More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I’m not saying that technology is evil and that we should throw our phones and tablets into a river. Some of our screen time is productive, essential, and/or enjoyable. Some of it provides relaxation or escape. But it’s also gotten out of control. 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.
The exercise asks you to decide how full your “tanks” are in four areas—love, work, health, and play—so that you can identify the parts of your life that need attention.
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. —
True Fun isn’t just a result of happiness, in other words; it’s a cause.
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.
And that, at its core, is what this book is about: feeling alive.
True Fun is the confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow.
Flow is a term used in psychology to describe when you are fully engrossed and engaged in your present experience to the point that you lose track of the passage of time.
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.
Judgment is also a fun killer. In order to judge something, we have to step out of an experience so that we can evaluate it, and (as we just noted) when we are out of our present experience, we are obviously not in flow.
The fact that playfulness, connection, and flow are all active states also means that anything that could be described as passive consumption cannot, by definition, generate True Fun on its own.
Fake Fun can be hard to identify at first, because it’s so well camouflaged—it’s engineered to trigger the release of some of the same chemicals that are present in our bodies and brains when we’re truly having fun. But in reality, it’s a mirage of fun that’s been created by people and businesses whose incentives, values, and goals are very different from our own.
The first thing we need to acknowledge is that our lives are what we pay attention to. Indeed, our attention is the most valuable resource that we have.
Annie Dillard has written, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”
humans require social connections in order to flourish (more on that in a bit), that our greatest achievements occur when we are in flow, and that our need for play is intrinsic, biologically driven, and consistent across cultures and throughout time. (Indeed,
“Prior to the Industrial Age, most people worked to complete specific tasks: bring in the harvest, put up the barn, stitch a quilt,” writes Headlee. When these tasks were complete, so was the day’s work. As a result, prior to around 1800, many people “actually had time to sit around a fire and listen to all 3,182 lines of an epic poem like Beowulf.” (“Back then,” she says, “that was considered a fun night with the family.”)
Unsurprisingly, many of us coped with the pandemic by relying even more heavily on our screens, trying to re-create virtually what was no longer available in reality—from school to work meetings to get-togethers with friends. Technology became a lifeline;
Instead, many of the leisure activities that we do on our screens fall into the category of Fake Fun, usually in the form of self-medication, entertainment, consumerism,*13 or distraction that—while sometimes satisfying in small doses—ultimately only leaves us feeling more anxious and alone.
They’re designed this way because nearly all of our most problematic, time-sucking apps are part of what’s known as the “attention economy” (or, more menacingly, but no less accurately, “surveillance capitalism”): an economy in which our attention, rather than goods and services, is the commodity that is being bought and sold.
This, generally speaking, is how algorithms decide what to show us: they compare data about us and our past behaviors to the profiles and past behaviors of thousands if not millions of other users who resemble us in some way, whether in terms of demographics or behaviors.
Algorithms are also shaping our emotions by exposing us to content that has deliberately been chosen to manipulate how we feel—and, therefore, influence how we behave.
Many of us are behaving in ways that Larry Rosen, a psychologist and co-author of The Distracted Mind, describes as being similar to those displayed in psychiatric conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
“phones affect our brains in the same way as drugs.” And we certainly use our phones like drugs: to give us jolts of pleasure and help us avoid emotional pain.
Dopamine is like a biochemical guiding star: we’re pulled toward activities that our dopamine systems have tagged as important,
The most important role of the dopamine system is to help us identify and remember—and motivate us to repeat—activities that are essential for the survival of our species; for example, dopamine is released in response to food and sex. It’s also released in response to activities that are helpful for our survival, even if not absolutely essential, such as social bonding or, for that matter, fun.
“This is one of the worst parts of tech addiction,” David Greenfield explained to me. “It dulls reality.”
rewards are also a huge dopamine trigger.
Our smartphones contain so many dopamine triggers that the result is often not curiosity, but hypnosis; every one of us has had the experience of looking up from a device and wondering where the last hour of our life has gone. Time flies when we’re truly having fun, but it also flies when we are in a dopamine-induced, Fake Fun–fueled trance.
we feel consumed by what’s colloquially known as FOMO: fear of missing out.
