The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

by Catherine Price

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. —

One of the foundational issues we face, when it comes to making True Fun a priority, is that we’ve been conditioned to believe that the pursuit of fun—particularly our own fun—is frivolous, selfish, and self-indulgent, even immature and childish. (That is, if we think about it at all.) We think that if we’re focused on fun, we’re not paying enough attention to the world’s problems or doing enough to help other people. As for our own self-improvement, we tend to focus our efforts on seeking “loftier” and more “serious” goals, such as achieving happiness, wealth, long-term health, and a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. We pursue these goals doggedly, reading self-help books, seeing therapists, taking antidepressants, sweating through workouts. When you add in the time that’s required to fulfill the obligations of adult life—going to work, doing your taxes, cleaning the house, raising kids—it’s understandable that fun ends up as an afterthought.

True Fun is the confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow.

There are also things that we’re drawn to, sometimes compulsively, but that are straight-up not fun. Like, for example, busyness. (This misperception is particularly common on vacations, when we overschedule ourselves in an attempt to maximize our fun.) True Fun is more likely to happen when it has space to unfurl.

Ideally, we want to learn how to loosen up without external help (which is something that devoting ourselves to the pursuit of True Fun will help us do).

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.

When this happens, chances are that you have been seduced by what I call “Fake Fun.” As I alluded to earlier, 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. 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. Think about it. 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, these decisions are deeply consequential.

As Weil wrote, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” Our

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.

The more we allow our time to be shredded into confetti, the more we treat ourselves as products with public images that need to be cultivated and maintained—in other words, the more complicit we become—the less we’re able to slip into flow, be our authentic selves, and experience True Fun. Algorithms are also shaping

“You would never turn the TV on and off or open and close the newspaper twelve times in 20 minutes, or call someone several times in an hour to say one sentence and then hang up.” Indeed,

We never know when something new will arrive, or what it will be. So we keep our phones with us, and part of our attention trained on them, at all times. Regardless of how meaningless the eventual rewards are, the unpredictability and anticipation causes our brains to release dopamine, which in turn makes us want to keep checking. As David Greenfield once put it to me, “Our brains love maybe.” —

Just as too much sunlight makes it impossible to see, too much information makes it impossible for us to think.

There’s a reason, after all, that many of our most creative ideas and insights occur when we’re in the shower: it’s one of the very few contexts in which we allow our brains to relax, to wander, and in a sense, to play. (This used to also be true for walking, but now so many of us text or listen to podcasts on our walks that they no longer really qualify as downtime.) When we spend all of our time scrolling and surfing, listening and watching—in other words, when we spend all our time consuming—we’re spraying our brains with an unrelenting fire hose of information and giving them no chance to come up with new insights, ideas, or thoughts.

It was, they concluded, their ikigai, which they described as “the happiness of always being busy.” But not busy in our western, always on, working 24/7 sense of the word. Busyness, in ikigai, refers to the happiness of always being engaged and present in something—or with someone—you care about. It refers, in other words, to a particular kind of flow. The more you’re in flow, say García and Miralles, “the closer you will be to your ikigai.” The

These days, when I encounter a nonmandatory request—even if it’s potentially positive, such as a new opportunity—I ask myself: Does this feel fun? Will it generate playfulness, connection, or flow? If so, I consider saying yes. If not—or if saying yes will reduce the time I have available for more meaningful, enjoyable, or rewarding activities—I do my best to say no.

I also try to pay attention to my body—it doesn’t lie. If I feel any sort of tightness or clenching, or if my breath becomes shallow or short, it’s a sign that I shouldn’t agree. On the flip side, if I notice lightness or excitement, I consider saying yes, even if the idea of doing so makes my stomach flutter. That’s often a sign of nervous excitement, which probably means I’m stepping out of my comfort zone in a good way.

Here are some other signs to watch for: Laughter A sense of release/freedom/letting go Feeling like you’re having a special, shared experience Losing track of time Feeling free from self-judgment and self-consciousness Feeling like you’ve temporarily “stepped out” of normal life Being fully absorbed and present Not caring too much about the outcome A feeling of childlike excitement and joy A positive boost in energy

Feeling totally yourself

While I didn’t ask about it explicitly, there was also one activity that popped up over and over again in people’s answers and that represented an (almost literal) line in the sand: the beach! Some people think of the beach as the epitome of fun, a catalyst to an infinite number of enjoyable experiences. Other people hate everything about it. (The sun, the sand, the salt: everything.) The fact that I did not mention a beach anywhere in the survey itself makes this even more interesting to me, and amusing.

“The notion of free time is as distant from most people’s everyday experience as open space.” —Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future

In an unfortunate twist, the people who are the most inherently responsible tend to have the most responsibilities, because other people tend to think of them whenever something needs to be done. These are the people who are running PTAs and coaching sports teams and serving on nonprofit boards and organizing office birthday parties. If you are one of those people, I’d like you to take a moment and ask yourself: How many of your obligations are mandatory, and how many have you taken on by choice? Of the ones that you have voluntarily assumed, how many do you enjoy? Then comes the big question: What could you say no to? I know this may sound counterintuitive, given that in general, building a fun-filled life requires being open to new experiences. But we need to be judicious. If you want to have space to say yes to more things you enjoy, you need to say no to those you don’t.

What for? Why now? What else?

Re phone use.

the process of creating space may make you realize that you have lost touch with what fun feels like. Or, worse, you may discover that you’re having a hard time feeling anything at all. I’m serious! This happens surprisingly often: we’ve gotten so used to constant busyness, stimulation, and distractions that any deceleration, or break from the digital world, can leave us feeling disoriented and empty. But don’t despair. Learning how to sit and be present with this discomfort (which, somewhat counterintuitively, is often the best way to move through it) is a skill that can help us navigate all sorts of challenges, such as disappointment, loss, and fear. Also, a certain degree of angst can actually be useful. Some of the best things in life require effort and discomfort

As Dunbar himself told a reporter for The New Yorker, “What Facebook does, and why it’s so successful in so many ways, is it allows you to keep track of people who would otherwise effectively disappear.” (To which I say, maybe there are some people in your life whom you care about so little that they actually should disappear.)

This revelation—the more you focus on delight, the more delights will reveal themselves to you—echoes the same philosophy we’ve been talking about throughout this book: that our lives are what we pay attention to. If we train ourselves to notice delights—the everyday beauties and kindnesses and amusing absurdities, the things that make us laugh or that we feel grateful for—we will feel more positive. If we pay more attention to sources of playfulness, connection, and flow, we’ll have more fun.

Noticing delight is essentially a gratitude practice, served in a tiny teacup. And tiny teacups are themselves delightful. So there you go.

This means that if you’re organizing a gathering, you need to be careful about whom you include. In other words, not only should you make a point to invite people whom you consider fun magnets, but you should reflect on who might be a possible spoilsport (or just not a good fit for the particular group or activity), and consider not inviting them. We’re trained to assume the attitude of “the more the merrier,” lest we risk being rude or hurting people’s feelings. But when you’re building playgrounds to attract fun, in some cases, more is not merrier; protecting your gathering from spoilsports—or, really, anyone who you think won’t add positive energy—is an act of generosity toward your guests.

Having too many responsibilities makes us feel heavy and burdened. Always prioritizing other people’s needs over our own leads to resentment and burnout. As journalist Jennifer Senior puts it in her book about modern parenting, All Joy and No Fun, “All of us crave liberation from our adult selves, at least from time to time.”

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.