Can you remember the last time you had fun—real, true fun that revitalized you, that caused you to lose track of time and shed that fretting self-consciousness? Many see fun as a frilly nicety or frivolity, but award-winning journalist Catherine Price argues that fun is foundational to life and to recovering that feeling of being alive. Dubbed “the Marie Kondo for brains,” Price writes around themes of coming alive and becoming aware of the obstacles thereto. Building on her previous best-seller How to Break Up with Your Phone, she explores why we often struggle with that “dead-inside feeling” of ennui, how modern culture encourages that feeling, and how rediscovering the power of fun can counteract the modern malaise.

Imagine being assigned a meal regimen that not only allows but requires that you eat your favorite foods—even those indulgent treats meant to be consumed in moderation. But, instead of leading to clogged arteries, lethargy, and weight-gain, it turns out your favorite foods are essential for good health. Even more than healthy, your existence depends on regularly consuming your favorite foods. It might sound too good to be true, but that is what true, authentic fun does for us and how badly we need it. It's critical to short-term and long-term emotional and physical health.

These experiences of fun can’t be conjured at will, but we can learn how to put ourselves in its path. There are ways to develop a radar (and become a lightning rod) for fun. More on that further down, but for now, we will understand fun better if we unpack several common misconceptions.

There’s this popular narrative that fun is selfish, childish, and superfluous. Research shows that fun is vital and necessary for adults as well as kids, and it allows us to be present in our lives and in the lives of loved ones. Far from being selfish or indulgent—it helps us to become more selfless.

There is a surprisingly strong biological basis for fun. One Dutch historian went so far as to describe humans as Homo ludens (literally “the playing man”). He saw fun as a biological imperative evolutionarily built into us—even though the impulse to play defies the bare-bones survivalist logic of evolution that sees life as a tooth-and-nail struggle with no room for frills. Zoologists found that periods of play in animals tend to overlap with the most significant spurts in cerebellum growth. Other studies have shown that laughter releases specific kinds of endorphins that enhance social connections and mitigate stress’s toll on the body. What the scientific literature calls “mirthful laughter” improves the body’s immune response and reduces hormones linked to depression. This kind of laughter also lowers the production of the stress hormone cortisol, which becomes poisonous when pumped into the body for extended periods of time. One piece of research found that simply laughing with friends about a time you once laughed together reduces stress. Laughter almost always accompanies fun. It is almost always a social phenomenon as well. 

Fun belongs at the center of our lives—not the periphery. Obviously, fun is not part of the bottom (most basic) rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: Adequate food, water, and shelter are needed for True Fun to be possible; and trauma, poor health, poverty, and unemployment pose significant barriers to exploring life-restoring fun. That’s an important qualification to mention, but the order of needs does not change the fact that fun remains a deeply felt need baked into our DNA—a need that holds life-changing potential if we meet it. It’s worth pursuing if we can.

Not all fun is created equal: There’s True Fun and Fake Fun. One will energize you, the other feeds that languishing feeling with which many of us are familiar.

True Fun can blindside us with a moment of mind-blowing euphoria or it can be a slow and steady drip that leaves us deeply grateful and light-hearted. This kind of fun resides at the intersection of playfulness, connectedness, and flow. It lodges more deeply in our minds and memories. True Fun makes us more resilient and empathetic, and restores us, both mentally and physically. In this state of True Fun, you lose that nagging self-consciousness that constantly braces for judgment from others (and yourself). It causes us to lose track of time and stop obsessing over outcomes because we’re so absorbed in the activity at hand. In True Fun, we experience feelings of release and freedom, of being completely ourselves, of childlike delight.

As if that isn’t good enough, True Fun also lays a foundation for deep productivity and creativity. (Ironically, we say ‘no’ to True Fun because we “don’t have time,” but it’s the lack of True Fun that leaves the tasks we deem necessary uninspired and monotonous.)

