. 

That's what I think about.