Fun is dead.
It’s become emphatic, exhausting, scheduled, hyped, forced and performative
By Karen Heller
December 23, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST
(Illustrations by Michael Parkin for The Washington Post)
Sometime in recent history, possibly around 2004, Americans forgot to have fun, true fun, as though they’d misplaced it like a sock.
Instead, fun evolved into work, sometimes more than true work, which is where we find ourselves now.
Fun is often emphatic, exhausting, scheduled, pigeonholed, hyped, forced and performative. Adults assiduously record themselves appearing to have something masquerading as “fun,” a fusillade of Coachellic micro social aggressions unleashed on multiple social media platforms. Look at me having so much FUN!
Which means it is nothing of the sort. This is the drag equivalent of fun and suggests that fun is done.
When there are podcasts on happiness (“The Happiness Lab,” “Happier”); a global study on joy (The Big Joy Project); David Byrne offering reasons to be cheerful; workshops on staging a “funtervention”; fun coaches; and various apps to track happiness, two things are abundantly clear: Fun is in serious trouble, and we are desperately in need of joy.
Consider what we’ve done to fun. Things that were long big fun now overwhelm, exhaust and annoy. The holiday season is an extended exercise in excess and loud, often sleazy sweaters. Instead of this being the most wonderful time of the year, we battle holiday fatigue, relentless beseeching for our money and, if Fox News is to be believed, a war on Christmas that is nearing its third decade.
Weddings have morphed into multistage stress extravaganzas while doubling as express paths to insolvency: destination proposals for the whole family, destination bachelorette and bachelor blowouts, destination weddings in remote barns with limited lodging, something called a “buddymoon” (bring the gang!) and planners to help facilitate the same custom cocktailsness of it all. When weddings involve this much travel, pedicabs, custom T-shirts and port-a-potties, they’ve become many things, but fun is not one of them.
What could be a greater cause for joy or more natural than having a baby? Apparently, not much these days. Impending parenthood is overthought and over-apped, incorporating more savings-draining events that didn’t exist a few decades ago: babymoons and lethal, fire-inducing, gender-reveal gatherings and baby showers so over-the-top as to shame weddings.
Retirements must be purposeful. Also, occasions for an acute identity crisis. You need to have a plan, a mission, a coach, a packed color-coded grid of daily activities in a culture where our jobs are our identities, our worth tied to employment.
Vacations are overscheduled with too many activities, FOMO on steroids, a paradox of choice-inducing decision fatigue, so much so that people return home exhausted and in need of another one.
The beach is no longer a day at one, an oasis of rest and relaxation. Vacationers feel the need to plant a chair — make that eight — at sunrise before transporting 220 pounds of stuff in a Buick-sized beach wagon, which is also a thing that used not to exist when a bucket, a book and a towel were enough. And still most people stare at their phones instead of the water.
“I feel like I should be having more fun than I’m actually having,” says Alyssa Alvarez, a social media marketing manager and DJ in Detroit, expressing a sentiment that many share. “There are expectations of what I want people to believe that my life is like rather than what my life is actually like.”
Newly single after an eight-year relationship, Alvarez feels she lacks a true friend group. “I’m addicted to my phone. You live in this social realm, using it as a social crutch instead of making true connections,” she says.
Mind you, Alvarez is 27. For eons, early adulthood was considered an age of peak fun. Now, according to several studies, it’s a protracted state of anxiety and depression.
Because there is now a coach for everything, Alvarez hired the “party coach” Evan Cudworth, taking his $497 course this fall on how to pursue “intentional fun.” (It now costs $555.) Cudworth meets with students biweekly, assigns podcasts, asks them to journal, and teaches them how to regulate their impulses and explore new outlets for fun.
How did this happen? How did fun come to take a back seat to almost everything? There is plenty of blame to go around, sort of like — spoiler alert — “Murder on the Orient Express” or our current Congress.
Blame it on an American culture that values work, productivity, power, wealth, status and more work over leisure. Italians celebrate dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing. Americans reward the sweat of doing everything ASAP.
Blame it on technological advances that tether us to work without cessation. Blame it on the pandemic, which exacerbated so much while delivering Zoomageddon. Blame it on 2004, with the advent of Facebook, which led to Twitter (okay, X), Instagram, Threads, TikTok and who-knows-what lurking in the ether.
