Those Who Wander Open Debate #3

Is Adventure Work, Play, or Something in Between?

Photo by Giacomo Berardi on Unsplash

Greetings fellow wanderers,

In August, I introduced a new feature at Those Who Wander—a Those Who Wander Open Debate. To reiterate, in place of a usual weekly post, I’m posting a monthly debate question, focused on various travel and adventure topics. 

The format is simple. I will post a question for debate and pose a 1-2 paragraph prompt about the question. There will then be a poll and an opportunity to leave a comment to expand on your answer. Please feel free to respond with any length you like and if you have any research you’ve come across on the topic, I would love for you to share it with us here.

I will also repost the stats from the previous month’s months poll. In September, I asked Does Travel Grant Us a Realistic View of the World? with 13% answering ‘Yes’, 13% ‘No’, 67% ‘Sometimes’, and 7% responding with ‘unsure.’  Thank you to everyone who participated!

Now onto today’s question and prompt:

Humans like to think in binary terms, hot and cold, night and day, hard and soft. Likewise, when it comes to the activities of life, we often use two broad categories of work and play or “free time” to carve out our weeks, months, and years—there is either 1) work or 2) there is time off from work. Yet life is often steeped in shades of gray. There are forms of adventure that do not sit neatly into the category of work or play but could be argued to be either or perhaps neither and something all on its own. Adventurous undertakings such as mountain climbing, backpacking, long-distance kayaking or biking, deep sea diving, and many other types of excursions we can imagine challenge this binary. 

While backpacking the Appalachian Trail years ago, I often described the experience in my journals as something “outside our normal routine” or something “separate from everyday life.” Lugging a 50-plus-pound pack over mountainous terrain for 20-plus miles a day certainly felt like “work” but not in the traditional sense of work as something contributing to our finances and the rest of society in the form of taxes, profits, and services. To some minds, extensive adventures are the complete opposite and one might say explicitly shirk the world of paid employment and mainstream society.

I’ve been reading an interesting book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. Homo ludens translates to “man the player” and the book is a classic anthropological text that poses an interesting question of whether the defining feature of culture and ultimately who we are as a species is how actively we pursue play. Play permeates virtually all aspects of human society and culture. Perhaps we have always been “working for the weekend” with work only a means to reach our true desire of playing and enjoying our free time.

I was struck by the criteria by which Huizinga defined play:

Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious”, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.

While much of what Huizinga describes in the book is related to the many games and sports humans construct across cultures, a lot of this is also how I would describe adventure. And yet, is adventure even a form of “play”? Backpacking the AT felt neither like work nor play, but something unique and distinct that is difficult to articulate. I will leave it here for now…

What are your thoughts? Is adventure work, play, or something in between? Perhaps it is neither and something that should stand all on its own.

Expand on your answer in the comments:

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me and participating in the discussion. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB