Only recently has Amelie begun to pretend. I hadn't really noticed it was missing until it appeared. But suddenly she is stirring imaginary soup in her imaginary pots,and giving me imaginary sips. As humans we love to try to figure out what makes us different-- even superior-- to other animals. May I less-than-humbly suggest pretending?

It's what lets us evolve and progress. Via pretending we can try on new roles safely, explore new directions for our lives, society, technology... I've called personas "barbies for designers", but isn't scenario planning just "let's pretend" for businessmen? And aren't those immensely useful and good games to play?

All innovation is born of "let's pretend." Without "let's pretend" there would be no start-ups, no silicon valley, perhaps no business at all. The only sad thing is some people forget it is play, and forget to have a good time doing it.

Comments

 

I agree with you about the relationship between pretending and being human.

I recall reading that about 2.5 million years ago Australopithecus got into the habit of picking up a block of flint and smashing it and then using the resulting flakes as carving tools. This is clever, but no pretending is involved, so Australopithecus clearly isn't human.

However, 1.5 million years ago a creature in Africa, perhaps homo habilis, picked up a big block of flint and looked at it hard and imagined a perfect hand-axe that was inside that block of flint, waiting to be free. He/she then chipped at the rock until they had exactly the hand-axe that they wanted. This was a big shift. The creature was imaging what they wanted first and then creating it. They had to pretend that rock first, and so we regard these creatures as the first human species.

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