A 10-Minute Cacao Ritual for Playing Again
Most definitions of play used by researchers include the phrase "apparently purposeless". That is the part adults cannot manage.
Ten minutes is a small enough commitment that the usual objection — that there is no time for this — does not really apply. The obstacle is not the ten minutes. It is that anything you can justify is no longer play.
The definition has "apparently purposeless" in it
Researchers who study play across species converge on a fairly consistent set of properties. Play is voluntary. It has inherent attraction — you want to do it rather than having decided you should. It involves a diminished consciousness of self and a loosened sense of time. It is improvisational, so it can go somewhere unplanned. And it produces a desire to continue.
Sitting at the front of that list is the awkward one: it appears to have no purpose. There is no outcome the player is pursuing, which is precisely what distinguishes it from work that happens to be enjoyable.
This is where adults get stuck. Almost every activity available to a working adult has been given a justification. Exercise is for health. Reading is for improvement. A hobby is for unwinding, which is for being more effective tomorrow. Once an activity has a job, it stops meeting the definition, and it stops delivering whatever play delivers.
The awkward instruction is therefore: do something that does not help.
Rats laugh
The evidence that play is a basic biological system rather than a human luxury is more striking than most people expect.
Rats engage in rough-and-tumble play, and while doing so they produce ultrasonic vocalisations at around 50 kilohertz — well above human hearing. Researchers found the same calls could be reliably elicited by tickling the animals, that rats would seek out the hand that tickled them, and that the calls were associated with positive rather than distress states.
Whether it is right to call this laughter is debated, but the broader picture is not seriously in dispute: play is widespread across mammals, it has dedicated neural circuitry, and animals deprived of it develop abnormally in social and emotional domains.
A thing that costs energy, carries risk of injury, and persists across species is not usually frivolous. Evolution does not generally maintain expensive behaviour for no reason, which is the strongest argument that "apparently purposeless" is about the player's experience rather than the actual function.
Flow is close, but not the same thing
Play gets conflated with flow, and they overlap without being identical.
Flow, as described by Csíkszentmihályi, is a state of complete absorption arising when a task's challenge is well matched to your skill, with clear goals and immediate feedback. It brings a loss of self-consciousness and a distorted sense of time — both of which play also has.
But flow requires clear goals, and play specifically does not have them. A rock climber in flow is trying to reach the top. A child pushing a toy car along a skirting board is not trying to do anything.
The distinction is practically useful. Flow is available in demanding work and is a large part of what makes difficult work satisfying. Play is available when there is nothing to achieve, and it is the one adults lose almost completely — because every activity has been quietly assigned a goal.
If you can only get to flow, that is worth having. But it is not a substitute.
Ten minutes, and the rule that makes it work
One rule: it must not be useful, and you must not get better at it.
That second clause matters. Improvement smuggles the goal back in. The moment you are tracking progress, you have converted play into practice, and practice is a different thing with different rewards.
So:
- Make the cacao. Twelve to fifteen grams, 240 ml. Do not make this part reverent — the making is not the ritual here.
- Pick something with no outcome. Ten minutes.
- If you catch yourself trying to do it well, stop and switch.
- Do not photograph it. An audience reintroduces a purpose immediately.
Things that tend to work: doodling with no subject. Improvising badly on an instrument you cannot play. Building something pointless out of whatever is on the table. Making up a stupid song. Rearranging objects into an order that pleases you for no reason. Talking nonsense with a child or an animal, both of whom are far better at this than you are.
Things that reliably fail: anything on a screen, which will supply goals and feedback within seconds. Anything you are already skilled at. Anything you have ever considered monetising.
If you cannot think of anything
This is the normal response, and it is worth sitting with rather than solving quickly. Adults asked to name what they do purely for fun frequently come up blank, or list things that are actually recovery, admin, or self-improvement in a friendly costume.
The usual route back in is memory. What did you do at eight or nine, before anything had a purpose attached? The specific activity is often not repeatable, but the shape of it usually is — building, drawing, arranging, pretending, making noise, moving.
Expect it to feel awkward and slightly embarrassing for the first several attempts. That discomfort is the accumulated habit of justifying your time, and it fades with repetition rather than with resolve.
Ten minutes, a few times a week. If at some point you find you have gone over the time without noticing, that is the whole thing working.
The productive cousin of this is our creative session, which puts the same loose attention to deliberate use. Keep something plain on the shelf for both — pure ground cacao takes about ninety seconds.
