The Science of Fun – Part 2
What are the conditions for fun?
This essay continues our exploration of the science of fun, using Catherine Price’s book The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again. This essay focuses on Price’s advice for restoring the conditions for fun.
As Price writes:
Today, if you’re like many people, your moments of in-person connection with friends are often planned far in advance—who has time for spontaneity?—via extended text or email chains. You also probably spend a lot of time “connecting” through text messages and social media. (After all, they’re so much more efficient than phone calls!) These can be good ways to stay in touch and can even be enjoyable up to a point, but communicating asynchronously via speech bubbles and emojis hardly feels the same as spending time together in person. And unfortunately, we’re not doing much of that, either … [I]t 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 … Before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the average adult was spending upward of four hours a day on their phone, and for many of us, the number is now even higher. — Four hours a day adds up to nearly sixty full days a year. It’s nine months’ worth of forty-hour work weeks. It’s a quarter of our waking lives. And that’s just our phones. Add in our tablets and televisions, our computers and videogame consoles, and I think it’s safe to say that many people are now spending most of their waking lives staring at screens. Yes, obviously some of this is necessary for work. But think about it: How much time each day, if you’re being honest with yourself, do you actually spend on your hobbies or with your partner, family, or friends, in person? Even if you add them all up, does it come anywhere close to four hours—let alone the total time you spend on all screens? … Instead of being consumed by the fear of what we might miss if we were to put down our phones, we should think about all the things we definitely miss when we pick them up. In short, every moment spent following algorithmically generated links is a moment we’re not doing something for ourselves, whether it’s reading a book, or practicing an instrument, or talking to a friend, or even just gazing at the sky. The more we allow our time to be shredded into confetti, the more we treat ourselves as products with public images that need to be cultivated and maintained—in other words, the more complicit we become—the less we’re able to slip into flow, be our authentic selves, and experience True Fun.
Price asks us to consider the extent to which we’re controlled by social media company algorithms, whether we’re aware of it or not:
[W]e’re not exposed to content that algorithms have chosen for us just once or twice a day; we’re exposed to it every single time we open an app. And we open apps every time we look at our phones. And we look at our phones dozens if not hundreds of times a day. Taken in isolation, each of these moments might not be a big deal, but in the aggregate, their effects raise questions about free will. “Look around you and ask what drives your product, media, and people choices,” writes Kartik Hosanagar in his book about algorithms, A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence. “Unless you are a tech Luddite, algorithms are silently rearranging your life. The conventional narrative is that algorithms will make faster and better decisions for all of us, leaving us with more time for family and leisure. But the reality isn’t so simple. In this brave new world, many of our choices are in fact predestined, and all the seemingly small effects that algorithms have on our decisions add up to a transformative impact on our lives. Because who we are, ultimately, is the sum total of the various decisions we make over a lifetime.” As Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president (who has since become something of a conscientious objector to social media), remarked at a 2017 Axios event in Philadelphia, “The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them…was all about ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” The answer that the attention thieves came up with was to copy tactics from a different device—and another source of Fake Fun: the slot machine. In fact, there are so many similarities between our phones and slot machines that experts such as Harris refer to phones as slot machines that we keep in our pockets. This is a big deal, because slot machines are considered to be some of the most addictive machines ever to have been invented. “When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we’re playing a slot machine to see what notifications we have received,” writes Harris. “When we swipe down our finger to scroll the Instagram feed, we’re playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next. When we ‘Pull to Refresh’ our email, we’re playing a slot machine to see what email we got. When we swipe faces on dating apps like Tinder, we’re playing a slot machine to see if we got a match.” Many of us are behaving in ways that Larry Rosen, a psychologist and co-author of The Distracted Mind, describes as being similar to those displayed in psychiatric conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Price has some practical advice on how to break the cycle of algorithm-driven attention wheels:
As a way to gain perspective, I encourage you to spend a few days paying attention to the way the people around you are interacting with their phones. The next time you’re out in public, for example, notice the people “watching” their children’s soccer games while tending to their work email. Notice the people crossing busy intersections while texting. Notice the people typing on their phones while driving. Notice the scene at restaurants, where nearly every diner has their phone next to them on the table, as if it’s part of the place setting, and entire families sit “together” with each person lost in their own device. Notice your friends’ behavior. Notice your family’s. Notice your own. Then imagine that instead of phones, we were holding cigarettes or syringes … “We give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever,” explained former Facebook president Sean Parker, describing the techniques platforms like Facebook use to capture our time and attention. “And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you…more likes and comments. It’s a social validation feedback loop…it’s exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” … Jaron Lanier sums up the situation in his book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. “Suddenly you and other people are being put into a lot of stupid competitions no one asked for,” he writes. “Why aren’t you sent as many cool pictures as your friend? Why aren’t you followed as much? This constant dosing of social anxiety only gets people more glued in. Deep mechanisms in the social parts of our brains monitor our social standing, making us terrified to be left behind, like a runt sacrificed to predators on the savannah.” What’s particularly crazy about our obsession with external validation is that many of the people we seek affirmation from online aren’t actually real. There are millions of fake accounts on social media platforms—it’s a constant struggle for social media companies to identify and purge these accounts—so it’s quite possible that some of the “likes” and follows that you’re interrupting your life to earn are actually coming from bots, not people. But we contort our lives around them anyway. Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of user growth at Facebook, described this in stark terms at an event at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2017.3 “We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short-term signals: hearts, likes, thumbs up,” he said. “And we conflate that with value, and we conflate it with truth. And instead, what it really is is fake, brittle popularity that’s short-term and leaves you more—admit it!—vacant and empty than before you did it.”
