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January 3 - January 22, 2022
Hours that I might previously have devoted to doing things, like playing music, learning a new skill, or interacting with my husband (as opposed to sitting in the same room together, parallel-scrolling) increasingly were spent staring at a screen. I’d morphed from an interesting, interested, independent-minded person into someone who had been hypnotized by a small rectangular object—an object whose apps were programmed by people working for giant companies that stood to profit from getting me to waste my time.
I’ve become convinced that our phones and other wireless mobile devices (which are sometimes referred to as “WMDs”—weapons of mass distraction) are pulling our internal compasses seriously offtrack, insinuating themselves into our lives in ways that aren’t just scattering our attention; they’re changing the core of who we actually are.
I could see that all of us were acting like addicts, but since everyone was afflicted, we were deluding ourselves into thinking that our behaviors were normal and okay.
digital sabbaths and were continually amazed by their effects on time—both in terms of the sheer amount that opened up, and in the way that avoiding screens made our perception of time slow down. Instead of allowing our time to be filled, we now were in charge of how we wanted to fill it.
If I really wanted to reclaim my life, I needed to remember how to live.
What is something you’ve always said you wanted to do but that you supposedly don’t have time for? The idea is that you probably have more time for it than you realize; you just need to reclaim some of the minutes and hours you’re spending on your phone.
Even more intriguingly, the class infused me with an exuberance that buoyed me for days. I was more playful around my husband. I was more present with our daughter. I felt less resentful of my obligations and less burdened by my lists
True Fun, I realized, is the feeling of being fully present and engaged, free from self-criticism and judgment. It is the thrill of losing ourselves in what we’re doing and not caring about the outcome. It is laughter. It is playful rebellion. It is euphoric connection. It is the bliss that comes from letting go. When we are truly having fun, we are not lonely. We are not anxious or stressed. We are not consumed by self-doubt or existential malaise. There is a reason that our moments of True Fun stand out in our memories: True Fun makes us feel alive. —
Even if we haven’t received an official diagnosis, many of us are suffering from emptiness, loneliness, boredom, and a general sense of languishing. But I would argue that in many cases, we are mixing up the cause and the effect: we are suffering from these afflictions because we are not having enough fun.* True Fun isn’t just a result of happiness, in other words; it’s a cause.
the first step in having more True Fun is to create space by doing fewer things, so that you can take advantage of opportunities for True Fun in your life that already exist and spend your free time in more targeted ways.
Fake Fun is numbing and leaves us empty when we’re done. True Fun, on the other hand, makes us feel nourished and refreshed.
True Fun is approachable and down-to-earth—it wants to be invited to hop off its pedestal and play with us in the dirt. We have more control over fun than we realize; we just need to better understand the factors that generate it for us personally, and design (and put ourselves in) more situations in which these factors are present. It is worth the effort.
True Fun is restorative. It increases resilience and empathy. It creates community. It reduces resentment. True Fun does wonders for our emotional well-being by empowering us to connect with other people, escape from self-judgment, and be fully present. Orienting our lives around True Fun will boost our creativity and productivity. It will make us better—and happier—partners, parents, workers, citizens, and friends. True Fun is good for our health. It gets us up from our desks, out of our heads, and into the world. Having more True Fun lowers our stress levels, and over time, that will likely
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The emotional power of the memories it creates is proof that True Fun isn’t frivolous; it’s profound.
True Fun is the confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow. Whenever these three states occur at the same time, we experience True Fun.
True Fun carries with it no sense of obligation—when we’re being playful, we don’t mind if there’s no tangible reward.
feeling like they’re joining together with someone while at the same time feeling totally themselves.
Distraction is probably the greatest offender, since it gets in the way of all three. If we are at all distracted—if our attention is split—we cannot experience True Fun, because fun requires flow, and flow requires that we be fully present.
True Fun and distraction are like oil and water: they do not mix.
True Fun is more likely to happen when it has space to unfurl.
Fake Fun is my term for activities and pursuits that are deliberately designed to fool us into thinking that they’ll produce True Fun but that don’t actually result in playful, connected flow.
We can’t control the fact that we will die. But we can control whether we actually live.
“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”
been conditioned to believe that our time is too valuable to waste, and yet we often end up spending our leisure hours on things that make us feel like we’ve wasted our time.
“The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are.”
we make decisions based on the public images that we have cultivated rather than on what we actually want. Not only does this dissonance make us behave in ways that don’t reflect our authentic selves—and, in extreme cases, that prevent us (and our kids) from even knowing our authentic selves to begin with—but it’s also exhausting. We’re left with no energy to pursue playfulness, connection, or flow, which is an unfortunate irony, given that playfulness, connection, and flow each generate far more energy and satisfaction than any hard-earned “like” on social media ever could.
Whereas flow rejuvenates us, time confetti makes us exhausted. Trying to hold too many things in our heads at one time taxes our working memories and leaves us drained.
Instead of being consumed by the fear of what we might miss if we were to put down our phones, we should think about all the things we definitely miss when we pick them up. In short, every moment spent following algorithmically generated links is a moment we’re not doing something for ourselves, whether it’s reading a book, or practicing an instrument, or talking to a friend, or even just gazing at the sky.
This may be due in part to the fact that playfulness, connection, and flow all reduce stress, and stress dampens creativity. It could also be the result of the surge of energy that we experience when we have fun, which enables us to put our ideas into action.
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Making space means clearing mental and physical clutter. It means reducing resentment, letting go of unnecessary responsibilities, and creating boundaries to protect your time and attention from people and companies trying to steal it from you. It means building stillness and openness into your schedule so that you have room for more moments of playfulness, connection, and flow. The goal is to create space for you to design and build the life you actually want.
Also, to be clear, building a more fun-filled
filled life is not about shirking your responsibilities. It’s about reorienting yourself toward things that energize and excite you—a process that, in turn, will increase your resiliency and give you more energy for everything else.
If I were to identify a list of universal fun killers, resentment would be near the top of the list. It destroys your ability to have fun with the person you’re feeling resentful toward. And in general, resentment is a toxic emotion that, if left unresolved, can poison other situations as well.
Cluttered spaces can have negative effects on our stress and anxiety levels, as well as our ability to focus, our eating choices, and even our sleep…. Constant visual reminders of disorganization drain our cognitive resources and reduce our ability to focus.”
“When our space is a mess, so are we.”
But it’s not just the novelty of new surroundings that is attractive to fun; it’s the absence of cues that remind us of the burdens of normal life, even if it’s just a pile of junk mail sitting on the counter.
relying on willpower is a horrible way to change a habit. (Eventually it’ll run out and you’ll be right back where you started.)
We just did a lot of work to create emotional and physical space in our lives. Now we need to identify what we want to do with that space; otherwise, we’ll be left with a vacuum, and it won’t be long before our old habits come rushing back in to fill it.
The problem, in other words, isn’t passive consumption itself; the problem is what happens when passive consumption is our default.