True Fun is not the obstacle, but the remedy to blocks and barriers in life’s other domains, from career to family life. When Price began taking a casual weekly guitar class, she found some intangible sense of joy that translated into playfulness with her husband and a heightened degree of attentiveness to her young daughter. The experience in the class (flow, losing track of time, no sense of fear) and after the class (light-heartedness and focus) all suggest Price got the real thing.

Many times, we think we are having fun, when in fact we are getting the life sucked out of us. When an activity leaves us feeling drained and numb, we’ve fallen into the clutches of Fake Fun. Some common Fake Fun activities are binging shows, “doomscrolling” through social media news feeds, habitually doing drugs or drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, and buying things we know deep down we don’t need. You will also notice that all these activities are glamorized and served up to consumers as things people do “for fun.” This creates some confusion: How do we know if what we’re experiencing is True Fun or Fake Fun?

You may have been lulled into Fake Fun if the activities you’re gravitating toward are compulsive, if you’re using them to self-medicate, or if it’s encouraging patterns of passive consumption. If what you’re doing isn’t promoting flow, playfulness, or connectedness, something other than True Fun is happening.

Despite American culture’s outsized emphasis on entertainment, there is a growing scarcity of True Fun—not a growing excess. This might sound counterintuitive, but the problem is that so much of what passes for entertainment is Fake Fun, which drains us. “Weapons of mass distraction,” like phones, tablets, and laptops are especially good at fragmenting our attention and leaving us too numb to play and connect. They rarely deliver on their promises of fun.

In short, True Fun is life-affirming, while Fake Fun is life-depleting.

Even if you’re convinced that True Fun is vital to recovering that feeling of aliveness and that it matters, it remains a nice idea until you reflect on how True Fun has been manifest in your life. The first step to having more True Fun is to “fun audit” your life. Most people would never place “audit” and “fun” in the same sentence, but reflecting on your own life and gauging how much True Fun you are allowing into it can pave the path to experiencing more fun, and to discovering anti-fun patterns in your life.

Begin by tracking the moments in your life that were full of laughter, where you felt free, very much yourself, as if you almost slipped out of normal, measurable time because you were so enveloped in the moment, or where your mood and energy levels suddenly got a boost. Sometimes it comes like a flash flood. Other times, True Fun comes as gentle-but-palpable trickle over an extended period of time. Whatever form it takes, it’s worth taking note of—just as long as flow, playfulness, and/or connection is part of the equation.

Once you get a feel for what True Fun has felt like in your life, it’s time to take the exploration a level deeper. Here are some questions for honest self-reflection:

-Is having fun a priority for me?

-Do I have a sense of what is fun for me?

-Do my friends consider me a fun person to be around?

-Am I aware of the people, contexts, and activities that spark True Fun for me?

-Have I made any effort to integrate these people, contexts, and activities into my life routines?

-How often do I experience wonder?

There’s plenty of gradient between yes and no on these questions, as well as room to grow. If your answers tip you toward novice in the ways of True Fun, that’s okay! That’s what this audit is for!

Once you’ve mapped out the feeling of fun inside you and had an honest conversation with yourself about the ways fun is present or missing in your life, take a Fun History—where you comb your life’s story for a handful of moments that top all the rest. Look for those moments that were unbelievably and unforgettably fun. This means finding moments that were not just meaningful, like a graduation or the birth of a child, but moments teeming with playfulness, connection, and flow like you’ve rarely experienced.

Ask yourself what it was about those moments that made them so fun. Was it certain people? Certain places or specific contexts? Was it what you were doing? How old were you? How did it feel? See if you notice any thematic throughlines that help make sense of your life’s most fun experiences.

Consider writing down these mountain-top experiences and exploring them. In that same journal, it will also help you to keep a daily log that tracks moments of fun during your day. We often overlook fun in our lives, and when we do notice it, we often forget after a day or two. Depending on which aspects of fun these experiences touch, you can mark the moments of fun you jot down with a P for playfulness, C for Connection, and/or F for flow, whichever made the moment fun for you. Sometimes people don’t even realize how much fun they’ve been having until they start writing it down.

