this is fun to do, which is Good™ in-and-of-itself, and also <insert this article here/>
The first one seems (according to my taste) healthy, and it’s barely trying to be a justification, it just passes off to the intuitive notion of good (which seems healthy for this sort of thing). The second one seems fraught, because it’s at risk of allowing the hegemony of explicit-utilitarian justification (that is, justifying things in terms of their legible uses) to subtly worm its way into even this idea of playing without needing a justification. By trying to justify [unjustified play], one implicitly asserts that [unjustified play] requires justification.
Typos: fixed the first, thanks. The second one actually wasn’t a typo. I tried an edit to clarify. The point is that if you give yourself to playful thinking, then playful thinking gets the opposite of learned helplessness, “learned empowerment”: it expects to be given you—that is, it expects to be empowered to play, embodied in you / your mind—and so it expects for it to be worthwhile to gather itself to play. And so it does gather itself to play, and in fact plays!
The first one seems (according to my taste) healthy, and it’s barely trying to be a justification, it just passes off to the intuitive notion of good (which seems healthy for this sort of thing). The second one seems fraught, because it’s at risk of allowing the hegemony of explicit-utilitarian justification (that is, justifying things in terms of their legible uses) to subtly worm its way into even this idea of playing without needing a justification. By trying to justify [unjustified play], one implicitly asserts that [unjustified play] requires justification.
Typos: fixed the first, thanks. The second one actually wasn’t a typo. I tried an edit to clarify. The point is that if you give yourself to playful thinking, then playful thinking gets the opposite of learned helplessness, “learned empowerment”: it expects to be given you—that is, it expects to be empowered to play, embodied in you / your mind—and so it expects for it to be worthwhile to gather itself to play. And so it does gather itself to play, and in fact plays!