How to be Silly

At last, a thing that is fun AND healthy.

I generally enjoy being thirty-four. What with its gifts of relative mental clarity, agency, financial independence and confidence.

Still, life as an adult is missing something.

There’s a prevailing monopoly of seriousness, and it makes existence feel like a heavy business.

LEGENDS. L-R: Top Cat, Fancy, Benny, Brain, Choo-Choo, Spook and Officer Dibble.

Top Cat was my childhood idol. He was a sophisticated ally cat that lived in a dustbin and was always in trouble. He and his friends were zany and silly, and they knew how to have a good time.

Last weekend, I caught a rerun of the show, and it made me want to be more like TC.

Snapchat lenses are a hoot!

Laughing: During my first ever job, I and a bunch of other twenty-something newbies were being trained to assist Members of Parliament with research. Sexy stuff.

The word "briefs" came up a lot. Our trainers used it to describe the important legal documents we would eventually prepare for our future bosses. But we were young and imbecilic. The primary association we had with the word briefs was men's underwear. We couldn't stop laughing. It was ridiculous.

Eventually, even the trainers gave up. They called for a 5-minute break to accommodate our off-brand, childish laughter. In this otherwise momentous building frequented by the country’s foremost intellectuals.

It's been over a decade, and we still reminisce about it. Laughter is that powerful. It creates a virtuous chain of neurological responses in the brain and limbic system, resulting in lower stress and a strengthened immune system. And it feels stinking good.

We could create emotionally safe spaces that allow us to be goofy idiots. Even if only briefly. Most things aren't that serious.

Making Room for Imagination: New research has reframed daydreaming. This 2022 study suggests that letting your mind wander is actually super productive. The authors found that it can profoundly boost creativity and well-being.

Our minds are so vast. We could make a LOT of room for imagination, and it wouldn’t cost us a dime. Surely, this vastness is by design. Life feels like it’s meant to be an expansive experience. And it’ll be nice to remember that in the middle of Mondays.

JK Rowling says this nicely. And Julia Cameron did too.

Cultivating Spontaneity: Two years ago, I wrote this post, reflecting on all of the little improvements I’d experienced in my life after the onset of the pandemic. 

More recently, I’ll admit that the tyranny of routine has taken over, and sometimes, I’ll silently mourn the loss of spontaneity.

Fun is inherently chaotic. To experience joy, we must experience novelty, which is hard to come by in an overly structured routine.

In Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity, Edward Slingerland calls upon us to disobey our calendars every once in a while. He says doing so can infuse a greater sense of playfulness and adventure into our lives.

Part of being spontaneous is heeding our bodily intelligence. He notes:

Our excessive focus in the modern world on the power of conscious thought and the benefits of willpower and self-control causes us to overlook the pervasive importance of what might be called “body thinking”: tacit, fast, and semiautomatic behaviour that flows from the unconscious with little or no conscious interference. The result is that we too often devote ourselves to pushing harder or moving faster in areas of our life where effort and striving are, in fact, profoundly counterproductive.

Some people think that, statistically, this is the best time in history to be a human. But that only sometimes feel true. Something could be said about being more like our child selves - and tending to our very human needs for levity, imagination and spontaneity. Maybe that will make this living nonsense feel less like a series of unending responsibilities.

As a parting gift, please enjoy this very silly important Instagram profile of one Rohit, who has now gone 1000+ days without consuming a single fizzy drink. This is no mean feat. Get over yourselves.