The ROI of Being Ridiculous

Here's something that happened recently that I'm not proud of: I spent approximately forty-five minutes designing a spreadsheet to help me be more playful.

Column A: play activity. Column B: energy required (low/medium/high). Column C: whether it involved other people. Column D: estimated fun yield per hour. I even color-coded it. There was a dropdown menu.

I completed the spreadsheet and then did not do any of the activities on it.

I am sharing this with you because it perfectly illustrates the problem I want to talk about today — which is that most growth-oriented adults have completely accidentally engineered joy, humor, and play out of their lives, replaced them with optimization frameworks, and then wondered why they feel vaguely hollow despite technically functioning at a high level.

Turns out: the spreadsheet is not the play. Who knew.

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The Framework Problem (and Why I'm Making One Anyway)

Here's the thing about play and humor — they resist systematization, which is exactly why analytical types like me tend to subtly abandon them. You can't A/B test a laughing fit. You can't measure the ROI of an afternoon spent doing something ridiculous with friends. There's no KPI for "delight."

But — and here's where I put on my irritating systems-thinking hat — that doesn't mean the science isn't there. It absolutely is. We've just been measuring the wrong things.

The VIA Character Strengths framework (originally developed by Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson) identifies 24 universally recognized human strengths. Two of them are humor and zest/playfulness. Not soft skills. Not nice-to-haves. Core character strengths that research has repeatedly linked to psychological flourishing.

A landmark 2025 study by Ruch and colleagues used machine learning to test whether VIA character strengths predict 12 health-related outcomes — including well-being, anxiety, healthy behaviors, and life satisfaction — across 4,830 adults in five countries (Ruch, 2025). The findings were striking: character strengths, assessed through this framework, are robust, culturally universal predictors of health outcomes. Humor and playfulness aren't personality quirks that make you fun at parties. They're measurable capacities that predict how well you do in life.

That's not a soft finding. That's a cross-cultural machine learning result across nearly five thousand people. You can put it in a spreadsheet if you want.

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The Play Deficit Nobody Talks About

Psychiatrist and play researcher Stuart Brown has spent decades studying what happens when adults systematically abandon play. His conclusion is uncomfortable: play deprivation in adults is directly linked to rigidity, depression, and diminished creativity. We don't lose access to play because we grow up. We lose it because we stop prioritizing it, and then we call it maturity.

Meanwhile, Robin Dunbar's research on laughter at Oxford showed something genuinely wild: shared laughter raises endorphin levels and strengthens social bonds more efficiently than almost any other human behavior. Your brain on a genuine laugh is pharmacologically different from your brain not on a genuine laugh.

Here's a useful mental model I call the Serious-Playful 2x2:

	High Output	Low Output
High Seriousness	Burnt out achiever	Anxious staller
High Playfulness	Creative high-performer	Joyful drifter

Most people optimize for the top row and wonder why they end up on the left side of it. The research suggests the bottom-left quadrant — the creative high-performer with genuine levity — isn't a coincidence. The playfulness is doing structural work.

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The Humor Style Problem (Not All Funny Is Equal)

Psychologist Rod Martin spent years categorizing humor into four styles based on two axes: who it targets (self vs. others) and whether it's benign or harmful.

1. Affiliative humor — inclusive, relationship-building, makes everyone in the room feel good
2. Self-enhancing humor — the ability to find things funny even in adversity, a powerful coping tool
3. Aggressive humor — sarcasm, put-downs, punching down; short-term laughs, long-term social erosion
4. Self-defeating humor — excessively self-deprecating, used to deflect rather than connect

The research is fairly unambiguous: affiliative and self-enhancing humor styles predict higher life satisfaction, lower anxiety, and stronger social bonds. Aggressive and self-defeating humor do the reverse. So yes — it matters what kind of funny you are. There's a portfolio optimization angle here that I find deeply satisfying.

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Positive Emotions Are Not a Reward. They're a Resource.

Here's a common mental model error: treating good feelings — joy, amusement, playfulness, delight — as things you earn after doing the serious work. Rest comes when the project is done. Fun comes on weekends. Levity is the dessert, not the meal.

The evidence disagrees. A 2025 longitudinal study by Donaldson and colleagues found that the PERMA+4 framework — which includes positive emotions as one of its core well-being pillars — predicts future employee functioning and performance over time (Donaldson, 2025). Not as an outcome of performance. As a predictor of it.

Positive emotions — which include joy, amusement, and the lightness that comes from genuine play — are upstream inputs to high functioning, not downstream rewards. Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory has been making this point for years: positive emotions literally expand cognitive range, broaden attention, and build durable psychological resources. You don't play because you've earned it. You play because it builds the conditions for your best work.

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Three Experiments (Actual Ones, Not Spreadsheets)

Given all of the above, here are three things you could try this week — none of which require a tracking system:

1. The Play Audit (Five Minutes) Ask yourself: what did you do between ages 8 and 12 purely because it was absorbing and fun? For most people, the answer arrives immediately. For an uncomfortable number of people, they then realize they haven't done that thing — or anything like it — in years. This is useful information.

2. The Humor Portfolio Check Over the next 48 hours, notice what type of humor you default to in social settings. Affiliative (making the room feel good)? Self-enhancing (laughing at your own predicament)? Or creeping toward aggressive (sarcasm, subtle put-downs)? You don't have to overhaul your personality — just notice the pattern. Awareness is the first branch on the decision tree.

3. The 20-Minute Non-Optimization Pick one activity that has no measurable outcome, no skill-building potential, and no entry on your to-do list. Do it for 20 minutes. Resist the urge to make it useful. The inability to do this without anxiety is itself very useful diagnostic information.

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The Actual Point

The reason play and humor get squeezed out of adult life isn't that we're busy. It's that we've implicitly categorized them as non-serious — and therefore as luxuries that come after the serious things are handled. But the serious things are never all handled. So the play keeps getting deferred.

What the research keeps finding — across VIA frameworks, positive psychology, neuroscience, and well-being science — is that playfulness and humor aren't accessories to a well-functioning life. They're load-bearing walls.

You can absolutely track this in a spreadsheet if it helps.

Just also maybe do the thing.