Wouldn’t golf be easier if we just picked up the little white ball, walked 400 yards and dropped it in the hole without hitting it with small sticks? Wouldn’t tennis be easier without a net in the middle? Why run an ultra-marathon when you could just walk or drive from A to B? Why spend years learning to play piano when you could just type a prompt and generate piano music at the click of a button? Why spend 9 months of my life making a graphic novel that no one will publish or anyone but a few people in my inner circle will ever read?
Maybe because ‘efficiency’ doesn’t always matter. Maybe because it’s fun. We have, as a species, for a very long time voluntarily attempted to overcome unnecessary obstacles (as Bernard Suits so eloquently put it).
In a market context, inefficiency is to be removed at all costs. They reward cheaper & faster. In a market, unnecessary obstacles are a problem to be solved. In a market, there is no tennis, or golf, or piano playing, and ultra-marathons have no value.
If we want evidence of the universality of our love for voluntarily overcoming unnecessary obstacles, we need only look to amateur play in every country and place on earth – the local sports clubs, chess clubs, board games clubs, music groups and yes, even artists.
Out beyond the market, we are happy. We play.