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The modern world is very wealthy, it's full of options. It's not like "This is the land I was born on and I have to make the most of it, and these are the people who are near me, and so they will become my family."
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My wife, there's certain kinds of housework that she just doesn't see as necessary to do in the way that I do. Things like the state of our closet or where things are in the kitchen. I have this almost unhealthily obsessive desire to have things in their place and she just totally doesn't. And this is a potential point of conflict, of course.
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Even when we tell kids to go play, what do the kids do? They come up with a set of constraints and structures. "Oh, we're gonna build a fort out of clothes, and now that we're in the fort we're going to pretend that we're prisoners," or whatever.
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We have so many choices that it's only always our fault if we're malcontent.
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The actual effort that you can exert upon the universe is fairly limited.
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To me, being able to find gratification in more venues, rather than greater gratification in a few, seems like a much more sane way of living.
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Play becomes a distraction, something you don't really need to do. It's not for serious people. They work hard, they don't play hard. Yes, you can say play hard, but that really means, keep working hard, right?
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Generally speaking, when people use the word fun, it's like a placeholder. You know, "How was your evening?" "Oh it was fun."