Maybe you need to have more fun
Maybe you need to have more fun
"Fun" as essential to human flourishing.
I recently became obsessed with a man who was riding the subway—probably on his way to work judging by his suit—while standing this close to the band Green Day as they played their iconic song “American Idiot.”
In the video, the band had boarded the train as part of a stunt for Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, and most of the people on board were ecstatic to discover the band on their train, belting out the songs as they danced. But that man didn’t—he barely watched. He just held onto his little post on his way to work, another day on the New York City subway.
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It made me think about what happens at concerts when we allow ourselves to get completely and unabashedly into something. We scream our lungs out, dance wildly, laugh hysterically with our friends as we scream “WOOOOO!!!!!” We become so overtaken by “fun” that we lose ourselves completely in pure joy and happiness.
When I recently attended Taylor Swift’s Era’s tour in Lisbon, that emotion was bubbling up inside me, I was smiling so big my cheeks hurt and singing so loudly I lost my voice.
It was so fucking fun.
But we don’t do that in real life. Rarely in our day-to-day lives do we get so excited that we are crying with our best friends, grabbing each other by the shoulders as we jump up and down with glitter on our faces screaming “WOOOOO!!!!!” Instead, we are that man in the subway: This is not a concert, we are riding the train, we are on our way to work, and that requires a certain decorum.
Sometimes I feel like that man—like there is a forced stoicism placed on me by society. Outside of a concert arena my emotions don’t peak quite as wildly. I have watched videos of Taylor Swift’s concert without feeling the way I did in the crowd. Even if I love something or hear something funny, if I am at work or on the bus I am not screaming and crying about it, I am sitting still, a slight smile on my face.
It isn’t until we enter into arenas where expression can be at its fullest that we are free to do so: Squealing as a kid doing a cannonball into a pool, upside down and tumbling with laughter on a roller coaster, screaming our guts out at a concert, cheering vivaciously at a sporting event, dancing our hearts out at a wedding, laughing hysterically at a comedy club.
There are arenas where it is ok to be overflowing with happy emotions and we are even expected to do so. And that makes me wonder: Maybe it isn’t the thing itself that is “fun,” but the freedom to express it.
That is exactly the sort of thing that enthralled French philosopher Henri Bergson. In his 1900 essay, "Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic," he explored what happens to us when we attend a comic performance in a crowded theater, and why we don’t respond with the same joy in our day-to-day lives.
“The comic spirit has a logic of its own, even in its wildest eccentricities,” he said. “It conjures up, in its dreams, visions that are at once accepted and understood by the whole of a social group. Can it then fail to throw light for us on the way that human imagination works, and more particularly social, collective, and popular imagination?”
The collective imagination is powerful. After all: I’ve been to concerts where I don’t even know the musician only to get swept up in the fervor of their hottest song. I’ve attended sporting events where I don’t even know the rules of the game only to start cheering with all the rest, hugging my friends and jumping up and down in ecstatic happiness at each point scored. It isn’t the concert or the game, then, that I thought was fun, but rooting for it—getting swept up in the emotion of a crowd that was having so much fun, outwardly throwing their hands up in the air, whooping and hollering.
“Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo,” Bergson said. “You would hardly appreciate the comic if you felt yourself isolated from others… Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.”
It is the group that gives us the freedom to laugh, and he gives a relatable example: Imagine that you are sitting on a train and the group next to you is recounting a story that has them all in stitches. “Had you been one of their company, you would have laughed like them; but, as you were not, you had no desire whatever to do so.”
Why is that? The same story can be hilarious if you are on the inside, but barely elicit a smile if you are on the outside. As Bergson says, “Laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers… how often has it been said that the fuller the theatre, the more uncontrolled the laughter of the audience!”
When we create these arenas of fun, we have more fun. What’s “fun” is experiencing those emotions together.
When a recent study claimed that exercise beat depression better than antidepressants, they buried the lede. As
and several others pointed out after its release: It wasn’t exercise in general that beat depression, it was specifically dancing. The researchers had lumped it together with all movement, but alone it outperformed every other option—including therapy and antidepressants—by a landslide.
That dancing is more effective on depression than jogging or therapy is not surprising to me—of all of the options it is the most emotive. We are smiling when we dance, we laugh, we are part of a collective group. I have been in a Jamaican dance class where I could not stop laughing for my complete inability to twerk, and the entire class could not stop laughing alongside me for my abhorrent attempts. A dance studio does not elicit the solemnity of yoga and tai chi or the solitude of cycling or strength training. It is art and emotion—it is the most “fun.”
When we live in absence of these arenas, we flounder. During the pandemic, we called it languishing. Without the chance to have fun, to be part of a group, screaming and laughing and having a good time, it was easy to enter into a sort of lifelessness. All the things proven to make us happier were still there—we could still exercise, engage in personal growth, find meaningful work, and remain close with friends and family—but all the things that were fun were gone.
We still studied even if we didn’t go to school. We still met with our families on Zoom even if we didn’t go to the family reunion. But without the thrill of college parties and dormitory antics, school was a boorish affair. Without going down a waterslide at the family picnic we were going through the motions. We became like that man on that subway: He may have a good life, he may even have a happy life, but he is still lacking some “X-Factor.”
I think that “X-Factor” is fun.
That the complete, unabashed and emotive enjoyment of life is human flourishing personified.
