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Groos’s theory of “the pleasure at being the cause” led him to devise a theory of play as make-believe: humans invent games and diversions, he proposed, for the exact same reason the infant takes delight in his ability to move a pencil. We wish to exercise our powers as an end in themselves.

— Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

As early as 1901, the German psychologist Karl Groos discovered that infants express extraordinary happiness when they first figure out they can cause predictable effects in the world, pretty much regardless of what that effect is or whether it could be construed as having any benefit to them. Let’s say they discover that they can move a pencil by randomly moving their arms. Then they realize they can achieve the same effect by moving in the same pattern again. Expressions of utter joy ensue. Groos coined the phrase “the pleasure at being the cause,” suggesting that it is the basis for play, which he saw as the exercise of powers simply for the sake of exercising them.

— Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber

For me, speculative fiction possesses a delicious and breathtaking capacity for making political theory come to life. When I started my undergraduate degree as a political science major, I'd been an avoid science fiction and fantasy reader for years. The intellectual challenges these genres thrust me into made political theory electrifying and liberatory. I never had to struggle to imagine the new worlds that theorists like Karl Marx, Edward Said, and Franz Fanon implored readers to envision; I'd already been doing that.

— The Blalf Book of Anti-Caste SF by Mimi Mondal, Bama, Kumar, Sumit (Artist), and 25 others (Page xv)

Against this approach, we must insist that the reduction of unwaged work is necessary, not because it lets people take on more waged labour, nor simply because much of it is drudgery. Rather, this reduction is essential because it expands the availability of free time that is a prerequisite for any meaningful conception of freedom. The struggle against work – in all its forms – is the fight for free time.

— After Work by Nick Srnicek, Helen Hester (Page 27 - 28)