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August 29 - November 15, 2023
“If you get in the habit of your life being fun, if you move through life believing it’s supposed to be that way, you’ll notice when it’s not.1 I’ve been making life fun for so long I can’t imagine putting up with no fun. But the inverse is true, too. If you get in the habit of life not being fun, you start to not even notice, because that’s what you’re used to.” —MICHAEL LEWIS
WHEN IS THE LAST TIME YOU HAD FUN? I’m serious. Think about it. When’s the last time you felt exhilarated and lighthearted? When’s the last time you didn’t feel judged, by yourself or other people? When’s the last time you were engaged, focused, and completely present, undistracted by thoughts about the future or the past? When’s the last time you felt free? When’s the last time you felt alive? Maybe you were laughing with a friend. Maybe you were exploring a new place. Maybe you were being slightly rebellious. Maybe you were trying something for the first time. Maybe you felt an unexpected
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the armoire front became the pantry façade of my dreams, and I could finally stop my eBay searches.
I was searching for architectural salvage in the same way that other people consume social media: eyes glazed, hypnotized by the stream of images on my screen. The photos were less glamorous, but the compulsion was the same.
Hours that I might previously have devoted to doing things, like playing music, learning a new skill, or interacting with my husband (as opposed to sitting in the same room together, parallel-scrolling) increasingly were spent staring at a screen. I’d morphed from an interesting, interested, independent-minded person into someone who had been hypnotized by a small rectangular object
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.
Without apps to distract us, we found ourselves with more hours in the day—hours that we were free to use on things that we truly enjoyed. There was just one problem: I no longer knew what I enjoyed. It turned out that, for all of its benefits, “breaking up” with my phone was only the first step. If I really wanted to reclaim my life, I needed to remember how to live.
Oh my God, I thought to myself as I indulged in one of my favorite pastimes: catastrophic thinking. I’m just sitting here, waiting for time to pass till dinner. Which really means that I’m just waiting to die.
This had intrigued me but I hadn’t taken any action on it. (I’d probably gotten distracted by whatever website was open in the neighboring browser tab.)
But existential malaise can be very motivating.
And then one day, it hit me: I was having fun. But not “fun” in the mild, casual sense in which we often employ the term. This wasn’t the feeling of doing something “fun” for yourself, like getting a pedicure, or buying a new TV. It wasn’t the “fun” that we try to portray on social media, or the “fun” people seek by getting hammered at a bar. This was something different, something much more powerful and life-affirming. I decided to call the feeling “True Fun” to distinguish it from these other uses, and I became obsessed with figuring out how to have more of it.
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 person told me he was so incapable of having fun that a former girlfriend referred to him as “Nuf”—fun, backward.)
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 the flip side, there are folks who push back against putting more energy into fun because they think they are already having enough of it. In some instances, they may be right—in which case I encourage them to teach others their secrets. But for many of us, a lot of what we do “for fun” isn’t fun at all. Instead, we spend much of our leisure time on “Fake Fun,” a term I use to describe activities and possessions that are marketed to us as fun, that we work long hours to be able to afford, but that are ultimately meaningless or a waste of time—such as binge-watching shows to the point that
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The pursuit of True Fun helps us stay true to our authentic selves, with less time spent on mindless distraction and empty pursuits and more time devoted to people, experiences, and activities that bring us a sense of meaning and joy.
True Fun is the confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow. Whenever these three states occur at the same time, we experience True Fun.
Playfulness, connection, and flow only exist in the moment when we feel them, which explains the fascinating fact that True Fun occurs exclusively in the present tense. Also, unlike positive states such as happiness or satisfaction, True Fun is an experience. This means that we can’t have True Fun continuously, alas, because each instance of it has a beginning and an end. But on the flip side, this makes fun more accessible; it’s easier to imagine specific circumstances in which you might have fun than it is to imagine how you could become someone who is happy or satisfied.
True Fun and distraction are like oil and water: they do not mix.
