On a recent flight, I watched a mother across the aisle play peek-a-boo with her small son while next to me a grown man in a VR headset spent six hours ascending the levels of a video game. It occurred to me that what I was doing between them — reading — was also a game: a peek-a-boo of ideas advancing across levels of meaning. I thought of Newton, who reflected on his deathbed: “I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore.” We play games with the mind and call them science, play games with the spirit and call them art, play games with the heart and mistake them for love. Life itself may be, in the end, a game — not a closed game, the goal of which is winning (for the goal of life is death), but an open game, the goal of which is playing. So argues philosopher Bernard Suits (November 25, 1925–February 05, 2007) in his uncommonly original and intellectually daring 1978 book The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (public library), exploring the elemental question of what makes a good life through a parable, that ancient form infinitely more effective than polemics, for parables, as Suits observes “ought to come at the end, not at the beginning, of serious inquiry; that is, only at the point where arguments fail.” Drawing on Aesop’s famous parable about the price of improvidence, Suits subverts the premise to depict the Grasshopper not as a fool but as “a working Utopian whose time has not yet come” and who exemplifies “the life most worth living.” The Grasshopper’s vision of Utopia is the supreme antidote to the cult of achievement — a way of experiencing life not as striving but as a game, of exposing workaholism as “no more than a ruse for avoiding living up to your ideals.” Suits writes:Prudential actions (e.g., those actions we ordinarily call work) are self-defeating in principle. For prudence may be defined as the disposition 1) to sacrifice something good (e.g., leisure) if and only if such sacrifice is necessary for obtaining something better (e.g., survival), and 2) to reduce the number of good things requiring sacrifice — ideally, at least — to zero. The ideal of prudence, therefore, like the ideal of preventive medicine, is its own extinction. For if it were the case that no sacrifices of goods needed ever to be made, then prudential actions would be pointless, indeed impossible. This principle, knowledge of which I regard as an indispensable first step on the path to wisdom, the ants seem never even to have entertained. The true Grasshopper sees that work is not self-justifying, and that his way of life is the final justification of any work whatever.At the heart of Suits’s investigation of games is “the attempt to discover and formulate a definition, and to follow the implications of that discovery even when they lead in surprising, and sometimes disconcerting, directions,” and within it “the attempt to define games as illustrating par excellence the futility of attempting to define anything whatever.” Against the definition of work as a “technical activity… in which an agent seeks to employ the most efficient available means for reaching a desired goal” Suits pits the defining characteristic of games:Games are goal-directed activities in which inefficient means are intentionally chosen.[…]While it is possible in a technical action to break a rule without destroying the original end of the action, in games the reverse appears to be the case. If the rules are broken the original end becomes impossible of attainment, since one cannot (really) win the game unless one plays it, and one cannot (really) play the game unless one obeys the rules of the game. In a game I cannot disjoin the end, winning, from the rules in terms of which winning possesses its meaning. I can, of course, decide to cheat in order to gain the pot, but then I have changed my end from winning a game to gaining money.The rules of a game, Suits observes, are accepted for the sake of the play they make possible — we choose to act within the limitations they impose in order to partake of the game. He offers a definition:To play a game is to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity.One of Salvador Dalí’s lost illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.A game has four elements: the goal, the means of achieving the goal, the rules, and — crucially — what Suits calls the “lusory attitude”: the psychological orientation necessary for entering into the play, at the heart of which is an acceptance of the arbitrary rules the game imposes. He writes:The attitude of the game player must be an element in game playing because there has to be an explanation of that curious state of affairs wherein one adopts rules which require one to employ worse rather than better means for reaching an end… In anything but a game the gratuitous introduction of unnecessary obstacles to the achievement of an end is regarded as a decidedly irrational thing to do, whereas in games it appears to be an absolutely essential thing to do.He simplifies the definition further:Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.Because the goal always precedes the attempt to pursue it, it is inherently “prelusory” and at the same time inherently related not only to the game but to life itself. Suits writes:The prelusory goal of a game… can be described before, or independently of, any game of which it may be, or come to be, a part. In contrast, winning can be described only in terms of the game in which it figures, and winning may accordingly be called the lusory goal of a game. Finally, the goal of participating in the game is not, strictly speaking, a part of the game at all. It is simply one of the goals that people have, such as wealth, glory, or security. As such it may be called a lusory goal, but a lusory goal of life rather than of games.Suits identifies three types of pseudo-players who can ruin the game for others: triflers, who recognize rules but not goals; cheats, who recognize goals but not rules, and spoilsports who recognize neither rules nor goals. The true player is one who recognizes both goals and rules — that is, one who enters the game with the lusory attitude and whose reward is not winning but playing.Art by Carson Ellis from Du Iz Tak?And so we return to the Grasshopper and his choice, deadly in Aesop’s parable but existentially triumphant in Suits’s, of play over work as the means to the good life. Structured as a Socratic dialogue, the parable pits the Grasshopper against his critical disciple Skepticus, who counters the core argument by pointing out that “people are not, and do not want to be, wholly grasshoppers or wholly ants, but a combination of the two,” seeing that “labour is valuable because it permits us to play.” To this the Grasshopper responds:The only argument against living the life of the Grasshopper arises from the contingent fact that at present one dies if one does not work. The answer to that argument is that my death is inevitable in any case. For if I am improvident in summer, then I will die in winter. And if I am provident in summer, then I will cease to be the Grasshopper, by definition. But I will be either provident or improvident in summer; there is no third alternative. Therefore, either I die or I cease to be the Grasshopper. But since I am just the Grasshopper, no more and no less, dying and ceasing to be the Grasshopper are one and the same thing for me. I cannot escape that logic or that fate… Everyone alive is really a Grasshopper… Everyone alive is in fact engaged in playing elaborate games, while at the same time believing themselves to be going about their ordinary affairs. Carpenters, believing themselves to be merely pursuing their trade, are really playing a game, and similarly with politicians, philosophers, lovers, murderers, thieves, and saints. Whatever occupation or activity you can think of, it is in reality a game.Couple with how play made us and keeps us human, then revisit this almost unbearably wonderful poetic reimagining of Aesop’s famous fable.donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.