The Science of Fun – Part 1

What makes for a fun experience?

Our need for fun, along with just about everything else about us, has an evolutionary basis.  As Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler write in their book The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life:

[R]ecall that we laugh mostly in the presence of others. So what communicative purpose does laughter serve in the context of play? Gregory Bateson, a British anthropologist, figured it out during a trip to the zoo. He saw two monkeys engaged with each other in what looked like combat, but clearly wasn’t real. They were, in other words, merely play fighting. And what Bateson realized was that, in order to play fight, the monkeys needed some way to communicate their playful intentions—some way to convey the message, “We’re just playing.” Without one or more of these “play signals,” one monkey might misconstrue the other’s intentions, and their playful sparring could easily escalate into a real fight. At the time, it wasn’t clear to Bateson exactly how the monkeys were telegraphing their playful intentions to each other, just that they must have had some means of doing it. But biologists have since studied these play signals in detail, and it’s not only primates who use them. “We’re just playing” is such an important message, it turns out, that many species have developed their own vocabulary for it. Dogs, for example, have a “play bow”—forearms extended, head down, hindquarters in the air—which they use to initiate a bout of play. Chimps use an open-mouthed “play face,” similar to a human smile, or double over and peer between their legs at their play partners. And many animals, in addition to using specific gestures, will also move slowly or engage in exaggerated or unnecessary movement, as if to convey playful intent by conspicuously wasted effort that no animal would undertake if it were in serious danger. All of these signals serve to reassure playmates of one’s happy mood and friendly intentions. And humans, in the same vein, have laughter. But not just laughter—we also use smiling, exaggerated body movements, awkward facial expressions (like winking), and a high-pitched, giddy “play scream.” All of these signals mean roughly the same thing: “We’re just playing.” This message allows us to coordinate safe social play with other humans, especially when we’re playing in ways that hint at or border on real danger. It’s the behavioral equivalent of “Just kidding!” or a winking emoji at the end of a text message . When we laugh in response to someone else’s actions, however, it’s a statement not about intentions but about perceptions. It says, “I perceive your actions as playful; I know you’re only kidding around.” This is reactive laughter, the kind elicited in response to an external stimulus. Jokes and other forms of humor are one such stimulus, but being tickled, chased, or surprised in a game of peekaboo all work the same way. We need to reinforce that “We’re just playing” only when circumstances arise which might, if not for the laughter, be mistaken for too serious or dangerous.

But what do we know today about the elements necessary for humans to have the unique experience of “fun”?  Catherine Price explores that question in her book The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again.

Price writes:

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 sense of connection. Regardless of the activity, the result was the same: You laughed and smiled. You felt liberated from your responsibilities. When it was over, the experience left you energized, nourished, and refreshed … Before we dive in, it’s important to acknowledge that we can only focus on True Fun if our basic needs are taken care of—food, shelter, adequate rest, and physical safety are definitely prerequisites, and there are many situations that can make it difficult, if not impossible, to focus on fun, such as poverty, sickness, abuse, trauma, and job insecurity. [But] True Fun is not a scarce resource, accessible only to an elite few. And while it’s easy to get caught up in materialistic striving and be tricked into believing that if you were richer, you’d be having more fun, that’s not true, either; sure, money can be helpful, but True Fun doesn’t require wealth. While some of the changes I’ve made are things I’ve had to pay for (e.g., guitar class), many of them have been free, and some have actually saved me money.

Price then lays out some ground rules for True Fun:

[T]he 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 … [F]or 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 our eyes glaze over, buying things we don’t need, or mindlessly scrolling through social media for hours at a time. Fake Fun is numbing and leaves us empty when we’re done. True Fun, on the other hand, makes us feel nourished and refreshed … 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. We enjoy it when we experience it, but when it comes to our priorities, it’s often at the very end of the list.

