When Did We All Stop Having Fun?

Or, just invite me to your child's football match already!

My idea of fun. Photo by K B on Unsplash

“In every task that must be done, there is an element of fun.” Mary Poppins.

Those of you paying attention will have noticed that there was no newsletter last week. Given that I’m not exactly the most reliable writer, you might have just put it down to disorganisation but you would be wrong. I was sick. Again.

Getting struck down by some sort of flu in November is a bit of an annual tradition for me. You’d think by now I’d have learned that if I want to make it through all twelve months without my body completely giving up on me, that I need more rest but I haven’t. So last week I was lying in bed, feeling particularly sorry for myself because not only had my immune system let me down but it had chosen a week that I had been looking forward to, to do it.

You see, last week was packed with fun. I was supposed to be going to a networking event run by Substack, then I was supposed to have dinner with an old friend from university who I haven’t seen in well over ten years but who has the best stories and always makes me cry with laughter, and after that I had booked an afternoon off to have a very long lunch with one of the wisest women I know. Not only did I have to cancel all of this fun but it turned out half of my Instagram feed had been at the Substack party so then I spent a week scrolling through their pictures and drowning in FOMO.

The lack of fun I feel in my life at the moment seems to be echoed across my friendship groups. We talk about how this has been a hard year or how life is just in one of those stages where it’s a bit of a slog. We reassure each other that that doesn’t mean we’re unhappy, not at all. “Contentment” is a word that is thrown around a lot, and we all nod wisely and agree how nice it is to be in a place of peace, even if it does come with a lot of responsibility. We’ll go out for dinner and laugh as much as we always have but then we’ll all turn down a third glass of wine because we “just can’t drink like we used to” and wake up the next morning relieved that there’s no hangover but also a little bit sad that there is no hilarious tale to be relived on the Whatsapp group.

What’s interesting to me is that this lack of fun is not the same as a lack of happiness or joy. Moving to the countryside, albeit fraught with stress, has brought me a lot of joy. When I take the dog for a walk in the morning I find myself grinning with delight at the sight of frost sparkling on the fields or a bright red sunrise burning across the hills. And when I go shopping at the weekend, I am like a little pig hunting out truffles and snuffling with pleasure as I pootle around the local farmers’ markets. On a daily basis there are constant moments of happiness so I couldn’t understand why despite this I felt like something was missing, until I read Catherine Price’s new book, The Power of Fun.

Price sets out to bring more fun into her life when she realises that all her free time is spent staring at her phone. Along the way she distills down the necessary components for fun and perfectly encapsulates the difference between fun and happiness. Here’s how she defines it:

“True fun… is the feeling of being fully present and engaged, free from self-criticism and judgement. It is the thrill of losing ourselves in what we’re doing and not caring about the outcome. It is laughter. It is playful rebellion. Is is euphoric connection…. True fun makes us feel alive.”

Playful rebellion and euphoric connection. Just the sound of those words makes me tingle.

When I think about the last time I really felt like I was having fun it was back in August. I was running a female empowerment workshop at a hippy festival in the middle of the Berkshire countryside. My co-facilitator and I had just spent 90 minutes watching a group of thirty women face their biggest fears, cry their eyes out and scream with laughter as we’d taken them through the sort of exercise that you really have to be there for (clue: it involved hand mirrors). By the end of the session everyone in the tent was drunk on their own bravery and I felt it too. I danced out of the dark tent and into the brightest of sunshine, barely able to stop hopping from foot to foot as my body charged itself off the biggest of dopamine rushes. In that moment there was only one thing I wanted to do; I skipped through the woods and down towards the huge lake that the festival was surrounding. Without a second’s hesitation, I threw off my dress and plopped myself into the water, completely naked and giggling like a lunatic. (I wish I could tell you I “dived” into that water but I simply don’t have that level of grace or athleticism. So “plopped” it is.)

Does this sound like your idea of fun? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t think the “what” really matters, it’s the feeling of it. In that moment it didn’t occur to me to wonder what anyone else would think or whether my body looked good enough to be swimming naked in front of a host of strangers. I didn’t care if the girl swimming next to me didn’t understand why I was laughing to myself but she grinned when she heard my giggles, and I loved that my happiness was infectious. In that moment, I couldn’t have told you anything about the world outside of that festival. I knew I was supposed to be packing my stuff up and leaving relatively soon, that I had a flight to catch and another work gig to get to but… I just didn’t care. I was totally and utterly in the moment and it was bliss. I need more moments like that, I think we all do.

An interesting component of fun, for me, is that it’s hard to do by yourself but it also requires a level of liberation from everyone involved to make it happen. You can be the funnest person on the planet but if you’re surrounded by people who feel uncomfortable in their own skin, then you’ll find it hard to have fun with them. For fun to be present, judgement (or a need for “cool”) has to be absent, you can’t have fun if you’re worrying about how you look or what others might think.

I think it’s why it’s so often easier for us to find fun in a crowd. Whether that’s at a festival or a gig or in the crowd at a sports match, unperturbed at screaming our head off because everyone around us is too. (As someone with very little interest in sport, I spend a large amount of time trying to persuade my friends to let me attend their children’s sporting events just so I can be in a place where being unashamedly enthusiastic is encouraged. I want to bake brownies for afters and scream encouragement / abuse at the other team from the sidelines. That’s my idea of fun. Although I suspect their children would be horrified.)

I also don’t think you can have fun when you’re in “adult” mode. Fun requires a level of letting go of responsibility and that’s hard to do when we’re worrying about bills or working our way through a long list of chores. And it’s also why fun is so important when life is hard. The science tells us that by having fun we can release dopamine and counteract feelings of hopelessness, helping us find a way through difficult times. And common sense tells us that if you can find a way to put down your responsibilities, just for a little bit, you’ll feel much more capable of carrying them when it’s time to pick them up again.

Finally, for fun to be present I think we need to let go of the outcome. A prime example of this is our hustle culture preoccupation with turning a hobby into a business. Kate Moss (that famously fun Capricorn) once asked, “why can’t I have fun all the time?” and despite this leading to her dating Pete Doherty and now making a living as a wellness influencer and Diet Coke spokesperson, it seems that we didn’t learn her lesson and now society is obsessed with turning hobbies into businesses.

Rather than just spending your weekends crocheting owls for the fun of it, social media wants you to know that if you just invested a bit of your time (and all of your money) into a twenty-point strategy, you too could become a crochet millionaire. And so we stop focussing on the thing that brings us pleasure and joy in the moment, and start focussing on the outcome - what could be possible here? Sorry to tell you this kids, but capitalism does not like fun and the couple of hours a week of play that you’d given yourself has now been co-opted by the tax man. Not even Kate Moss has fun all the time.

But we could all have fun some of the time. And I think in 2024, we all need to have fun more of the time. We need moments of playful rebellion and euphoric connection to counteract the darkness that can sometimes seem never-ending. We need to laugh our lungs out and be silly with the people we love. We need to try something new, get lost in the journey of mastering and then not care when we fall flat on our face. We need fun because without it, where will we get the energy for life?

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