What Does Being Serious Actually Mean?

Seriousness and joy are lifestyle choices.

You can be serious about anything in your life.

Even about games and play.

A disclosure: As a non-gamer, I used to be too serious about games.

As a child, I didn’t think of them as games. They were just what I was doing and immensely important to me. As an adult, I thought I didn’t like games and considered them something requested of me in order to socialize with others.

But that turned out not to be true. I might have had these thoughts before the games, but when I played them, and shortly afterward, I felt joy.

Discovering my resistance toward games was a gift. Because this let me see that my seriousness was a lifestyle choice, not something caused by nature.

Games and game design taught me many things. Of course, we need to prepare our game field and learn the rules, but at some point, we need to start playing to test the game. Otherwise, we will be thinking about playing the game instead of actually playing it.

Many will agree that’s no fun at all, also non-gamers like me.

But why then in real life, don’t we start playing (that is, living), rather than just thinking about life and adding drama to it instead?

Seeing what is in front of us as a game can help us to start playing and living.

One of my children’s favorite games is when I pretend to be extremely serious and tell them not to laugh or smile. That usually results in fits of laughter combined with their vain attempts to straighten their faces and not smile or laugh.

My solemn praises of their attempts to be serious make them explode with laughter, at which I playfully scowl and tell them not to laugh. That only makes them laugh even harder. We all end up laughing so hard we cry.

But even deliberate attempts to be serious about something, when observed non-judgmentally, can be very funny to ourselves.

So, let’s not be too serious about our intention to either start or do something and just start doing.

A note to this article: It is a modified excerpt from Self-Gamification Happiness Formula: How to Turn Your Life into Fun Games.

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