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I appreciate how making useless stuff is fun as a hobby, and enjoying that play is important. Even crows enjoy their sleds [0], that’s how important play is.

Needing to complete a project for the sake of your continued survival/paycheck, while adhering to specific criteria, is very much the opposite experience. A study done where _people were paid to put together Lego sets_ put together less of them when they had to watch the researcher take them apart immediately afterwards, despite intrinsically enjoying Legos [1].

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mRnI4dhZZxQ [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01672...




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