Much like junk food, Fake Fun gives us a quick fix of pleasure but ultimately doesn’t make us feel good—and, over time, it can actually harm our mental and physical health. It also pulls our internal compasses off course. When we succumb to the siren song of Fake Fun, our guiding stars—our actual passions and priorities—become obscured by clouds; Fake Fun takes us in directions we don’t actually want to go and leaves us feeling vacant, anxious, unfulfilled, and numb. In short, the more we allow Fake Fun to hijack our compasses, the more dead inside we feel.
As Weil wrote, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”
But the Industrial Revolution and advent of factory jobs caused a huge shift in the way paid laborers were compensated—which is to say, earnings began to be determined not by their accomplishments but by the time they spent “at work.” It was the difference, in other words, between a cobbler being paid to repair a shoe (a project that has a defined endpoint and a clear way to measure success) and a factory worker being compensated by the hour for performing tasks that theoretically could be repeated indefinitely. The latter creates financial incentives for people to keep working for as long as
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Remote work
The shift to factory work also caused a new issue that has influenced the way we think about leisure time and fun. When you change people’s focus from accomplishing tasks to making stuff, you end up, perhaps unsurprisingly, with a lot of stuff. In order to make a profit, you have to convince people to buy the stuff you’re producing; in other words, you need to create demand.
One way to do this is to build entire industries—i.e., advertising and marketing—to convince people that they want and need more stuff. What’s one really effective way to do that? You tell people that buying your stuff will make them happy and help them have fun. (This works even better if you can get them to compete with each other to see who can acquire more stuff.) But of course, people need money in order to buy your stuff—and pay off the ensuing credit card debt—and making money requires them to work more, often at jobs at which they help produce even more stuff, which then needs to be
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What this all boils down to is that we have internalized the idea that time is a commodity that can be traded, and that the most important thing we can trade it for is money; therefore, any use of time that does not result in financial compensation is not a valuable use of time.
Our emphasis on outcomes and efficiency rather than satisfaction and enjoyment may partially explain some of the high rates of depression and anxiety in teenagers, especially those attending schools that serve as feeders for elite colleges.10 It certainly hints at why it’s so hard for many adults to prioritize True Fun and to enjoy it when it occurs: 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
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Making flow even more elusive is the fact that, no matter what we’re in the middle of doing, we’re only seconds away from an interruption, whether it’s from a child, an email, a news alert, or a text message or other notification. Indeed, when it comes to our ability to experience True Fun, these perpetual distractions may be the biggest obstacle of them all. Simply put, it is impossible to be in flow—and therefore to have True Fun—if your attention is divided. And, thanks in large part to the devices we carry in our pockets, our attention is divided all the time.fn9
Also, in many cases our devices are simply amplifying issues that we already had, such as not having good boundaries between our work and home lives, relying on external validation as a proxy for self-worth, overemphasizing money as a metric for the value of our time, and buying into the idea that the best way to achieve health, success, and happiness is to maximize every single thing we do.
Time flies when we’re truly having fun, but it also flies when we are in a dopamine-induced, Fake Fun–fueled trance.
The sheer amount of information available on (and shoved into our brains by) our phones is also likely harming our creativity. In their book, The Distracted Mind, neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and psychologist Larry Rosen make the point that human beings forage for new information in the same way that other
animals forage for food. This is another one of those evolutionary quirks that served us well in the past: seeking information was helpful when information was limited, just as our drive for food helped us when calories were scarce. But now, the abundance of cheap, sugar-filled food has led to an epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes, and our easy access to endless, often low-quality information is overwhelming our brains. 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
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thoughts. As Greg McKeown writes in his book Essentialism, “By abolishing any chance of being bored we have also lost the time we used to have to think and process.”62 If we want to be creators rather than consumers, if we want to be interesting people instead of automatons, we need...
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True Fun isn’t a distraction from our problems, in other words. It’s a solution.
What’s more, play and playfulness can help us get back in touch with (or figure out for the first time) who we actually are. In the words of British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott in his classic 1971 book, Playing and Reality, “It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality.”19 Brown elaborates on this idea, writing that “the self that emerges through play is the core, authentic self.”20
In fact, being in nature has so many positive psychological benefits that some researchers quasi-jokingly use the word “outdoorphins” to describe the types of endorphins that are triggered by being outside.50
Flourishing is a term psychologists use to refer to a state of optimal human functioning in which we feel engaged, open, purposeful, self-accepting, resilient, robust, motivated, and satisfied. It’s the opposite of languishing—which is to say, the all-too-familiar sensations of hollowness, emptiness, or being stuck in a rut.81 Many psychologists believe that, when it comes to feeling good about ourselves and our lives, flourishing—even more so than happiness—should be our goal.
Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being (and a flourishing convert himself), there are five fundamental elements of flourishing: positive emotions, engagement, positive relationships, meaning, and positive accomplishment. The more you experience them, the more you will flourish.82
The takeaway, according to Fredrickson, is that “people should cultivate positive emotions in their own lives and in the lives of those around them not just because doing so makes them feel good in the moment, but also because doing so transforms people for the better and sets them on paths toward flourishing and healthy longevity.”
Like many adults, I’d fallen into the habit of using productivity and money to decide whether something was worth doing. It’s the same tendency we talked about in the last chapter, and it isn’t a new thing; in fact, it’s exactly what Bertrand Russell alluded to in his 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness.”
“There was formerly a capacity for lightheartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency,” he wrote.83 “The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.”
Like many people, if I got paid money to do something, I assumed it must have been worth my time. If I worked for ten hours without a break, I concluded that I must have had a good day—even if it left me exhausted and depleted.
Using fun to guide our decisions can also make us more productive. Many of us in white-collar jobs get sucked into doing things that give us the impression we’re being “productive”—say, checking email constantly, or ticking small things off our to-do lists, or getting sucked into office politics and gossip—when in reality we’re just filling time to make ourselves feel like we’re getting stuff done. (Take a hard look at your workday, in other words: How much of your time are you spending on things that are meaningful or essential to your job—or you—versus on being reactive?)
Good discussion
Fun can also help us avoid burnout. For example, in moments of writer’s block, I used to do one of two things: I’d either stare at the problematic paragraph till my eyes glazed over, hoping for divine inspiration, or I would “take a break” by toggling over to my internet browser and staring at news headlines and the list of unanswered messages in my email inbox until I needed a break from that, at which point I’d go back to staring at the problematic paragraph. (And then I’d wonder why I kept finishing my days feeling like I never wanted to write again.) The problem was that I wasn’t actually
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with was that my working memory was overtaxed, and my ability to process new information and come up with new ideas had been depleted. (As a reminder, your “working” memory refers to all the things you’re holding in your consciousness at any given moment in time.) The last thing I needed was to add more information to my working memory by scanning news headlines and my inbox. This just contributed to my mental exhaustion.
Then I read Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. In it, he writes that many of the world’s greatest writers, scientists, and artists “balance busy lives with deep play, forms of rest that are psychologi...
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I experience what Soojung-Kim Pang is describing when he writes that “when we stop and rest properly, we’re not paying a tax on creativity.91 We’re investing in it.”
Imagine what it would be like if you were ravenously hungry but didn’t know that the gnawing in your stomach was hunger, didn’t know that the solution to hunger is to eat food, and didn’t know how to get food, let alone what types of foods you like. Many of us are similarly naïve about fun.
Begin by reflecting back on three experiences in your life that you would describe as True Fun: moments in which you felt completely present, engaged, and alive, in which time seemed to simultaneously stand still and fly by, and that were so joyous and energizing—so fun—that they count as some of your most treasured memories.
Here are some examples from the Fun Squad: I was 21 and traveling by myself, and I had just arrived in Croatia after getting the overnight ferry from Italy. I met three Canadians in my youth hostel and invited them to go on a day trip the next day with a couple of other people I had met in Italy who had traveled on the ferry to Croatia as well. The whole thing was such a fun experience, full of freedom to do whatever I wanted as there were no expectations …. The following day we had a wonderful day together, spending time at the bar while it was raining, going on a boat trip, swimming, walking
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I’d go to an open mic. Open mics are fun because you never know what might happen. They bring together earnest creators who want to share their original work (or a creative take on a cover) and who are, by and large, receptive and encouraging to all the other performers. Sometimes two performers will come up with a spontaneous collaboration. Sometimes someone with truly amazing talent shows up and totally wows the room. No two shows are the same—every one is unique and ephemeral. They epitomize that