Blame it again on 2004 and the introduction of FOMO, our dread of missing out, broadcast through multiple social media spigots, allowing us to follow/stalk prettier, richer people having oodles of fun in fabulous places while doing irreparable damage to our free time, self-esteem and ability to experience joy.
“So many people are retreating into their phones, into anxiety,” says Cudworth, 37, from Chicago. “I’m helping people rediscover what fun means to them.” He hosts a virtual KnowFun social health club, helping clients experience joy while sober. Cudworth is a former college-prep coach, customer engagement officer, marketing director, college admissions staffer, host of a full-moon gathering and serious fan of raves and underground music.
His mandate is redefining fun: cutting back on bingeing screen time, eradicating envy scrolling, getting outside, moving, dancing. “With technology, we don’t allow ourselves to be present. You’re always thinking ‘something is better around the corner,’” Cudworth says, the now squandered in pursuit of the future.
“The world is so much less about human connection,” says Amanda Richards, 34, who works in casting in Los Angeles and is a graduate of Cudworth’s course. “We do more things virtually. People are more isolated. And there’s all this toxic positivity to convince people of how happy you are.”
How do Americans spend their leisure hours when they might be having fun with others, making those vital in-person connections? Watching television, our favorite free time and “sports activity” (yes, that’s how it’s classified), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average of 2.8 hours daily.
“That’s way more television than you really need. We put play on the back burner,” says Pat Rumbaugh, 65, of Takoma Park, Md. She’s “The Play Lady,” who organizes unorganized play for adults. Rumbaugh is also a fan of getting dirty (literally, with dirt), dress-up boxes and sidewalk chalk for grownups.
Catherine Price, the author of “The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again,” believes “we’re totally misdoing leisure” and “not leaving any room for spontaneity.”
Price plans to launch a “funtervention” in January on her “How to Feel Alive” Substack, with exercises and tips on having more fun to help start the year with a resolution that, unlike diets and exercise, people may keep. These include prioritizing “fun magnets” (people, activities and settings that make us happy rather than things we think we should do for fun), identifying a new experience for the new year, and taking a digital Sabbath from screens.
Price takes fun seriously, designing a fun framework called SPARK, which stands for space, pursue passions, attract fun, rebel, and keep at it. She distinguishes between Fake Fun, which she defines as often passive and done too frequently (television, phone, “activities and products that are marketed to us as fun”) and True Fun, actually Venn diagraming the latter.
To Price, True Fun is the confluence of connection (other people, nature), playfulness (lightheartedness, freedom) and flow (being fully engaged, present), which is not as challenging as it sounds. “You can have fun in any context. Playfulness is about an attitude,” she says.
Similarly, Todd Davis, 66, of Scottsdale, Ariz., says, “I don’t think having fun is a matter of finding time. I think it’s an emotion.”
Davis is a corporate fun coach and author of “Fun at Work,” which sounds like oxymorons. But, once upon a time, workplaces could be fun, as opposed to offices that are designed to appear fun (look, wood accents, free Kind bars) so that people will spend every waking hour there. Back in the day, co-workers were friends. (Sometimes, more.) After hours, they gathered for drinks, played softball. Today, because of email, Slack and remote work, offices are half empty and far quieter than libraries.
“We go to work and there’s no sense of connection and camaraderie,” says Davis, who was long employed by his city’s department of parks and recreation. “People feel emotionally disconnected. Healthy conversations are the precursor of fun. We’ve lost the art of communication. Our spirit comes home with us. If you don’t communicate at work, what are you coming home with?”
Cathy Wasner, 54, is a consultant in North Jersey who took Davis’s multiday program. For years, work took precedence in her life, a situation she’s trying to correct. “Spontaneity has totally gone out the window,” she says. “For me, fun is kind of putting myself first, being intentional about getting together with friends, self-care. You have to make sure to do the things that feed your soul.”
Meanwhile, Alvarez, the Detroit social media marketing manager and DJ, says: “I’ve changed the need to put so much pressure on myself to socialize, to feel the need to create content.” As a millennial hyphenate, she is training with Cudworth to become a party coach herself.
“There’s this feeling that we’re not doing much, yet we’re burned out at the same time,” says Cudworth. “There’s a lot of shame involved in this, people telling themselves, ‘I don’t know how to have fun. It’s not working for me.’”
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