What compelled you to write a book about fun? It’s a direct follow-up to my last book, How to Break Up With Your Phone. At first, those two concepts might not seem to be connected, but I’ve realized that they’re intimately connected. When I wrote How to Break Up With Your Phone, perhaps unsurprisingly, I ended up with more free time because I was reclaiming time that I’d formerly spent on my phone and other screens. In the middle of taking a 24-hour break from screens—this practice my husband and I try to do regularly as a digital Sabbath—I ended up asking myself a question. “What’s something you always say you want to do, but you supposedly don’t have time for?” And my answer was learning to play the guitar, because I had one. My grandmother gave me money in college to buy one. She played guitar herself and I was really close to her. I remembered that I’d seen a flier for this studio that had adult guitar classes, so I signed up for one. When I went to these classes, I felt that I was infused with this buoyant sense of energy that stayed with me for days afterwards. I began to look forward to the class as this highlight of my week. I asked myself, “What is this feeling?” The feeling that I was having was fun, and while I have a happy life I’m very satisfied with, I just hadn’t felt this sense of freedom and release recently. And I became intrigued by what exactly that feeling was, what it was doing to me and how I can have more of it. That is how the book came to be. How do you define fun? As I delved into the research, there was no agreed upon definition of fun. It’s a word we use all the time, but what is fun? I [came] up with a hypothesis, which is that it’s the confluence of playfulness, connection and flow. You’re bringing a lighthearted spirit, you’re feeling a sense of connection—which usually is with another human being, but it could be with an animal or even yourself—and you’re so actively engrossed in what you’re doing that you lose track of time. What is “fake fun,” as you describe it? The fact that we don’t have a solid definition of fun has left us really vulnerable to any company that wants to market their products to us by telling us that these products are fun. We end up giving over much of our hard-earned leisure time to products and activities that don’t actually result in playful, connected flow. I refer to that as fake fun. I would argue that the biggest offenders right now [are] social media apps and the other time-sucking apps on our phones. I compare fake fun to junk food, something that’s designed to be very compelling and make you want to consume it in excess but [makes] you feel worse afterwards. You get an initial jolt of pleasure by eating a cookie, but then you end up eating 10 cookies and suddenly you’re not feeling so great. Maybe look at social media for a minute or watch [one or two episodes of] your favorite television show, but these things are designed, because of their business models, to encourage binge consumption, and that results in us feeling much worse than when we started. What are the health benefits of having fun in your life and the consequences of not? Most things you do when you’re having fun are active and often involve physical movement and being outside as opposed to being sedentary in front of a screen. But something that interests me even more is the effect that our screen pursuits have on our hormone levels [and] how the nonstop connectivity we have with our devices might be encouraging a state of hypervigilance. I was interested in what effect that might be having on our stress levels. Cortisol is a stress hormone that’s there to help us respond to and survive physical threats. It’s very effective because it helps you run away from things by increasing your heart rate, blood pressure and blood sugar, but it’s well known that cortisol is really bad for us if it remains elevated chronically over long periods of time, and if that happens it’s associated with increased risks for all sorts of health conditions like heart attacks, heart disease, stroke, even dementia and cancer. A couple years ago I interviewed neuroendocrinologists and asked them point-blank, “Is this a crazy idea?” Every single one of them said no. I [looked] into the effects of playfulness, connection and flow. There’s plenty of research about how those are all very rejuvenating and relaxing states. The more socially connected you are, the more playful and lighthearted you are and the more you’re engaged and present, the lower your stress levels will be, which means lower cortisol levels, which is very good for your long- and short-term physical health. What about the social benefits and consequences? I started to write this book in April 2020 right in the midst of lockdown. Who knows where we are in the trajectory of the pandemic right now, but it certainly was in what so far has been the most intense phase, not to mention all the unrest that was going on during that time. We all were so socially isolated. I was really terrified by the research I found indicating how detrimental loneliness and isolation are to our health. If we don’t feel human connection, it actually impacts our physical bodies in ways that are much more dramatic than most people might think. There’s one often-cited study that found that the health risks of being lonely and isolated could be equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. One thing I found particularly interesting in my own research was that when people described past experiences of true fun, the vast majority involved other people, even for self-described introverts. And when I asked people what surprised them about their own answers, numerous people said exactly that. There was some interesting research I came across talking about how loneliness and isolation can affect us down to gene expression, meaning [they] can change how our genes are turned on and off. Why do you think people struggle to have fun and make time for fun? Americans in particular have this puritanical streak where we assume that if it feels good, it’s not actually good for us and we should be doing things that are harder or require more willpower. You can see that in our New Year’s resolutions; we’re not saying, “This year I’m going to have more fun,” we’re saying, “I’m going to lose weight, meditate more, exercise more, spend less time on screens.” We have this emphasis on self-restriction. Fun is one of those rare loopholes where you can have the best of both worlds. It’s the equivalent of going on a diet where the only rule is to eat more foods you love. We also tend to emphasize productivity. We’ve been conditioned to believe that our time is money, and so any use of time that does not result in us being financially compensated is not a good use of time. There’s an irony there because we are obsessed with the idea that time is too valuable to waste, but we end up wasting our hard-earned leisure time on totally valueless things. Expensive physical objects are marketed to us as fun, such as phones, televisions, computers or gaming systems. We buy these really expensive things that we then need to pay for, and how are we able to pay for them? We have to work longer hours to pay the credit card bills for these possessions, and then we’re not having fun and are too tired to actually do anything. We’re rejuvenating with our leisure time, so we end up wasting it on fake fun. Fun actually boosts our productivity because it lets us take a break. If you do want to buy into the idea that your time is money and you want to maximize that type of productivity, fun can actually help you. It’s much more restorative than most other things we do with our leisure time. But it should be its own reward. I think we should rethink the value of our time and try to decouple money from time. What would you tell someone is the first thing they should do to have true fun? One of the first things I suggest people do is this fun audit, as I call it, and recall several experiences from their own lives that they would describe as truly fun. They don’t have to be profound; come up with three or four examples. Then ask yourself, “What were you doing? Who were you with? Where were you? What objects, if any, were involved?” A fun magnet is an activity, setting or person that typically generates fun for you. Playing music with friends, swing dancing and biking are fun magnets to me; it’s not guaranteed, but I know if I put that on my schedule I’m much more likely to have fun. Mine your own life experiences for fun magnets. Another suggestion [is] to notice moments of playfulness, connection and flow that are already present in your life. When I wrote the book, I was having more [of those] moments independently than I gave myself credit for because I hadn’t been paying attention to them. Calling out those tiny moments and giving them weight really boosted my mood, so I encourage people to scan their current lives.
