The Power of Fun Quotes

“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. Your choice of what to pay attention to in any given moment might not seem like a big deal, but taken together, these decisions are deeply consequential.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“We can’t control the fact that we will die. But we can control whether we actually live. We can control whether we merely endure our days or experience and enjoy them. We can control whether we arrive on our deathbeds feeling like we’ve wasted our time or end up satisfied with how we’ve spent our brief moment in the sun.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“True Fun is the confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow. Whenever these three states occur at the same time, we experience True Fun.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“One of the many great things about taking breaks from screens and devices is that it forces you to be still. This stillness can be very uncomfortable, but it also gives your brain a chance to breathe--and to come up with new ideas. As I sat there, contemplating my empty play tank and my inevitable march toward death, I asked myself a question ... What is something you've always said you wanted to do but that you supposedly don't have time for?”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“In short, 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.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“But what we don’t realize is that, far from being frivolous or selfish, the pursuit of fun will help us achieve all of these goals. Life is not a zero-sum equation: we can care about fun and be conscientious citizens who are committed to improving the world—indeed, fun can give us more energy with which to do so. And if we want our own lives to be satisfying and joyful, True Fun isn’t optional. It shouldn’t be an afterthought. It should be our guiding star.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“We can’t control the fact that we will die. But we can control whether we actually live.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“After all, habits and routines make our lives easier, but they also make things boring. Consider your commute, or your weekly run to the grocery store: you’ve probably traced and retraced the same route so many times that you no longer have to think about it. That’s convenient and efficient, but when you’re on autopilot, you’re not really present. You could walk out your front door and end up at your desk or in the produce aisle with absolutely no memory of how you got there. (This is even more true if you’ve spent the trip there staring at your phone.) Not only will navigating your life on autopilot leave you with fewer memories, it will actually make time seem to speed up. William James described this in his classic 1890 text, The Principles of Psychology, when he wrote that “as each passing year converts some of [our] experience[s] into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and weeks smooth themselves out…and the years grow hollow and collapse.” (Way to twist the knife, William.) Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as “dissociation,” and screens are a particularly powerful trigger for it. According to tech addiction expert David Greenfield, that’s what’s happening when you look up from your phone and have no idea where the last forty-five minutes of your life have gone. As James alluded to, when you fill your schedule with routines, habits, and passive consumption, your memories will arrange themselves in a smooth chain of indistinguishable links, with very little to help you tell where one day ended and another began. The best way to fight back and to slow down time is to focus on creating more opportunities for what scientists call “pattern separation”—in other words, finding ways to break up monotony. A life filled with new experiences and small rebellions can do just this. Instead of a long, smooth chain, you’ll end up with the equivalent of a necklace made of colorful beads, each of which holds the potential to become, in the words of Johan Huizinga, “a treasure to be retained by the memory.” The more distinct these beads are (and the more beads you collect each day), the more time will seem to slow down. As an example, think of your four years of high school. Chances are that you have distinct memories from freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior years, and that, for better or for worse, those four years seemed to pass relatively slowly. Compare that to how many distinct memories you have from the last four years of your adult life.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“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.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“The transformation this idea caused in the world at large cannot be overstated,” writes Headlee. “When time is money, idle hours are a waste of money. This is the philosophical underpinning of all our modern stress: that time is too valuable to waste.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“When you change people’s focus from accomplishing tasks to making stuff, you end up, perhaps unsurprisingly, with a lot of stuff.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“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 they can bear it, in order to earn more money.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“It’s as if we’ve become trapped in some Dickensian orphanage where the only available food is gruel: we’re so used to life being tasteless (and stressful and competitive) that it wouldn’t even occur to us to demand other more nourishing and flavorful foods.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“What’s more, we’re creating a value system that will reduce their ability to experience it for their entire lives. How can you build a life full of playfulness, connection, and flow when you’ve never been taught that they’re important (or, even more concerningly, if you haven’t experienced them to begin with)? How are you supposed to appreciate True Fun—and lose yourself in its joy—if you’ve been raised to view life as a competition in which resources and opportunities are scarce, and you are constantly being ranked and judged?”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“The words we use to talk about attention and time—we pay attention; we spend time”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“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.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“medication. If you take a step back and observe adults “having fun,” you may notice that many of the things we pass off as fun could also be described as numbing ourselves from our current reality. For example: getting drunk or high. Binging on movies or TV. Spending hours mindlessly scrolling.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“It can occur when you feel unusually connected to your physical environment (e.g., nature), the activity in which you’re participating, a pet, or even your own body.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“when we’re being playful, we don’t mind if there’s no tangible reward.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“By playfulness I mean a spirit of lightheartedness and freedom—of doing an activity just for the sake of doing the activity and not caring too much about the outcome.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“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.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“If our attention is like a spotlight, crisp-edged and narrow, for which life provides an infinite number of possible targets but only a finite number of days, then where do we want to focus it?”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“All of us crave liberation from our adult selves, at least from time to time.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“In the attention economy, we are not the customers or the vendors; we are the users (an ominous term!), and our attention is the product that is being sold.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“according to Adam Grant, “Psychologists find that in cultures where people pursue happiness individually” (as we in the United States tend to do), “they may actually become lonelier. But in cultures where they pursue happiness socially—through connecting, caring and contributing—people appear more likely to gain well-being.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“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. Even everyday forms of evaluation, such as “liking” things on social media or editing the selfie we just took, count as judgment and encourage self-consciousness—another fun killer—and therefore will destroy that moment’s capacity to be fun. Comparing ourselves to other people is also a form of judgment and is toxic to fun—as the saying goes, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“The emotional power of the memories it creates is proof that True Fun isn’t frivolous; it’s profound.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again

“No sane person would have utilized any other means of communication as often as I was checking my phone,” she wrote. “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.”
― Catherine Price, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again