everything’s okay if you’re still having fun

the Fun agenda

Marc Chagall, Paris through the Window, 1913

Three things:

1. Everything, if done long enough and deeply enough, is sometimes tedious.

2. I’m pretty sure the key to long-term happiness lies in having fun even when something is tedious and difficult.

3. If you find something fun even when it’s objectively hard, keep going.

I had the thought this week that I’d be okay with it everyone I knew suddenly wanted to start matchmaking and writing a novel. I mean, I’m sure I’d feel somewhat perturbed and competitive, but also I’d be like: good luck, you really want to do that to yourself? A romantic profession is sort of like being a romantic in the sense that everyone congratulates you on it and tells you they’re also a romantic but in reality are immediately turned off by the series of actions required to actually act in a romantic way. The idea of it is sexy—I would do anything for love!—and the reality is often boring, punishing and medium-term unrewarding. I just don’t think most people find romantic professions or decisions fun.

There’s a lot of things I don’t have the stomach for. (Like properly throwing away your contact lenses, S would interject.) What I do have the stomach for is an arbitrary grab bag of things I didn’t choose. I could and do listen to people describe their interior lives and relationships in great depth, forever, again and again—I like when my friends repeatedly tell me about the same issue in their relationships, I find it interesting every time. I can manage a great deal of relational complexity without feeling drained or exhausted by—I’m not stressed out by the demands of extreme intimacy. I can read for multiple hours a day, every day, and I enjoy a wide variety of reading material. I find it very easy to keep loving the people I love, and it’s easy for me to see how the things about them that make me crazy are the same things that I find endearing. I enjoy asking for the things I want; I love the thrill of the chase; I’m extremely dogged. I really like to create private worlds, sometimes in fiction, sometimes just between two people—I find the formulation, maintenance, and expansion of them deeply absorbing. I’m not the fastest person, and rarely a natural learner, but I have a very sturdy constitution and I enjoy incrementally getting better over a long period of time.

Does it matter why we like the things we like? I noticed recently that I obsessively look at and for clothes as a way to manage my anxiety. It is very literally how I self soothe. It is a waste of time and money; I have more clothes than I need. It’s also absurdly, ridiculously fun. And it’s managed to stay fresh—my understanding of what I want to wear and how I relate to it and how I relate to style in general continues to evolve. It is often tedious, but it hasn’t stagnated. My attention comes back to it, and the way my attention falls feels satisfying. Relationships are the same way—I’ve learned that the slope of a relationship is so much more important than where you started. In a healthy relationship, things are always changing and deepening. I guess the truth is that I feel like I’m always changing, and everything around me is always changing, and I find change fun even when it’s scary—it’s proof that we are all still breathing.

If something is fun, really fun, and it doesn’t hurt me, I do more of it. I don’t need any justification beyond that. And by the way, there’s a difference between enjoyable slash addictive, and fun—for instance, I find short form video to be the former but not the latter. I think the most unhappy periods of my life have been when my relationship to fun totally withered. I felt strained and fearful and depressed and despairing, and it felt like nothing was fun. And when I’m happy, it’s because I’m able to find everything fun, even the frustrating obstacle blocking my path. How you relate to a problem is often the whole problem. If you think there’s no way out, there’s no way out. But if you tackle it with gusto, the whole challenge takes on a playful quality.

A bad habit of mine is that I can be really judgemental of the way other people solve problems. I get frustrated if I think they’re doing it wrong! Which is fruitless, and more importantly, so much less fun than focusing on how I myself solve problems. Some questions I’ve been asking myself when I feel trapped or stuck:

• Can I change how I approach it? How can I try something new?

• What’s a better narrative of the same situation?

• Is there a stuckness to how I think about this problem? Am I making it binary when it isn’t? Am I acting from a place of fear?

• What could make this really hard thing fun? What do I have to look forward to?

Weirdly enough, it’s sometimes easier to make things fun than to make them good. I can get so stuck in these mental traps where I get pessimistic about my problems and find it impossible to imagine them getting better. So my assessment becomes very gloom and doom, like It’s bad and it’s going to stay bad. But sometimes the best way to think about it for me is, Okay, it’s bad, but can it be fun? Introducing that element of play somehow moves everything along. Then I’m able to be more clear-headed and realize that in fact there is a way out.

So the question I’m always drawn to asking people is, “Are you still having fun with it?” (Can you still have fun with it? Did you ever have fun with it in the first place?) Fun is the heart of aliveness, the silliness in a very serious world. When I’m having a bad time I always tell myself: One day soon I’m going to have fun again.