The essay is much deeper than this. Graeber is speaking directly to people like you (and me, until I read this article a few years ago) who believe all actions

The essay is much deeper than this. Graeber is speaking directly to people like you (and me, until I read this article a few years ago) who believe all actions are rooted in evolutionary adaption. Graeber does get a bit woo-woo but I really like this essay for putting the idea that fun and play could just be emergent properties of the world we live in - which is pretty cool, no woo stuff needed (which Graeber does kind of wander into at one point). Most important paragraph in the essay: "The tendency in popular thought to view the biological world in economic terms was present at the nineteenth-century beginnings of Darwinian science. Charles Darwin, after all, borrowed the term “survival of the fittest” from the sociologist Herbert Spencer, that darling of robber barons. Spencer, in turn, was struck by how much the forces driving natural selection in On the Origin of Species jibed with his own laissez-faire economic theories. Competition over resources, rational calculation of advantage, and the gradual extinction of the weak were taken to be the prime directives of the universe."