Once you get a feel for the contexts in which fun shows up, you can start giving some thought to how to integrate those places, people and activities into your life and routines. The acronym SPARK will help you in your process of prioritizing fun and discovering more of what fun means for you personally—as everyone experiences fun differently.

SPARK stands for:

-make Space

-Pursue passions

-Attract fun

-Rebel

-Keep at it

Keeping space open in your life is literal and metaphorical. It involves reducing clutter in your physical space as well as your mental space. It could mean letting go of peripheral roles and responsibilities or setting boundaries to protect your time—something that friends, acquaintances, and employers can get a piece of if your phone is always with you. Sometimes people try to pursue fun by adding more activities and more purchases to make those activities possible. But making space for fun doesn’t have to break the bank. In fact, most people who discover their sources of True Fun tend to become minimalists, streamlining their possessions and pursuits.

Pursuing passions is an integral part of sparking fun. Interests (what you like learning about) and hobbies (what you like to do) tend to relax you, but your passions energize and enliven you. Passions are interests and hobbies with rocket fuel. Hobbies, interests, and passions are all worth leaning into and discovering. We are dynamic beings, so over time some interests become passions and some passions cool and become hobbies. That’s normal. For many adults, it is hard to identify them at first. This is markedly different from how most kids can rattle off their passions and interests in a heartbeat. There’s no shame in being unsure. Keep exploring. The more you discover, the more engaged in your life you will become. 

Attracting fun is about becoming a magnet for playfulness, connection, and flow. People who are fun magnets tend to be open to spur-of-the-moment changes, are settled in who they are, and have no fear of looking ridiculous, being vulnerable or even being laughed at while attempting something new. They tend to delight in the simple things of life and experience life as full of joy. If that list doesn’t resonate with you, that’s okay. Having fun is a risk, especially if it’s new for us. Moreover, there are certain personality and genetic traits that can predispose many of us to emotions like sadness, fear, and anger.

The main thing to be aware of is whether we are using personality as a shield to bypass social risks. We might successfully ward off the perceived threat, but we also ward off fun. You don’t need to force yourself to adopt a syrupy-sweet, bubbly persona if that’s not your typical social wavelength. Simply putting yourself in the path of fun, practicing being in the moment, and seeking delight can open life up for you and show you more fun. Many people report that just being in the presence of people who are fun helps them drop their fears and inhibitions.

Rebellion is part of keeping the spark alive, too. No need to commit a felony or land yourself in prison, but the occasional act of mild rebellion against norms, roles, and status quos can excite that childlike fun and spontaneous playfulness—especially when others are in on it.

Finally, keep at it. Restructuring your life around the power of fun isn’t that different from exercise. It takes work to grow the fun muscles, and it can be discouraging at points, but as you stick with it, you will see gains overtime.

You are going to die. It’s inevitable. There’s nothing you can do to alter that fact; however, you do have control over the way you meet death. Sadly, many people limp through life with that “dead-inside” feeling, which is hardly living at all. It’s as if we die well before we’re even dead.

Ultimately, our lives are comprised of what we turn our attention to. As writer Annie Dillard put it, “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” Think about being a child, and how it felt when an adult—despite everything going on in their busy world—stopped everything to give you undivided attention. That attention made a world of difference to you. One mystic saw attention (in its purest form) as no different than prayer. Suddenly, attention becomes not just a side note to life, but the very means by which we attend to life.

So what do we want to attend to? And what kind of people do we become if we give the lion’s share of our attention to the political fulminations, social media diatribes, or anything else that consistently upsets us? What does that do to our emotional world? What kind of people do we become if we make that the air we breathe? And what kind of people might we become if we gave more of our attention to playfulness, connection, and flow—qualities that, taken together, make up True Fun? Imagine an inner world increasingly built with experiences of True Fun. What would that life look like? Is that an inner world you would enjoy more and enjoy inviting others into? After all, True Fun is a far more joyful experience when it is shared.

These insights are just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of The Power of Fun here. And since we get a commission on every sale, your purchase will help keep this newsletter free.