Why You Shouldn't Fear Having Fun

It's hard to have fun if you underestimate the importance of play.

“What's the worst that can happen?” said Catherine Price, breezily. 

Catherine (author of The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again) was staging a fun-tervention on me as part of an upcoming podcast episode. On her advice, I’d been trying to inject some much-needed fun back into my life by taking… a surfing lesson.

I’m no surfer. I’m a forty-something academic with bad knees, so I really appreciated Catherine’s vote of confidence in my scheme.

“Well, I guess you could get eaten."

I added sharks to the long list of reasons I should try to get my deposit back from the Little Compton Surf Camp, where I had just booked a beginner class.

To be honest, drowning, sunburns, breaking my leg, and apex marine predators weren’t the things I feared most about spending a day in the Atlantic surf. The biggest nagging concern was that I would be… wasting valuable time.

I’ve been open with you in previous newsletters about the trouble I have with time. I fill my schedule to the brim and sometimes suffer under the great weight of all the things I’ve committed to doing. I’m sure you’re familiar with that sickly, suffocating feeling too.

Part of the reason I reached out to Catherine was that I’ve just stopped prioritizing fun. I had plenty of fun as a child. And well into adulthood I remained playful. My husband and I even won our engagement ring playing skeeball at the “Fun-O-Rama” beach arcade. But the last time we went there, I secretly slipped outside to answer my work emails.

I know that making time for fun is important for my happiness. It offers health benefits – lowering stress hormones like cortisol. And the research shows that including windows of fun in my working day will allow me to be more focussed, productive, and creative when I again return to my desk.

I know all this, and yet I still worry that fun is just… slacking off.

New research suggests that attitudes like this are a big problem. It turns out that viewing leisure in negative terms – as wasteful and unproductive – reduces our ability to enjoy any fun activities we do engage in.

Rutgers Business School professor Gabriela Tonietto and her colleagues noted that many people are dismissive of the value of leisure activities. With 80% of Americans (me included) reporting feeling time famished, the researchers feared a belief was taking hold that undervalued play as a worthwhile activity to include in a busy life.

“An overworked lifestyle is socially desirable and signals status,” they note in their paper. Play was being pushed from our lives because of a false assumption that “work produces benefits, while leisure does not.”

To test the power of these attitudes, Tonietto and colleagues asked participants in one experiment to read a “newspaper” article. Some subjects read a control discussion about coffee makers. But the other two groups read a doctored article: either one that made the case that leisure benefits productivity by reducing stress (which side note — is actually true), or one that said that leisure was a “wasteful” use of time.

Everyone then watched a film… Best Funny Cat Videos 2019. When the researchers asked participants how much fun they’d derived from watching all the feline fails, the subjects who’d just read that leisure was “unproductive” or “wasteful” rated their experience as significantly less joyful than the rest of the test subjects.

Worryingly, those who read the article extolling the virtues of leisure didn’t have a better time watching Best Funny Cat Videos 2019 than the people who just read about coffee. You can bum people out by dismissing leisure as a waste of valuable time, but you can’t make them experience more joy by telling them fun is worthwhile.

Many of us don’t even need to read a doctored article telling us leisure isn’t worthy of our time, we already believe it in our bones. We might work in cultures that celebrate long hours or have friends and co-workers who encourage us to put in all the hours we can. Many of us also get a pressure to be constantly productive from our upbringing.

I had a great time learning to ride the waves at my first surfing lesson. (And didn’t even see a shark’s fin). But I’m little haunted by the work of Tonietto and colleagues. If I had a sunnier attitude towards leisure… might I have had even more fun?

There is a glimmer of hope, though. Tonietto and colleagues suggest that more research could be done to uncover interventions for those of us who struggle to embrace fun.

But a start is working on our personal attitudes. Which is important - because having fun is so good for both our mental and physical health. But if that’s not enough to convince some of us to take fun seriously - then maybe we just need to take baby steps, by exploring leisure activities that reassuringly feel a little bit like work - like gardening or crafts. 

It’s something I’m planning to do more and more, so I hope you’ll join me!