How We Spend Time: Rituals, Pastimes and the Way into Games — Transactional Analysis 6 (C1)

TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS · LESSON 6

How We Spend Time: Rituals, Pastimes and the Way into Games

C1 (B2–C2) · 90 minutes

Stuck in the lift

Task You're stuck in a lift for ten minutes with a colleague from another department whom you barely know. Choose the letter you would most likely do, and the one you would least like your colleague to do.

A. Chat about how bad the lifts in this building are, then about weekend plans.

B. Tell them honestly that small spaces frighten you, and how you're feeling right now.

C. Look at your phone and say nothing until the doors open.

D. Say "Typical! Nothing in this place ever works", wait for them to reassure you, then explain why that won't help either.

E. Work together: press the alarm, call reception, read the safety notice.

F. "Well, this is fun!" "Ha, isn't it?" Then a polite smile.

READING

The hunger for structure

Lesson 5 was about strokes, the units of recognition we exchange with each other, and the hungers behind them. In Games People Play (1964), Eric Berne added a third need to stimulus and recognition: structure-hunger, the need to fill our time. "The eternal problem of the human being," he wrote, "is how to structure his waking hours." An empty hour in the company of others is uncomfortable, and Berne argued that boredom, if it persists, becomes a kind of emotional

starvation.

His answer was a classification. When people come together, they can spend their time in only a few ways, and each way brings strokes of a different intensity. Berne's 1964 list named rituals, pastimes, games and intimacy, with activity as a frame that any of the others could happen inside. The list now standard in TA, as set out by Ian Stewart and Vann Joines in their textbook TA Today, has six ways of structuring time, starting with withdrawal:

READING · CONTINUED

The hunger for structure

Withdrawal: present in body, absent in mind. No transactions with others; the only strokes are the ones you give yourself, in thought or fantasy.

Rituals: familiar exchanges that run as if pre-programmed, such as greetings, and end the same way every time.

Pastimes: talking about something, with no intention of doing anything about it.

Activities: working with others towards a goal, with the Adult ego

state in charge.

Games: repeated exchanges with a hidden agenda, ending with both players feeling bad. (Lesson 7.)

Intimacy: open, honest contact with no hidden agenda and no exploitation.

As you move down the list, the strokes grow more intense. Many TA writers add that the psychological risk grows too: in withdrawal nobody can hurt you, while in intimacy there is no script to hide behind. As we'll see later today, not everyone agrees.

Six ways to spend an hour

stroke intensity

1. Which step of the ladder fills most of your working day?

2. Is withdrawal a retreat from people, or something everyone needs?

3. Can colleagues reach intimacy, or should work stay at activities?

4. Why might Berne see activity as a frame for all the others?

Intimacy

Games

Activities

Pastimes

Rituals

Withdrawal

?

psychological risk

Map it: a day in Nairobi

Task Label each moment W, R, P, A, G or I. Then choose one moment you could argue has two labels, and decide which moment gave Priya the most intense strokes.

Day two of a logistics conference in Nairobi. Priya Raman, a supply-chain manager from Chennai, knows almost nobody.

1. 08:40 At registration: "Good morning!" "Good morning! Name?" "Raman." "Here's your badge. Enjoy the day!" "Thanks, you too."

2. 09:00 In the keynote, Priya sits at the back, answers emails on her phone and speaks to no one for ninety minutes.

3. 10:30 Over coffee, Kwame Mensah from Accra and Priya compare journeys from the airport. "Two hours in traffic!" "Two? Try Lagos at rush hour." They move on to hotel breakfasts.

4. 11:00 Workshop: five strangers have forty minutes to plan a mock shipment from Mombasa to Kampala. Priya and Lucía Ortega from Bogotá split the costings and check each other's figures.

5. 13:00 At lunch, Hiroshi Tanaka asks Priya how to rescue his delayed project. To every idea she offers, he replies, "Yes, but…". After twenty minutes she feels drained. He sighs, almost content: "You see? Nothing can be done."

Map it: a day in Nairobi

6. 16:00 Closing session: the organisers thank the sponsors, the speakers thank the organisers, and everyone applauds on cue.

7. 19:30 At drinks, Amira Haddad from Amman and Priya discover they both know a professor in Rotterdam. "Do you know…?" and "What happened to…?" fill an easy hour.

8. 22:00 On the hotel terrace, Lucía admits she is thinking of leaving the industry and is afraid of what her family will say. Priya says she has felt the same. Neither gives advice; they sit with it.

9. 23:30 Alone in her room, Priya replays the lunch in her head, inventing better replies to Hiroshi.

READING

What small talk is for

To an outsider, much of human conversation looks pointless. Two neighbours agree that it's cold; a stranger asks how you are and doesn't wait for the answer. In 1923, decades before Berne, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski gave this kind of talk a name: phatic communion, speech whose main purpose is not to pass on information but to create a bond through the exchange of words itself.

Berne gave the same insight a

stroke economy. A ritual is a stereotyped series of simple exchanges, set by social custom. Two Americans passing in a corridor with "Hi!" and "Hi!" make what he called a two-stroke exchange: one stroke each way. The words carry almost no information, yet the strokes are real, and if one person skips the expected greeting, the other notices at once.

READING · CONTINUED

What small talk is for

Rituals vary from culture to culture: a handshake, a namaste, the British "How do you do?" answered with the same question. Children absorb the local rituals early.

A pastime goes one step further: a run of semi-ritual talk around a single topic. Berne gave them tongue-in-cheek names: "General Motors" (comparing cars), "Who Won" (sport), "Kitchen" and "Wardrobe", "How Much" (what things cost), "Ever Been" (to some nostalgic place) and "PTA", which in

one of its forms becomes worried talk about juvenile delinquency.

