Why We Need More Play in Our Lives, And Why It Shouldn't Stop When We Grow Up

Somewhere along the way, play became something we thought we were supposed to grow out of. We think we've got that wrong.

When you're a child, nobody asks what you're achieving when you play.

You build a shop out of cardboard boxes.

You turn the sofa into a fort.

You make a café out of mud, leaves and whatever you can find in the garden.

You draw a picture because you want to draw a picture. You make something wonky and declare it brilliant. You spend an entire afternoon inventing a world that disappears again before dinner.

There doesn't have to be a point. Then somewhere between childhood and adulthood, things change.

Making things becomes a hobby we're supposed to be good at.

Exercise should improve our bodies. Reading should make us knowledgeable. A creative hobby can somehow become a potential side hustle before we've even finished learning it.

Even rest can start feeling like something we're supposed to optimise.

And play, doing something simply because it's enjoyable, quietly starts disappearing.

We think we need some of it back.

What actually counts as play?

We tend to imagine play as toys, playgrounds and children running around.

But play is much broader than that.

Researchers studying adult playfulness often describe it less as a particular activity and more as the way we approach an experience: finding amusement, curiosity, challenge or interest in situations that might otherwise feel ordinary. Research has associated adult playfulness with things including creativity, adaptability and different approaches to coping with stress.

That means playing might look like:

making something ridiculous out of clay, trying to recreate a picture badly, building something just to see if you can, doing a puzzle with someone, painting without knowing how to paint, turning dinner into a competition, or, in our case, being handed a plain biscuit and several bags of icing and being told:

Do whatever you want with it.

The important part isn't necessarily what you're doing. It's that, for a little while, the outcome doesn't matter very much.

Children understand this instinctively

Give a child a cardboard box and it rarely remains a cardboard box.

It's a rocket. A house. A shop. A boat. A hiding place. Children are remarkably good at seeing possibilities in ordinary things.

Unstructured play gives children opportunities to invent, negotiate, experiment, solve problems and use their imaginations. The American Psychological Association notes that play that isn't directed by adults can help children exercise creativity, build resilience and interact organically with other children. But there's another part of childhood play that we think adults could borrow.

Children aren't constantly asking whether they're doing it properly.

Watch a group of children decorate biscuits and you'll see it immediately. One will carefully copy the example. Another will pile every colour on top of every other colour.

Someone will decide that the biscuit is no longer whatever shape you told them it was supposed to be. And someone will inevitably eat the icing directly from the bag.

Nobody has failed. They're playing.

Then adults sit down at the same table

And something interesting happens. At first, adults often approach the biscuit differently.

What am I supposed to make? What does the example look like? Mine isn't going to look like yours. I'm terrible at this.

And then, usually, a few minutes pass. Someone's icing goes wrong. Someone starts laughing. Someone copies somebody else's idea. Someone becomes unexpectedly competitive. Someone creates something completely different from the picture. The conversation wanders somewhere else.

And very gradually, people stop worrying about whether they're good at decorating biscuits.

That is the moment we're interested in. Not the perfect biscuit at the end. The bit where everyone forgets they're supposed to be good at it.

Creativity doesn't have to produce anything useful

We're surrounded by messages telling us to improve ourselves. Learn something. Build something. Track something. Monetise something. Even creativity gets dragged into it. You start painting and someone asks whether you're going to sell your work.

You bake something and you're asked whether you've considered starting a business. You take up pottery and suddenly you're looking at whether you could open an Etsy shop. But there is value in making things that have absolutely no commercial purpose. Research into everyday creativity has found associations between creative activity and positive wellbeing. Other research into enjoyable leisure activities has similarly found links between engaging in pleasurable activities and better psychological wellbeing, although these relationships are complex and shouldn't be treated as proof that any single hobby is a cure-all.

Sometimes making something can simply be enjoyable.

That is enough.

We're also living increasingly frictionless lives

So much of modern life is designed to make things effortless.

Tap. Swipe. Order. Scroll. Watch. Repeat. There are obvious advantages to that. But there is something satisfying about using your hands. Cutting. Building. Piping. Squashing. Stacking. Mixing colours. Working out how something fits together. We don't think the answer is declaring technology bad. It isn't. We use it constantly. But we do think we need things worth occasionally putting it down for.

Maybe we should play with our food

Most of us were probably told some version of:

Don't play with your food.

We've built an entire business around disagreeing. Food is an extraordinary material for play. It has texture, colour, smell and taste. It changes when you manipulate it. It can be stacked, shaped, piped, built, broken apart, and eventually eaten. A biscuit can be a biscuit. But it can also become a tiny hamburger, a tennis racket, a building. Or something nobody else can identify but you insist is exactly what you intended. Once you stop treating food purely as something to consume and start treating it as a creative material, an enormous world opens up. That's the world we're increasingly interested in exploring.

Play isn't the opposite of being serious

Being playful doesn't mean treating life as though nothing matters.

Research into adult playfulness increasingly suggests something subtler: playful people may be particularly good at reframing situations and finding interesting or enjoyable possibilities within them. A 2025 study examining playfulness during the pandemic found that more playful participants tended to approach difficult circumstances in more active and creative ways, something the researchers described as “lemonading.”

Recent qualitative research has also identified positive emotion, stress reduction, social bonding and learning among the ways participants described meaningful wellbeing arising from playfulness.

That doesn't mean piping icing onto a biscuit solves life's problems.

Obviously it doesn't.

But perhaps a life containing moments of silliness, curiosity, imagination and making things for no reason at all is a little richer than one without them.

We think that's worth protecting.

Put more play on the table

So this is the idea sitting underneath The Mini Baker's Box.

Not:

Everyone should become brilliant at biscuit decorating.

And definitely not:

Here is another thing you need to be productive at.

It's much simpler. Make something. Play with it. Laugh when it goes wrong. Let your children invent the rules. Challenge your partner to make something better than yours.

Build tiny worlds. Make ridiculous things out of icing. Put your phone somewhere else for half an hour. And don't worry too much about whether the end result deserves to be photographed. Although, obviously, if it looks particularly spectacular, or particularly terrible, we'd quite like to see it.

Maybe we never actually outgrow play. Maybe we just stop giving ourselves permission to do it.

Consider this permission.

Put more play on the table.