Price then describes what researchers have come to see as real “fun”:

Given the wide range of experiences and emotional intensities that we describe as “fun,” the idea that fun is a life-changing force may sound hyperbolic. But that’s not fun’s fault; it’s because we’ve cheapened the word through careless (even if unintentional) overuse. I realized that if we really want to grasp—and harness—the full power of fun, we need to become much more precise about how and when we use the word. Do an internet search for “how to have fun” and you’ll quickly encounter more evidence of how broadly and sloppily we use the word. “Roast a turkey,” suggests a list of ideas from CNN, which also includes encouragements to get more sleep, to “put together an altar to honor loved ones who have passed,” and to watch a documentary about climate change. A similar list from Real Simple magazine proposes that if you want to have more fun, you should “make snickerdoodles,” “get everyone some fun back-to-school notebooks and supplies,” and—I swear I am not making this up—“adorn your table with gourds … The lack of a solid definition—coupled with the assumption that fun isn’t serious enough to deserve attention to begin with—likely explains why so few people have tried to study fun’s psychological or physical effects directly. In a 2017 paper about the general concept of fun—one of the few I was able to find—the authors write that “relatively little research has investigated the consequences of fun” and point out that “the word fun does not appear as an index term in any emotion or social-psychology textbook or handbook of which we are aware.” In the absence of scholarly guideposts, I developed my own terminology, starting with the concept of True Fun—which I chose because I wanted to distinguish the euphoria triggered by my experience in my guitar class from our more pedestrian uses of “fun” (not to mention toenail fungus). I also wanted to clarify that True Fun doesn’t rely on the doing of any particular activity. Having more of it does not require you to attend more trivia nights or, I dunno, learn how to play pickleball.

Price read lots of answers people gave to questions about the kind of experiences they found to be truly fun.  She writes:

The more of these experiences I read, the more convinced I became that, while True Fun can occur in an endless variety of contexts, there is, in fact, a universal definition that holds true across people and experiences. True Fun is the confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow. Whenever these three states occur at the same time, we experience True Fun … True Fun can only occur when people are being playful. 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. Playfulness creates a sense of being outside of your normal reality; you’re relieved of your everyday responsibilities and feel carefree; you smile frequently and laugh easily. True Fun always involves a sense of connection—the feeling of having a special, shared experience with someone (or something) else … [I]n the vast majority of instances, this connection is with another person; when people describe True Fun, they report feeling like they’re joining together with someone while at the same time feeling totally themselves. Flow is a term used in psychology to describe when you are fully engrossed and engaged in your present experience to the point that you lose track of the passage of time. (You know the adage “time flies when you’re having fun”? That’s flow.) Self-consciousness and judgment—whether from yourself or other people—are anathema to flow, as is any form of distraction.

What gets in the way of fun?  Price says:

Distraction is probably the greatest offender, since it gets in the way of all three [playfulness, connection, and flow]. If we are at all distracted—if our attention is split—we cannot experience True Fun, because fun requires flow, and flow requires that we be fully present. Since the definition of being distracted is that you are not present (the word “distracted” is derived from a Latin verb that means “to drag away”), this means that anything that distracts us is going to block True Fun. If we want to experience more True Fun, we need to minimize the amount of time we spend trying to pay attention to multiple things at once. In addition, distraction gets in the way of playfulness, which requires active engagement. (You can’t maintain witty banter, for example, if you’re not paying attention to the conversation.) And it destroys connection, too: we’ve all experienced the frustration and loneliness that comes from being around someone who is physically present but mentally someplace else. True Fun and distraction are like oil and water: they do not mix. 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.

Price writes of the false allure of “busy-fun”:

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. 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. This is a really important distinction, given that so many of the things that we do “for fun” are passive activities such as watching television or checking our social media feeds … I am not suggesting that activities such as going to the movies, reading books, or watching your favorite show are wastes of time, or that you should cut passive consumption out of your life entirely. But if we’re being precise about it, these things are not truly fun—unless, that is, something about the experience provides a sense of playfulness, connection, and flow (for instance, if a performer is particularly good at connecting with the audience, or if you attend a concert with friends). And in that case, the experience no longer really qualifies as passive consumption to begin with. As I see it, the main problem with passive consumption is that when it’s made too easy and accessible—as it is on our televisions and devices—it runs the risk of becoming a form of drug itself, something we use to seek pleasure and avoid pain (both for ourselves and for our kids). Not only does this habit hold the potential to cause dependence, it can transform passive consumption from an occasional choice into our default, until eventually we forget that other options even exist. And every time we use it to numb ourselves, it saps time and energy that we could be putting toward the pursuit of True Fun … [Y]ou may keep finding yourself entranced by things that you have realized are not ultimately enjoyable and that will never lead to True Fun—like, for example, descending into social media spirals, or doomscrolling the news, or swiping mindlessly through dating profiles, or spending a beautiful day glued to your couch, or buying things you don’t need or can’t afford. You may know intellectually that these are not rewarding uses of your time—and be fully aware that they’re likely to leave you feeling bad and unsatisfied—and yet keep getting sucked into them anyway. And once you’re in their thrall, you may find it very hard to break away. 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. In other words, the source of entertainment went from being a form of passive consumption to being fodder for interaction, which in turn can facilitate fun. For example, I have a friend who routinely has fun when she and her husband watch cheesy Hallmark movies together and try to predict the dialogue. In this case, the movie itself isn’t the fun per se; the fun comes from the game that they’re playing together (for which the movie provides material).

