Is It Irresponsible to Prioritize Fun?

Why fun is a force for good

Photo credit: Tenzin Choejor

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Happy Tuesday, everyone—and belated MLK day, for those of you in the United States. Welcome back to the January Funtervention. (Don’t know what I’m talking about? You can catch up on the Funtervention here.)

Today I want to address a question that I get asked a lot, in one form or another, which is whether it’s irresponsible to think about—let

alone prioritize—fun, given all the horrible things going on in the world. As one reader recently asked, is it not “the height of privilege” to be trying to protect ourselves from feeling sad when there so many people struggling to survive?

Their question was specifically in response to the idea of redesigning our phones to reduce news notifications and make them more delightful, but their comment touches on a broader concern: a lot of people assume that by choosing to seek out fun or delight, we are being uncaring or irresponsible.

Personally, I think this is a false dichotomy. Instead, I firmly believe that we can do both things at once: care about the suffering in the world AND do our best to seek out (and create) fun, joy and delight in our own lives—and in the lives of others. In fact, I believe that the more we collectively do so, the better the world will be.

Fun as a Force for Good

I think part of our apprehension about fun comes from our lack of a good definition. If you define fun purely as “enjoyment, amusement, or lighthearted pleasure” then I see how it might appear frivolous or selfish. (Though, with that said, I also think that all humans deserve to enjoy their own lives—which is what I believe the UN Convention on the Rights of a Child was suggesting when it concluded that every child “has the right to rest, relax, [and] play.”)

But if you buy my argument that true fun is the state of playful, connected flow, then it’s not frivolous at all.

As I argued in my TED talk and in my book, The Power of Fun, while there is very little research about fun per se, there is a lot of research on playfulness, connection, and flow, and all three states have proven benefits for both our mental and physical health. The more we can increase any of them (again, for ourselves or others), the happier and healthier we will be.

I’ll write about the physical health benefits in a future newsletter (though if you want a preview of some of the benefits, check out the Surgeon General’s advisory on social connection), but the point that seems most relevant to our conversation today is that fun unites and energizes us; it erases our differences while giving us the resiliency we need to be good partners, parents, friends, and citizens.

Don’t believe me? Think back on when you feel like you were the worst version of any of your roles in life and ask yourself: were you having enough fun? (I certainly was not!)

Next, call to mind some of your most fun memories and the people you shared them with. Did you care about their political beliefs, or their religions, or their races or nationalities? Or were you joined together by the feeling of having had a special shared experience? And when that experience ended, did you feel angry, depleted, or full of despair? Or did you feel joyful, energized, and empowered?

And finally, think about moments when someone has done something that has created fun or delight for you. How did that affect your energy, resiliency, and outlook?

Fun has an amazing ability to remind us of what connects us. It taps into our shared humanity. It erases differences. It reminds us of why life is worth living. It counterbalances our brains’ natural tendency to seek out and focus on the things that stoke anxiety and fear. And it gives us the energy we need to be forces for good ourselves.

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Fun is not zero sum

I’m also always struck by our unspoken assumption that if we are having / prioritizing fun, we’re preventing someone else from doing the same, as if there’s some International Bank of Fun that only allows a certain number of withdrawals per day. But why? Fun is not zero sum: if I’m having fun, it does not limit the amount of fun that’s available to you—there is infinite fun to go around. In fact, fun often begets fun. (We’ve all had experiences where being around other people having fun has lifted us out of bad moods and led to us having fun ourselves.) It’s an uplifting spiral.

Also, who are we really helping?

I think it's enormously important to offer support and empathy to people in our personal lives or communities who are suffering, and to do what we can to help. (And, if we’re able, to volunteer or financially donate to aid organizations that are working to alleviate suffering in other areas of the world.)

But whenever someone suggests that we have a moral obligation to stay tethered to our news feeds, I feel the need to push back.

Simply put, I don't think we're doing *anyone* any good when we allow our phones to inject us with a steady drip of bad news all day, saturating our brains with suffering that we can’t control. In fact, in many cases, I think we're being taken advantage of. By which I mean: are we truly helping anyone? Or are we simply making money for the companies responsible for sending us the notifications, whose profits increase with every minute we spend on their apps?

Paying attention to fun does not mean ignoring current events, but it can help us direct our energy in more productive ways. In fact, I just checked the news myself (it’s Tuesday morning) and guess what? There was a lot that upset me, and very little that I have any control over. I’m making a conscious decision to not check the news again until tonight (I don’t even keep the apps on my phone), and focus my energy on things I can control, including my ability to appreciate, create and share fun, delight, and joy.

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But don’t take my word for it

Whenever I think about these questions, I think of a documentary called Mission Joy, about the unlikely—and incredibly playful—friendship that existed between Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Llama. The two of them could not have been from more different backgrounds, and both endured more conflict and suffering than most of us will ever be subjected to. And yet the primary emotion that comes through from their relationship is mischievous joy. In fact, they explicitly advocate for this mischievous joy—this fun—as a force for good in the world.

At the risk of making everyone on this list cry, here is the trailer:

And here is a clip from the documentary that I think speaks directly to the question of how we should think about our relationship with the news. As the Dalai Llama puts it, “People who see newspapers too much believe that [there is] one only event on this planet, [and] then feel more hopeless, and feel all humanity is bad and our future [has] not much hope. Yes, there are very sad things, very negative things, but at the same time there are much more positive things.” The world would be better, he suggests, if we chose to focus on them.

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What you can do

If you would like to experiment, here are some suggestions:

• Delete all news apps off your phone. (This doesn’t mean you can never check the news; just do so via the browser, and decide ahead of time what times of day you will check it.) If this seems too radical to do permanently, just try it from now through the weekend and notice the difference it makes in your mood.

• Take a few minutes today to adjust your remaining notification settings so that you’re only being notified for things you actually care about. I personally think of notifications as “interruptions,” because that’s what they do: interrupt us. So ask yourself: what is worth being interrupted for?

• If you get a lot of your news through social media, be sure to adjust the settings there, too (you may even want to unfollow some accounts).

• Redesign your home screen so that it only contains apps that serve a practical purpose or that support a habit or activity that you enjoy or want to be devoting more energy to. (If you want to follow Kevin Roose’s lead, create a photo album of delights, and design a widget that will randomly display photos from it.)

• Come up with a positive alternative that you will do instead of checking the news (because, if you’re used to constantly checking it, you’re likely to find yourself twitchy!). For example, you could add a delight to our group delight chat or read through (and contribute to) our running list of past memories of fun. Or perhaps reach out to a friend or loved one, or use those minutes to engage in a hobby, or to learn or practice something new. Take a walk around the block and smile at a stranger. Write a thank you note to someone. Do something that will create delight for someone else. This is not being a Pollyanna; it’s protecting yourself and putting positive energy into the world. Notice how you feel after doing so, compared to how you feel when you check the news.

If you have more suggestions or ideas, please leave them in the comments!

Wishing you all the opportunity to experience (and share) the power of fun,

Catherine Price

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