Well, For a Start at Least

In this world, sex is scandal, drugs are danger, art is luxury, and work is a badge of suffering. We’ve inherited definitions from bureaucrats with clipboards and priests with guilt complexes. These systems once served a purpose—mostly taxation—but now function as elaborate mood-killers. What if we reframed them? Not with utopian fantasy (we tried that, it got monetized), but with mischievous intent. What if life wasn’t a punishment to endure, but a playground to misuse?

Play, of course, is unserious. It doesn’t generate quarterly returns. It doesn’t scale. It’s what children do before they’re taught to sit still and worry about their LinkedIn profiles. But play is also how we learn, how we bond, how we accidentally invent jazz. To play is to engage without fear, without hierarchy, without needing a five-year plan. If we treated our bodies, minds, and relationships as instruments of improvisation rather than compliance, we might stumble into something resembling joy. Not the kind sold back to us in curated retreats, but the kind that erupts when people feel safe enough to be weird.

We’ve built a culture that rewards exhaustion and calls it character. We mistake suffering for depth and seriousness for wisdom. Children, those chaotic bundles of possibility, are treated like startup investments or future disappointments. Fear is institutionalized. Love is monetized. And still, somehow, the human impulse to connect, to care, to create—it persists. It’s annoyingly resilient, like glitter in a carpet.

So let’s imagine a different baseline. One where sex, drugs, art, and work aren’t moral battlegrounds but modes of expression. One where children are celebrated not for their future productivity, but for their present absurdity. One where fear is no longer the currency of control, and love is no longer doled out like performance bonuses. It wouldn’t fix everything. But it would be a start…

I dream of a world where:

sex is just people playing with their bodies
drugs is just people playing with their minds
art is just people sharing their weirdness
work is just people looking out for each other
life is just people playing
children are life’s richest reward*
fear is no longer currency
love is no longer rationed

Well, for a start at least…

*Children are currently life’s bravest reward. Especially the ones who ask “why?” 47 times before breakfast. And yes, this would mean free chocolate. Possibly universal nap time.

Harry Handelbar

Harry is a recovering satirist, part-time philosopher, and metadata tinkerer. His archive spans two decades of metaphysical mischief, theological punchlines, and poetic nonsense. He believes in satire’s transformative power, the elegance of expressive metadata, and recursion—once writing a poem that never ended and a script that crashed browsers.