Price also considers why people today might not be having as much fun as they used to:

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. Our choice of where to direct our attention also affects our emotions and moods. If you habitually direct your attention toward things that upset you—alarmist news headlines, for example, or social media screeds—then you will experience the world as alarming and upsetting. If you choose instead to pay attention to things that uplift you, or that offer opportunities for playfulness, connection, and flow, you will experience the world in a completely different, more positive light. Adding to the challenge is the fact that our brains can only pay full attention to one cognitively demanding thing at a time. (This is why you can fold your laundry while listening to the news, but you can’t listen to the news while reading a book.) In other words, our brains can’t multitask, and if you don’t believe me, try this exercise from a Buddhist monk named Haemin Sunim, described in his book The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down: “The mind cannot have two thoughts at once,” he writes. “See if you can think two thoughts at exactly the same time. Well? Is it possible?” The fact that we can’t split our attention means that whenever we make a decision about what to focus on in any given moment, we are also implicitly making a decision about what we’re not going to focus on. Our attention, in other words, is zero-sum, similar to a narrow spotlight that can only illuminate one small circle, leaving everything else in the dark. In any given moment—including right now—you’re missing nearly all that is going on around you. This is necessary; otherwise, we’d be completely overwhelmed. But it further demonstrates how important it is to be intentional about where we direct our light.

Price then explores some of the changes that have occurred through history to make fun more elusive in our daily lives today:

[B]y treating childhood as a résumé-building opportunity, by leaving no space in our kids’ schedules for (supposedly) purposeless play, we’re also preventing our children from having True Fun. 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? The consequence is that many of us, adults and kids alike, are having so little True Fun that we have forgotten what it feels like, to the point that we don’t even realize what we’re missing (that is, if we ever consciously knew how to recognize it at all). 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 … The evolution of how we’ve thought about time is covered in fascinating detail in Celeste Headlee’s 2020 book, Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving. In it, she writes that for most of human history, work productivity was measured (and, for paid laborers, earnings determined) by the things people accomplished or created rather than the amount of time they spent on them. “Prior to the Industrial Age, most people worked to complete specific tasks: bring in the harvest, put up the barn, stitch a quilt,” writes Headlee. When these tasks were complete, so was the day’s work. As a result, prior to around 1800, many people “actually had time to sit around a fire and listen to all 3,182 lines of an epic poem like Beowulf.” (“Back then,” she says, “that was considered a fun night with the family.”) 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 they can bear it, in order to earn more money. 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 sold in order to make a profit. And on and on and on. (You have just witnessed my attempt to distill the history of American materialism and consumer culture into a paragraph.) 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. “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.” Today, the idea that time is money has been ingrained even in those of us who do not have factory jobs. Indeed, many salaried careers combine the worst of both worlds: the amount of money you can earn is capped by your salary, but there’s always more work that you could do (and that you may feel pressured to do, in order to prove that you are “committed” and to keep up with your peers) … Some of what we do at work is genuinely productive and fulfilling, of course, but much of it (think email) is not; we spend a lot of time just churning and trying to stay afloat. As Headlee describes it, “Many of us are exhausting ourselves … working very hard at things that accomplish very little of substance but feel necessary.” … 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 with a side of guilt … I have a habit of sitting in front of my computer for hours at a stretch and then feeling so physically gross that I decide I must counteract my sedentary work life with intense exercise. This urge, combined with my compulsive need to be “productive,” means that I often use my free time to attend indoor cycling classes in which I join other people in a dark room (which usually has no windows and is sometimes literally in a basement) on stationary bikes equipped with sensors measuring our energy output, which is ranked on a screen at the front of the room. With an instructor shouting encouragements for us to climb imaginary hills, and pop music blasting so loudly that I often wear earplugs, we then silently compete with each other to see who can bike the fastest to nowhere. Yes, I’m doing good things for my cardiovascular health. But it is more than a bit dystopic, and I would hardly say that I have fun.

So what advice does Price have for restoring the conditions for fun?  That’s the subject of the next essay.