Looking for a good time? It’s better in groups.

Living Happy round up

Jan 23, 2023

people sitting on sand near bonfire during daytime — Photo by Ball Park Brand on Unsplash

When I was a little kid, I was pretty poor and pretty bored and pretty lonely in my little rural portion of Bedford, New Hampshire, and so I did all these random things by choice. I’d muck through the swamps in my backyard, jump off granite cliffs and almost always sprain ankles.

I learned how to track just so I’d be sure to not miss Bigfoot if she or he came to hang out in my backyard.

In my eighth grade class we had a unit called “early man,” where we’d make shelters out of sticks. We made weapons too. The big event capping the unit of interdisciplinary learning was when the whole grade went on a multi-day camping trip. I was stoked. Maybe I’d finally see Big Foot.

Instead, I got severely chilled because my poor-kid boots weren’t waterproof. The only other person who didn’t make it the whole time was Sarah Silverman. She’s a famous comedian now. I remember sitting at the base camp by the heater, blankets wrapped around me, shuddering (it was way bigger than a shiver) feeling like I had absolutely failed.

And here’s the thing: none of those things really sound like fun, right? There is pain, loneliness, suffering, shivering, failure.

Still, when I think of being little, I think of most of that was pretty fun. But when I think of what was really fun as a kid it was sleep-overs, going trick-or-treating with friends, hanging out with a bunch of people looking for UFOs, being in plays and being silly, riding in car and singing songs loudly and off-key, going to concerts, hanging out in a group to watch a movie.

Jessica Bennett has an opinion piece in the New York Times where she writes,

“What is fun, exactly? Unlike happiness, fun is not a state of being, though happy people do often report having fun. “Fun” is not an action verb like “play,” though of course, it can be sparked by an action. Fun isn’t necessarily guaranteed by leisure time or access to things considered to be leisure — vacations, rest — though you could argue that these things would free a person up to have more fun. And unlike pleasure, which sparks a very specific cortisol response in the brain (and has been studied in rats and humans), it is challenging to analyze a brain on fun, in part because for humans, fun inevitably becomes unfun as soon as you’re sitting in a brain scanner — and how to tell if a rat is having fun?”

Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester told her that fun is elusive.

She writes, “Happiness is seen as weighty, important, meaningful. Fun, meanwhile, is viewed as trivial. At his university, Dr. Reis told me, they have something called Dandelion Day, which occurs each spring right before finals. There are games, food trucks, live music, trivia contests and carnival rides. The idea is to get students to have fun, basically. But it’s branded under the guise of stress relief and well-being.”

There aren’t a lot of scholarly articles about fun, Reis says, in his article in J Positive Psychology. And what he found? Well, it wasn’t what little lonely Carrie needed.

He wrote,

“People are motivated to pursue fun activities because these activities commonly result in a broadly positive affective experience. As enjoyable as fun activities may be in their own right, shared fun is more fun than solitary fun, particularly when the sharing involves a friend. Fun therefore deserves more serious scrutiny as something more than a reflection of the enjoyability of an activity or moment in time: it yields an affective state that is linked to developing and reinforcing important social bonds.”

Which interests me because often when I am having a day that’s pretty low on the happiness scale, I want to hunker down and hermit. But that might be the opposite of what I needed to do.