Book Reviews: Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity

"What if ... I could spend the next hour ... day ... week doing exactly what I chose? What would that be? What would I find fun right now? What's stopping me?"
- Cas Holman, Playful 

Playful by Cas Holman was a book I didn’t know I needed. As someone on the threshold of adulthood at the ripe age of 25, I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions about what it means to get older. As a socially constructed consequence of aging, we are told to shake off our curiosity in place of stability and responsibility. Somewhere along the way, I internalized that adulthood meant sacrificing joy and, for some reason, suppressing yourself in an effort to look like you have your life together.

It’s interesting what we consider “together”: someone who has figured it all out and appears to know the secret sauce to surviving this wild existence. Unless you’re aware of your own reincarnation, we’re all kind of winging it, trying to figure out something that doesn’t really need to be solved. Adulthood feels like a performance to me — one I’m carefully, almost stubbornly, trying not to take part in.

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