“Your cortisol levels are elevated when your phone is in sight or nearby, or when you hear it or even think you hear it,” David Greenfield told me. “It’s a stress response, and it feels unpleasant, and the body’s natural response is to want to check the phone to make the stress go away.”
“The smartphone shuts down our ability to use judgment.”
When cortisol levels remain high over the long term—which they do when we exist in a heightened state of anxiety for extended periods of time—it affects our physical health in ways that could actually shorten our lives.
how powerfully positive True Fun can be for us mentally, physically, and emotionally, and how little attention has been paid to its potential as a health intervention.
According to Brown, “play” describes any activity that is “absorbing [and] apparently purposeless” and that “provides enjoyment and a suspension of self-consciousness and sense of time. It is also self-motivating and makes you want to do it again.”
But playfulness itself also brings people closer, makes them feel comfortable, and creates special, shared experiences. You can see this in your own life: if you call to mind your oldest, most treasured friendships and some of your favorite moments that you have shared with those people, there will likely be an element of playfulness running through them.
“The feeling of being ‘apart together’…of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the usual norms, retains its magic beyond the duration of the individual game.”
Humans are social creatures; we have evolved to live in groups. This is why social exclusion hurts so much, and why we’re so vulnerable to FOMO.
“loneliness influences virtually every aspect of life in our social species”—to the point that loneliness expert John Cacioppo wrote that he and his colleagues had found that “loneliness somehow penetrated the deepest recesses of the cell to alter the way genes were being expressed.”
The study has found that the people with the strongest relationships lived longer, reported higher levels of happiness and satisfaction, and suffered less cognitive decline.
“collective effervescence,” which was coined in 1912 by sociologist Émile Durkheim to describe the feeling of connection, meaning, and joy that occasionally arises from collective events.
flow is also marked by a total lack of self-consciousness, leaving us with what Csikszentmihalyi describes as a “stronger self-concept”—which is to say, confidence in our authentic selves—and is often accompanied by a sense of mastery and control. When we are in flow, we don’t fear failure.
psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl (who writes that he and his fellow prisoners used a “grim sense of humor” to help them survive) describes humor as one of “the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation.”
humor also reduces our risk of stress- and anxiety-related diseases such as heart attacks and strokes in the long run.
S(et point) + C(ircumstances) + V(oluntary behaviors) = H(appiness) Your happiness “set point” depends on your genes, which obviously can’t be changed. Your circumstances include both controllable things like where you live, and uncontrollable things like the family dynamic you were born into. Voluntary behaviors are exactly what they sound like: they’re the things you choose to do—including
(Sewing circles? Lawn bowling?) But once I’d experienced what playful, connected flow felt like in my mind and body, I realized that, far from being quaint or a waste of time, seeking fun through social activities with other human beings is one of the best uses of our time—regardless of what the activity might be. Today, having a relaxed lunch with a friend or taking a break in the middle of the day to call someone no longer seems like an unnecessary luxury, and organizing a weekend away with friends no longer seems like too much work. Instead, I now recognize them as valuable investments in
...more
When I reflected on the many ways in which prioritizing fun can help us flourish, it became clear to me why fun is such a powerful tool for building a meaningful life—and why not treating it as a priority can leave us so vulnerable to technology’s thrall. Simply put, the pursuit of fun requires us to decide how we want to fill our days. It demands that we identify what makes us feel the most alive.
While our apps encourage FOMO, True Fun is so intrinsically satisfying that when we experience it, there’s nowhere else we’d rather be. While online “connections” often leave us feeling hollow, vacant, and competitive, the sense of connection we experience when having fun breaks down walls, encourages vulnerability, and brings us closer to other people by helping us tap into our shared humanity.
The first step of our fun audit*1 will be to zero in on what playful, connected flow feels like in our minds and our bodies—the logic being that you can’t have more True Fun if you don’t know how to recognize it when it occurs.
SPARK—short for “make space, pursue passions, attract fun, rebel, and keep at it”—to
STEP 1: KNOW THE SIGNS OF TRUE FUN