There is some evidence to support this. We have witnessed, for example, that more emotionally expressive cultures (like the US, Australia, and many Latin American countries) tend to be happier than less emotionally expressive (like Eastern Europe, many Asian countries, and Russia). Comparing the two, Dutch social psychologist Geert Hofstede said the former are socially free to enjoy life and have fun, as a result they tend to have a higher degree of happiness and optimism and emphasize leisure time and freedom of expression. But the latter suppress emotional gratification through strict social norms, as a result they tend to be less happy and more pessimistic, they focus on duty and discipline over leisure and enjoyment.
It makes sense. When you’re in a situation that elicits laughter (like a theme park) you are generally more happy than when you are in a situation that requires you to be serious (sitting in a meeting with your boss).
It’s probably a good idea that I’m not, if I was a therapist I would tell all of my clients to go have fun—the emotive and collective kind I’m talking about here. I would tell them to grab a friend and go to Disney World, to go to Comic-Con and get all the way into it, to go to Mardi Gras and throw all the beads they could get their hands on, to go to a haunted house with friends. Just see if you feel more alive, I would say. Just see if it will shake you out of your slumber.
The old philosophers would have found this a frivolous ask. As much as they spoke about the good life, it lived far apart from any kind of passion toward it. Aristotle's “Eudaimonia” is often translated to “flourishing,” but he actually defined it as living a virtuous life informed by reason. The stoics warned against the excesses of passions, saying we should be ruled by logic instead. Even the Epicurean concept of “pleasure” was more focused on the absence of suffering than having fun.
“Fun” itself would have seemed a dangerous pursuit. As we can observe in children: Emotive happiness can just as easily be accompanied by emotive tantrum. We think of Travis Kelce screaming at his coach during the Super Bowl, soccer fans getting so riled up that stadiums around the world have to ban alcohol. Good emotion often comes with bad emotion, and this is where the philosophers would place a wet blanket over the whole thing, calling passion and its erratic moods a precarious thing.
Compared to such whims, a docile “happiness” seems a much more appropriate goal, and in modern psychology culture this has become our north star. But I think “happiness” falls short. That it has become so entrenched in our minds that “working out” is essential to happiness seems proof we are going after the wrong thing. We write studies completely missing the point—that it is not actually exercise that’s making us happy, it’s having fun.
And going without it can be just as dangerous: I think about the riots that filled the streets during the pandemic. What was that but pent up emotion? With no outlet for positive emotions our solitude led us to spiral in negative ones. There was no laughing and crying with a stranger, there was only fear of them on the street. Waiting in line for the Taylor Swift concert, we bought pizza and shared it with new friends from Turkey and Thailand. During the pandemic, our neighbor called the cops on us for standing together with our friends in the front yard.
Emotion can be both positive or negative, that’s true, but without emotion at all we are lifeless. When all I do is work from home, eat healthy foods, practice yoga, and go for long walks and hikes, I am bored. I read a lot of philosophy, I don’t spend time on social media or watch TV, but I am listless. I’m not eating enough cheesecake or drinking enough champagne. I’m not staying out late with friends. Sometimes I need to be shaken from my slumber with loud music, loud laughter, a roller skating party at the park, fantasy books only.
It’s easy to get into a routine of all the things that are supposed to be indicators of a good life, and yet that life is not good.
It’s just… fine.
The “good life” lives beyond those bounds.
Children intrinsically know this, and we create plenty of arenas in which they can have fun. At splash pads and playgrounds and birthday parties children can run around recklessly, squealing with laughter. By comparison: Adults have places to eat and drink. The comedian Mitch Hedberg once joked that if he wanted to go down a waterslide he’d have to pretend he wound up at the top of it by accident. “Whoops, guess I better slide down.”
But we can continue to play and have fun as we grow up, and we can seek out arenas in which we are free to do so with a group. The philosophers needn’t have worried: As we grow up, we are fully capable of emphasizing positive emotion in our lives without also swinging wildly in the negative direction. If our therapists asked us to unpack all of our happy memories instead of all of our traumatic ones I think we’d be much better equipped to do so.
As Bergson says: “In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter.”
It might still be frivolous. Why should we care that any of us are having “fun” when there is still so much suffering in the world? Why does it matter whether we are going through the motions or are actually enjoying our lives? Maybe it doesn’t. But I don’t see the point in living in a world of zombies either. I still believe in “the good life”—that “human flourishing” doesn’t just mean all of our economic indicators are met and all of our “happiness” checkboxes are ticked.
It means finding that X-Factor.
There will still be suffering, but we do not need to live a life of languishing. We can seek out laughter instead. We can be happy and express emotion—we can laugh and jump up and down and scream “WOOOOO” with our friends at a concert.
We can have FUN!
If we can find that, maybe we will find happiness and human flourishing and all the rest.
I’d love to know your thoughts in the comments section. Treat this as our literary salon, a place where we can discuss human flourishing!
Thank you so much for reading,
P.S. If you enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting my work as a paid subscriber. Your support is how I earn a living as a writer and I could not be more grateful to continue to do so.
Fall semester of Freshman year, we performed You're A Good Man Charlie Brown. And of course theater kids don't keep the drama in the theater, so in classes and in the cafeteria and the grocery store, we would act like the little kids in the play and be very expressive with our emotions. It was a lot of fun, and so very healing to be able to freely express emotions like a child again.
So aspirational. I think I’m bad at fun…almost all of it comes from being around my child and little of it is really personal. But that’s the freaking goal — fun is part of what makes life worth living!