The Tuna Sandwich Experience
This is a story about a businessman we'll call Tim, and a tuna sandwich. Tim's a successful entrepreneur - they run their own property business, and have lots of dealings with lots of important people.
About a week ago, Tim had a meeting lined up and was thinking about the impression he wanted to project in the meeting - successful, well-put-together; someone who knows what they're talking about, and by extension someone who's opinion and expertise matter. In the property world, Tim says, the way you present yourself is important; first impressions are very important1. That doesn't mean wearing a suit the whole time, but about giving a particular impression: that you take your work seriously; that you respect the other person's time; that your opinion is worth listening to. So Tim dresses for the occasion.
Now, Tim's normally a stickler for scheduling, but on this particular day (or more specifically, the night before) he dropped the ball and ended up running from one meeting to another with no time for lunch. So he picked a tuna sandwich up from a cafe and decided to eat it in the car on the way to the meeting. I say decided, I really mean attempted, because as Tim takes his first bite, he immediately fires tuna mayo all down his carefully chosen outfit. Cue him driving round Essex smelling like fish and trying to scrub mayonnaise off his crotch with bottled sparkling water in a car park.
When I was listening to this story I thought the point Tim was making was going to be something like "however much you prepare, something will always go wrong", which is true - but that wasn't why Tim was telling me this story. For Tim, the Tuna Sandwich Experience (TSE as I'll now refer to it) was about the difference between what kind of person you say you are, and the kind of person you are; the image you want to project, and the actions necessary to be that kind of person. "Saying and thinking things are one thing", he says, "but action is what's important"; Tim wanted to come across as calm and collected, but he hadn't created the conditions for himself to do so, and consequently turned up to his meeting smelling like an off-duty fishmonger.
I'm wary of attaching too much philosophical weight to a story about an entrepreneur ineffectually eating a sandwich. But speaking to Tim about actions and intentions tells us something about playfulness: that we need to embody the kind of attitude we want to have, and provide the conditions for it to happen. Tim wanted to come across as one thing, but by not being that thing, he couldn't demonstrate he was that thing. This was just one event, of course, but he made a point of saying that single events are only single events until they aren't. Covering ourselves in tuna once is messy; constantly turning up to meetings covered in tuna makes us a messy *person. *
Figure 1 - A model for "plork", the practice of playfulness (Castro, 2025)
There's a lot of talk about play and playfulness at the moment (at least on my LinkedIn feed) that focusses on the important of play, how we should play more, and why play is good, productive, human, etc. There's less talk about practically achieve something like this. If we consider ourselves playful people, is that something that happens naturally, or is that something we cultivate? If we are cultivating it, are we doing it consciously, or subconsciously? How might we practice being more playful? If we want to be considered - by ourselves, as much as anything else - as playful people, perhaps we need to cultivate the conditions necessary to allow a playful attitude to occur; we need to be doing conscious work to be playful people. It doesn't really matter how we get there - maybe it's a mindfulness thing; maybe it's keeping a playfulness diary (Proyer, 2012); maybe it's practicing plork (Fig. 1). But if you've read anything I've written before, you'll be familiar with my argument that playfulness is a practice that takes work (Castro, 2025). If we do a thing enough, we become that kind of person.
A last point - life is chaotic, changeable, messy. Sometimes, just by quirk of fate, we'll end up covered in tuna. As the world gets increasingly complicated, it feels to me increasingly important to acknowledge that that in itself it doesn't say anything about who we are. It only becomes who we are if we don't do anything to change it. Perhaps one of the things worth practicing is our ability for the tuna to fall, and not consider ourselves failures when it does; to laugh, to soda water our smart jeans and to chuckle and the silliness of it all.
References
CASTRO, D. 2025. Plork! A foundation for playful making. Journal of Play in Adulthood, 7**,** 37-57.
DE KOVEN, B. L. 2014. A Playful Path. ETC Press 2014.
PROYER, R. T. 2012. Development and initial assessment of a short measure for adult playfulness: The SMAP. Personality and Individual Differences, 53**,** 989-994.