Price reminds us that living our lives as though it were a performance for others makes achieving the initial conditions for fun impossible:
Part of the reason that treating our lives like performances leaves us feeling so vacant and empty is that it encourages us to behave in ways that are downright toxic to fun. Perfectionism doesn’t leave space for playfulness (and, as we’ll talk about in a bit, it can be devastating to our mental health). Staging the perfect selfie removes you from your experience and destroys flow. And instead of connecting us, passively scrolling through pictures of other people’s supposedly perfect lives leaves us feeling insecure and jealous. We compensate by posting idealized photographs of our own lives to make ourselves feel better (which is another way of saying that we post them to make other people feel insecure and jealous), creating a performative competition that destroys any chance of experiencing real connection—or True Fun … It’s important to note that there’s nothing inherently wrong with our brains’ attraction to novelty, rewards, and unpredictability. In fact, there’s an evolutionary advantage to it, because it makes us curious—and if we weren’t curious, we would become complacent and never try new things. It also makes life more enjoyable by opening us to new experiences and leading us into situations that are unexpectedly delightful. But the dose makes the poison. Our smartphones contain so many dopamine triggers that the result is often not curiosity, but hypnosis … And as always is the case with dopamine, we need to be careful about what sorts of behaviors we’re being conditioned to repeat, and at what frequency. After all, there are consequences to our actions. When we interrupt conversations every time we receive a notification, we weaken our connection to the person we’re with. When we repeatedly check the news just in case something has happened, we raise our own anxiety levels and keep ourselves in a state of high alert. When we refresh our email just in case we’ve received a new message, we distract ourselves from the task at hand. When we do this over and over again, day after day, the effects add up. And every time we succumb to our urges, it pulls us out of flow and lessens the chance that we will experience True Fun … When it comes to the ways in which our phones are rewiring our psychology and physiology—and affecting the way we experience our own lives—their ability to distract us is at the top of the list. The constant distractions served up by our devices are causing us to exist in what tech expert Linda Stone calls a state of “continuous partial attention,” which is exactly what it sounds like: paying partial attention, continuously. Our inability to stay focused also interferes with our ability to create memories. We obviously can’t form memories of things we didn’t pay attention to in the first place, which means that every real-life moment that we miss as a result of burying our heads in our phones represents an experience that we won’t have, and a memory that will never be created. What most of us don’t realize, however, is that our phones are preventing us from remembering the things we do experience, too. The process of transferring short-term memories into long-term storage requires physical changes in our brain (more specifically, the creation of new proteins), and this process is disrupted by distraction. If we don’t have long-term memories, we can’t have insights (which I define as the ability to draw connections between seemingly unconnected things), because we don’t have information or experiences to connect—it’d be like trying to make a meal from an empty pantry. This, in turn, suggests to me that the constant distractions served up by our devices may be impacting our ability to think deeply and have interesting thoughts.
