The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

by Catherine Price

a baby, gazing up at her mother. And there was her mother, looking down at her phone. I felt gutted.

Life is short; kids grow up so quickly. I didn’t want to coast through my days distracted and only half-present. I wanted to live. And that meant I needed to change, fast.

I felt like I was caught in a modern, real-life version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: 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.

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.

“activity that brings you joy just for the pure sake of doing it”?

I started by thinking of other times in my life when I’d experienced the feeling I now called True Fun. There was the ride home from a wedding where my husband and I had packed our car with friends and spent the trip belting “Bohemian Rhapsody” at the top of our lungs.

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.

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. On

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 restorative. It increases resilience and empathy. It creates community. It reduces resentment.

True Fun is the confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow. Whenever these three states occur at the same time, we experience True Fun.

As Annie Dillard has written, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”

philosopher Simone Weil called attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity.”