The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

by Catherine Price

I’m not talking about rebellion that would hurt you or anyone else or put you in jail—or even that gives you an adrenaline rush, if that’s not your thing. I mean committing acts of harmless rebellion in which you deliberately step outside the bounds of your “normal” life and do something different just for the fun of it.

Johan Huizinga wrote that “play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all its own.”

You can rebel against habits and routines. Doing so will help you fight back against what Senior calls “the dirty secret about adulthood”—namely, “the sameness of it, the tireless adherence to routines and customs and norms.”

dopamine is a tool our brains use to form memories and record things that are worth doing again—in other words, it’s a salience indicator. Dopamine focuses our attention on the present moment, helping us to tune in to sensory details and experience things more intensely. This means that every time we rebel against our routines and habits and have an even slightly positive experience, not only will we be creating a vivid memory to look back on but the ensuing dopamine jolt will reinforce the idea that trying new things is worth repeating in general.

it’s like Walt Whitman said: we contain multitudes. We can be silly and serious, responsible and rebellious, mature and childlike—and in fact, the more we harness the positive powers of rebellion and allow our playful streaks to shine, the more energy we’ll have for everything else.

Orienting your life around fun is like exercise: it’s not something you can do once and then forget about. It reminds me of something Alex Soojung-Kim Pang says in his book Rest. He argues that rest, which he broadly defines as things that restore our energy or ignite new creativity, is something that we must actively work to claim. “Rest is not something that the world gives us,” writes Soojung-Kim Pang. “It’s never been a gift. It’s never been something you do when you’ve finished everything else. If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.” The same is true of fun.

final step of SPARK, “Keep at it,” and the basic goal is simple: we need to continue to prioritize fun so that the pursuit of fun doesn’t become lost in the sea of all the other things competing for our attention and time—and we need to commit to doing so not just for the next day or the next week but for the rest of our lives.

In terms of purpose and structure, there are two main types of fun squads: the ones that meet to talk about fun and support each other as they reorient their lives around its pursuit, and ones that actually do stuff together.

MICRODOSES Microdoses are small, everyday pleasurable experiences that result in a feeling of playfulness, connection, and/or flow. Maybe they cross the line to full-on fun, maybe they don’t, but they’re enjoyable, they’re energizing, and they leave you rejuvenated when you’re done. I recommend aiming to microdose on a fun-related activity at least several times a week, if not once a day. It’s possible to microdose spontaneously. I think of this as a carpe diem kind of fun.

Another way to microdose on fun is to deliberately seek out (and keep room on your schedule for) moments of playful rebellion, like making a weekly date for yourself where you sneak away from your desk in the middle of the day to go for a walk or meet a friend for lunch. Novelty can also help: some people microdose on fun by making a commitment to themselves to regularly try something new. And please: keep up your practice of noticing delights.

Leaf Van Boven, a neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who has studied the effects that different types of spending have on happiness, hypothesizes that this might be in part due to the fact that, whereas possessions tend to encourage people to compare themselves to one another (e.g., who has the nicest car or television) and thus divide them, experiences bring people together. They’re “a better source of entertaining conversation than material possessions,” according to Van Boven, and they lead to more enduring pleasure and satisfaction.

COMMIT TO SCREEN-LIFE BALANCE

One of my favorite ways to avoid falling prey to the worst parts of technology is to regularly take breaks from my devices. To do so, my husband and I often borrow a tradition from many of the world’s religions and spend Friday to Saturday nights disconnected from screens—the practice I mentioned to you earlier that’s sometimes called a “technology shabbat,” or “digital sabbath.” This disconnection helps create space and time that we can then use on activities and traditions that leave us nourished and refreshed.

PUT WORK INTO FUN…

…BUT DON’T TURN FUN INTO WORK

Conclusion The Power of Fun “Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently.” —Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

Next, we must answer the question that inspired this book: What do we want to pay attention to?

One of the many ironies surrounding fun is our assumption that, because it feels so good, it must be frivolous.