Price asks us to consider the unique experience we’ve all felt while taking a shower, an experience that blissfully isolates us such that we become detached from the “fear of missing out”:
There’s a reason, after all, that many of our most creative ideas and insights occur when we’re in the shower: it’s one of the very few contexts in which we allow our brains to relax, to wander, and in a sense, to play. (This used to also be true for walking, but now so many of us text or listen to podcasts on our walks that they no longer really qualify as downtime.) When we spend all of our time scrolling and surfing, listening and watching—in other words, when we spend all our time consuming—we’re spraying our brains with an unrelenting fire hose of information and giving them no chance to come up with new insights, ideas, or thoughts. Not only does dopamine pull us back to our devices, but—thanks to dopamine—we’ve been so conditioned to think of checking our devices as something worth doing again and again that when we can’t check, we feel consumed by what’s colloquially known as FOMO: fear of missing out. Whereas True Fun focuses our attention—when we’re having it, there’s nowhere else we’d rather be—FOMO makes it impossible for us to ever be fully present. It scatters our attention and makes us anxious, often to the point at which our bodies release a stress hormone called cortisol. “Your cortisol levels are elevated when your phone is in sight or nearby, or when you hear it or even think you hear it,” David Greenfield told me. “It’s a stress response, and it feels unpleasant, and the body’s natural response is to want to check the phone to make the stress go away.” So, what do we do? We reach for our phone. And what do we encounter? A dopamine trigger, which reinforces the idea that using our phone to soothe our anxiety is worth doing again…and the cycle continues.
Price then asks those who find some sort of authority in “social media influencers” to consider the following:
It’s also likely that some of the “influencers” you look up to because of their enormous followings have paid to increase their followings, specifically to manipulate you into thinking that they are worth paying attention to. In a 2018 report, The New York Times found that it was possible to buy twenty-five thousand Twitter followers, using a company called Devumi, for $225—roughly a penny apiece. (Devumi, according to the article, at that point had “more than 200,000 customers, including reality television stars, professional athletes, comedians, TED speakers, pastors and models.”) Some of these accounts are obviously fake if you look at them closely, but others actually use profile photos and bios that have been scraped from those of real people (it’s a form of identity theft), so that they appear to be real.
Price also asks us to consider the reactions of the founders of modern digital media to the proliferation of their own invention:
Steve Jobs himself didn’t give his kids iPads. (“They haven’t used it,” Jobs told New York Times reporter Nick Bilton in 2014. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” According to Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, “Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things…. No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.”) Bill and Melinda Gates had a similar no-tech-at-the-table policy and didn’t get their kids smartphones until they were 14.
Price also reassures us that fun isn’t something you have to engineer in advance; rather, it’s the result of an attitude you bring to your moments in time:
[W]hile sports, board games, dress-up, goofballing, and make-believe are all forms of play (and kids are definitely play experts), they are far from the only ways that humans play. According to Brown, “play” describes any activity that is “absorbing [and] apparently purposeless” and that “provides enjoyment and a suspension of self-consciousness and sense of time. It is also self-motivating and makes you want to do it again.” In other words, play depends less on the activity itself than it does on the attitude we bring to it. Any activity can count as play if we approach it with a playful state of mind. Speaking of playfulness—it, too, doesn’t require you to pretend to be something (or someone) you’re not. Instead, playfulness refers to the ability to let down your guard, shed formality, not care too much about outcomes, and open yourself to—indeed, proactively seek out—opportunities for humor and lighthearted connection. (For example, consider the difference between “having a conversation” and “bantering”: you’re doing the same thing—talking—but the latter involves a playfulness that makes it more fun.) Indeed, all of us are capable of recognizing playfulness and being playful ourselves—even people who consider themselves to be “serious.” … Think about the people you enjoy spending time with the most, the ones who bring you joy and consistently make you smile. And then think about some of the adjectives you’d use to describe them. Chances are playfulness will be toward the top of the list.
Price writes that while social media algorithms prey on people’s loneliness, opening ourselves up to true fun can expand our social horizons:
[L]oneliness encourages FOMO by making us hypervigilant for potential social threats, such as any sign that we’re being rejected or excluded—and hypervigilance itself is both a manifestation and a source of stress. Like depression, loneliness also affects our brains in ways that impair our ability to think clearly and pull ourselves out of our ruts. When we’re lonely, we pay more attention to negative feedback than positive … [But] fun can expand the number of people with whom we can connect to begin with, because of its ability to bring us closer with people who have different opinions or backgrounds from our own—you may deeply disagree with someone’s political views and yet have a great time dancing with them at a wedding, for example. True Fun brings out our shared humanity, which … is extremely good for our emotional well-being (not to mention the future of humankind). Interestingly, you don’t need to know a person particularly well in order to experience the positive effects of playful in-person human connection. Exchanging genuine smiles with someone, even if they’re a stranger, boosts our mood and lowers our levels of stress hormones. Even engaging in what’s known as a “fleeting relationship”—say, a conversation with a ride-share driver or a fellow passenger on a plane, or bantering while ordering coffee—has been proven to have a positive effect on mood.
