You make an important point. Fun in general is a broader thing than playful thinking (and deeper and more sacred in some ways), so playful thinking doesn’t at all encompass all of fun. Fun and playful thinking are related though; playful thinking is supposed to be fun, and at least for me, the issue with playful thinking is that the fun is being stifled. So following on your last paragraph, the deeper thing is fun simpliciter.
Another point, only hinted at by the phrase “serious play”, is that the concept of playful thinking is not supposed to imply unseriousness. Seriousness is not the same as explicit-usefulness-justification, because play can be serious but it’s almost impossible for activity driven by explicit-usefulness-justification to be genuine, fully deep fun. (It can be somewhat fun, and some people are blessed to have explicit-usefulness-justifications that spur them into activity that then becomes genuine, fully deep fun. I can sort of do that but not fully, especially because my explicit-usefulness-justifications are pretty demanding and don’t want me getting confused about what counts as success.) Serious play, in its seriousness, can involve instruction and taste. It could involve a mentor giving you harsh feedback. It could involve, for example, you saying to yourself: the thing I’m learning about right now, in the way I’m learning about it, does it access [what intuitively feels like] the living, underlying, hidden structure of the world? And then modifying how you’re engaging to heighten that sense. It could involve your case of learning a mode of thinking from someone else.
> trying to claim it as my own
My two cents (although I’m worried about intruding on this, and worried about other people retroactively intruding such that the process is distorted): if at some point you realize that you’ve gained a lot on claiming it as your own, it would be very valuable to describe that to others. (If you’ll allow a flight of fancy: We can only send messages backwards in time by a few years, so only messages that are taken seriously as a priority to transmit backwards in time will be relayed fast enough to outpace the forward flow of time, and make it back to primordiality.)
Thanks.
You make an important point. Fun in general is a broader thing than playful thinking (and deeper and more sacred in some ways), so playful thinking doesn’t at all encompass all of fun. Fun and playful thinking are related though; playful thinking is supposed to be fun, and at least for me, the issue with playful thinking is that the fun is being stifled. So following on your last paragraph, the deeper thing is fun simpliciter.
Another point, only hinted at by the phrase “serious play”, is that the concept of playful thinking is not supposed to imply unseriousness. Seriousness is not the same as explicit-usefulness-justification, because play can be serious but it’s almost impossible for activity driven by explicit-usefulness-justification to be genuine, fully deep fun. (It can be somewhat fun, and some people are blessed to have explicit-usefulness-justifications that spur them into activity that then becomes genuine, fully deep fun. I can sort of do that but not fully, especially because my explicit-usefulness-justifications are pretty demanding and don’t want me getting confused about what counts as success.) Serious play, in its seriousness, can involve instruction and taste. It could involve a mentor giving you harsh feedback. It could involve, for example, you saying to yourself: the thing I’m learning about right now, in the way I’m learning about it, does it access [what intuitively feels like] the living, underlying, hidden structure of the world? And then modifying how you’re engaging to heighten that sense. It could involve your case of learning a mode of thinking from someone else.
My two cents (although I’m worried about intruding on this, and worried about other people retroactively intruding such that the process is distorted): if at some point you realize that you’ve gained a lot on claiming it as your own, it would be very valuable to describe that to others. (If you’ll allow a flight of fancy: We can only send messages backwards in time by a few years, so only messages that are taken seriously as a priority to transmit backwards in time will be relayed fast enough to outpace the forward flow of time, and make it back to primordiality.)