Welcome to the Happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. Have you noticed a change recently in our world?

We're busy. We're stressed. We're rather overwhelmed. Life is getting expensive. Life is getting

hard. In response to this chaotic world, I'm seeing two default settings. We're

either grinding away at work, tying our worth to our achievements, or we're numbing ourselves

to escape the stress. It's just not unusual these days to see people working so hard having 12, 14-hour days every single day

and then exhausted on the weekends. And these aren't just brain surgeons or high executives.

This is true for a lot of us. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we see people

who are equally overwhelmed, but their

way of dealing with it is to numb themselves.

They may play video games for 14 hours a day, or wake up to a joint or a glass of alcohol

and keep it going all day long.

Sadly, with these frenetic, busy, distracting activities, we completely lost the art

of play, doing something for the pure joy of the experience with no goal, no modernization,

and no numbing effect. Today, I want to argue that life, the universe, doesn't need us to be a manager,

a millionaire, a master of industry, or to numb ourselves. The universe wants us to experience

the joy of existence. I want to use an analogy between a parent and a child to help illustrate the thesis of this podcast today.

But before I go on, I do want to add when I use the word universe, I'm just trying to be respectful to everyone listening.

If you prefer, you could put in the word Jesus, God, Spirit, Source, Buddha, Krishna,

the One.

Please do that because in today's podcast, we are going to be referring to the highest power

of all to help us understand how play is an essential part of the universe or God's mission for us. So if you are a parent right

now or if you ever plan on being a parent, I want to ask you, what do you actually want for

...