We introduced the last essay in this series with a discussion of the evolutionary origins of human laughter. Price brings us back to that subject, and writes:
[T]here is a telltale sign of True Fun that has been relatively well studied: laughter. True, sometimes we laugh when we’re not having fun. But when we’re truly having fun, we nearly always laugh—to the point that I’ve begun to use laughter as a way to differentiate True Fun from enjoyment … The more we laugh together, in other words, the more connected (and less lonely) we feel; as comedian John Cleese has observed, “It’s almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you’re just howling with laughter.”
Price also provides the insight that the pursuit of money is often not a gateway to future fun, but a barrier to it:
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. “The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.” Minus the “man” part, it was as if he had looked into the future and written an essay about me. 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. My research on fun has taught me that this approach is misguided. Instead, I now try to keep in mind a paraphrased version of an observation from Henry Thoreau: “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” Yes, we all obviously have to get work done and earn money; as we’ve discussed, we require a base level of economic security before we can devote attention to our emotional well-being. But if our basic needs are met and our ultimate goal is a meaningful, joyful life, then we’re not actually gaining much psychologically by stacking up accolades and excess wealth—and money and productivity are not the primary metrics we should rely on when we evaluate our use of time … These days, when I encounter a nonmandatory request—even if it’s potentially positive, such as a new opportunity—I ask myself: Does this feel fun? Will it generate playfulness, connection, or flow? If so, I consider saying yes. If not—or if saying yes will reduce the time I have available for more meaningful, enjoyable, or rewarding activities—I do my best to say no. I also try to pay attention to my body—it doesn’t lie. If I feel any sort of tightness or clenching, or if my breath becomes shallow or short, it’s a sign that I shouldn’t agree. On the flip side, if I notice lightness or excitement, I consider saying yes, even if the idea of doing so makes my stomach flutter. That’s often a sign of nervous excitement, which probably means I’m stepping out of my comfort zone in a good way. 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?)
Price invites us to look for opportunities for fun in our own jobs:
[C]reating space for fun (and always having opportunities for fun on the horizon to look forward to) can keep me motivated and on task. This is especially true if I’m able to incorporate a sense of playfulness into my work, an idea that is backed up by research done by Adele Diamond, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of British Columbia. She has demonstrated that if you ask four-year-olds to stand still for as long as possible, they typically can last about a minute. But if you tell the children to pretend that they are guards at a factory—in other words, if you invite them to treat the task as play—they can stay still for an average of four. Just imagine how much more we could accomplish with a four-fold increase in our ability to stay on task … [T]he pursuit of True Fun can also make us more creative; the more regularly we experience it, the more new ideas we are likely to have. This may be due in part to the fact that playfulness, connection, and flow all reduce stress, and stress dampens creativity. It could also be the result of the surge of energy that we experience when we have fun, which enables us to put our ideas into action. Put this all together and it’s not surprising that in the scientific research on creative thinkers, writes David Epstein in his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, “an enthusiastic, even childish, playful streak is a recurring theme.”
Finally, Price asks us to give space to others bold enough to make room for fun, including our own children:
If a friend or partner or spouse or child has a fun magnet or fun factor that you don’t share, don’t be a spoilsport. Don’t criticize or punish or resent them for spending time on something that they enjoy or that often brings them True Fun, just because you don’t share their passion. Instead, help them make space for it. Actively encourage them to engage in it. Give them a permission slip to let go and enjoy themselves without worrying that they’ll be scolded later or have to “pay you back.” Chances are, they’ll return refreshed—and in a better mindset to have fun with you. The more True Fun each person in the relationship is having, the stronger the ultimate relationship is likely to be.
Finally, Price quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes, who wrote “We do not quit playing because we grow old. We grow old because we quit playing.”
That concludes this essay series on the science of fun.