Pastimes do more than fill time. They are a sorting device. In Berne's words, "Pastimes form the basis for the selection of acquaintances, and may lead to friendship." While two people talk about cars or traffic, each is quietly sounding the other out as a candidate for something closer: friendship, a joint project, or, as Lesson 7 will show, a game. On this view, small talk is not empty. It is a low-risk audition.

Small talk around the world

Task Interview your partner, then swap. Take notes on their answers. Agree on one surprising difference between your cultures or workplaces to report to the group.

1. When you arrive at work or class, what is the expected greeting ritual? How long does it last?

2. Which small-talk topics are safe where you live, and which are off limits?

3. How long can a silence between two people last before it feels awkward?

4. In your language, is "How are you?" a real question? What happens if you answer it honestly?

5. In a business meeting, how much small talk comes before the real business starts?

6. Which tires you more: small talk with strangers, or silence with strangers?

READING

Beyond small talk

For Berne, the most gratifying forms of social contact were the last two on the ladder. Games offer intense strokes at a price: a hidden agenda and a bad feeling at the end. Intimacy, in Berne's account, is candid, game-free contact with no mutual exploitation, and "the only completely satisfying answer" to all three hungers. Later TA writers add that, because it is not pre-programmed, it is also the most unpredictable way to spend time.

Berne was blunt about the rest of the ladder: "Pastimes and games are substitutes for the real living of real intimacy."

Is intimacy also the riskiest? Much TA teaching says so. Stewart and Joines disagree. In their view, intimacy feels the most dangerous from the Child ego state, but is actually the least risky, because nothing is hidden and nobody is being put down.

READING · CONTINUED

Beyond small talk

Activities, they add, can be more or less risky than pastimes, depending on what is being done.

What does the research say about small talk? In 2010, Matthias Mehl and colleagues recorded snippets of 79 students' daily lives with a small audio device. Happier students had more substantive conversations and less small talk. But a larger 2018 replication, pooling data from 486 people, found that only half the result held: substantive talk was still

linked to life satisfaction, but small talk was linked to neither more nor less of it. Separately, in 2021–22, Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley ran 12 experiments with more than 1,800 participants and found that deep conversations with strangers were less awkward and more connecting than people expected. None of these studies tested Berne's theory directly, and none shows that deep talk causes happiness.

Fishbowl: is small talk a waste of time?

Task Take a role below. Speakers argue; observers stay silent and take notes. To swap in, an observer types TAP in the chat and replaces a speaker of their choice.

ROUND 1

Is small talk a waste of time?

ROUND 2

Is intimacy the riskiest way to spend time, or the safest?

SPEAKERS

OBSERVERS

• Speaker 1: argues yes in round 1 and riskiest in round 2.

• Speaker 2: argues no in round 1 and safest in round 2.

• Speaker 3 (if you have one): free to switch sides at any moment, but must say why.

• Observer A: notes the strongest argument on each side.

• Observer B: notes any evidence from today's texts that the speakers use, misuse or ignore.

• Observer C (if you have one): notes which of the six ways of spending time the fishbowl itself is using.

Private reflection

Task Choose one prompt and write privately. Nobody will read what you write. Sharing afterwards is optional.

Prompt 1

Think of a relationship that has stayed at rituals and pastimes for years: yours, someone you know, or one from a film or novel. What might it cost to move one step up the ladder, and what might be gained?

Prompt 2 (lighter)

Plan your ideal evening out. Which of the six ways would you spend it in, and how much time would each get?

Back in the lift

Task You're back in the stuck lift with the same colleague. Now that you know the six ways, would you choose a different letter? Would you choose differently with a close friend?

A. Pastime

B. Intimacy

C. Withdrawal

D. Game

E. Activity

F. Ritual

Before Lesson 7

This week, notice an exchange that has happened before, maybe many times, and always ends with someone feeling bad.

P

A

Write down how it starts, what each person says, and how it ends. No names are needed. It could be at work, at home, online, or in a TV series.

Next lesson: Games People Play. Why we keep repeating exchanges that hurt, and what Hiroshi was really doing at lunch.

C

TEACHER'S REFERENCE · SKIP OR DELETE BEFORE CLASS

Answer key

MAP IT: A DAY IN NAIROBI

1 R · Ritual: a greeting that runs the same way every time.

2 W · Withdrawal: physically present, no transactions with anyone.

3 P · Pastime: talk about traffic and breakfasts, with no plan to act on it (close to Berne's "How Much" and "Ever Been").

4 A · Activity: a shared, goal-directed task.

5 G · Game: a repeated pattern with a hidden agenda that ends with Priya drained and Hiroshi oddly satisfied. Berne called this one "Why Don't You – Yes But" (Lesson 7).

6 R · Ritual: a long, formal ritual of thanks and applause.

7 P · Pastime: close to Berne's "Do You Know" and a way of sounding each other out.

8 I · Intimacy: honest, open contact with no hidden agenda and no attempt to fix or score.

9 W · Withdrawal, structured by fantasy: Berne said a solitary person can fill time with activity or fantasy.

DEFENSIBLE DOUBLE LABELS (pairs need only one): 4 may include pastimes while people work; 6 could be argued as an activity for the organisers; 7 might be the first step towards friendship; 9 is also the game continuing in Priya's head. Most intense strokes: 5 (negative) or 8 (positive); either is defensible if argued from stroke intensity.

STUCK IN THE LIFT / BACK IN THE LIFT A pastime · B intimacy · C withdrawal · D game · E activity · F ritual.