The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

by Catherine Price

If I really wanted to reclaim my life, I needed to remember how to live.

One of the many great things about taking breaks from screens and devices is that it forces you to be still.

“Depression tries to trick you into thinking that you can’t do the things you enjoy because you’re depressed, but it’s actually the exact opposite: you’re depressed because you’re not doing the things that you enjoy.”

where you don’t care about what other people think. It’s a feeling of freedom. It’s being a bit reckless and giving your inner child a chance to come out and play.”

many of the things that keep us up at night don’t ultimately matter.

We can’t control the fact that we will die. But we can control whether we actually live.

our lives are what we pay attention to. Indeed, our attention is the most valuable resource that we have.

We only experience what we pay attention to. We only remember what we pay attention to. Your choice of what to pay attention to in any given minute might not seem like a big deal, but taken together,

our brains can only pay full attention to one cognitively demanding thing at a time.

our brains can’t multitask,

“The mind cannot have two thoughts at once,”

We work so that they can play.

earnings began to be determined not by their accomplishments but by the time they spent “at work.”

When you change people’s focus from accomplishing tasks to making stuff, you end up, perhaps unsurprisingly, with a lot of stuff.

Indeed, many salaried careers combine the worst of both worlds: the amount of money you can earn is capped by your salary, but there’s always more work that you could do (and that you may feel pressured to do, in order to prove that you are “committed” and to keep up with your peers). Dangle the carrot of a possible promotion or bonus and we will work even harder.

we spend a lot of time just churning and trying to stay afloat.

“Many of us are exhausting ourselves…working very hard at things that accomplish very little of substance but feel necessary.”

we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that there should be a purpose to everything we do, or else it’s a waste of time; as a result, experiences that bring us pure pleasure don’t seem worthy of being treated as priorities, and sometimes even come with a side of guilt.

we make decisions based on the public images that we have cultivated rather than on what we actually want.

When we refresh our email just in case we’ve received a new message, we distract ourselves from the task at hand.