Showing posts with label play. Show all posts
Showing posts with label play. Show all posts

Friday, 12 September 2008

Killer rats and the pleasure of leisure

Today's billboard for the local newspaper contained a headline that conjured some horrific mental images and almost got me worrying about giant, slavvering mutoid rodents with fangs and a taste for human flesh... maybe like these ones:



Apart from fretting about killer beasts, I've been looking for work now that I've found myself 'inbetween jobs'. Its a full time occupation, and one that I get bored with very quickly...all that form-filling, trying to make yourself sound employable, what an impossible task. Despair at my predicament led me to reread Bob Black's great piece of ludic utopianism, The Abolition of Work:


"No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act."


It's a very entertaining piece from the self proclaimed 'Groucho Marxist', and if you've ever dreamed of escape from the pressures of the grind, then you should check it out.