Fun-maxxing

Don't maintain a life you forget to live

It has been said that we suffer because we take seriously what the Gods made for fun. Recently, ‘fun-maxxing’ is a term I’ve seen popping up in various places. That got me wondering the following question: what if you filled your life only with things you found fun?

Instantly, the question provokes repulsion. If you heard a teenager ask that, or worse yet, state that as a life philosophy, you’d launch into a lecture about discipline, compromise, hard choices, and all the other life-isn’t-so-simple-isms, no doubt born of your own mangled hopes and desires. To dream is encouraged as a child, but offensive as an adult. But those simple on the surface questions asked by younger people are an invitation to reassess. After all, as you go through life, you should find yourself evermore well placed to achieve unreasonably impressive things, including lifestyles. You can reopen the case on discarded dreams.

We should make a distinction between fun and pleasure. I think they’re different things. Perhaps meaningfully different. Fun is more active and engaged. It’s a cousin of flow, or maybe a sibling (probably the younger). Even laughing is a big expulsion of energy. Though it doesn’t have to be, pleasure can be soaked in passively. I also think you can get bored with pleasure. It’s a victim (and co-conspirator) of our ever-shifting baseline. You can’t be fed up with fun though. “Ok, we’ve had enough fun now” is invariably said by another person who’s not having fun, but is nearby to people who are. Fun, by definition, is always commensurate with our threshold of enjoyment.

So here's the thought experiment that I want you to imagine. And imagine it as you are right now, without editing out the complicated parts of your circumstances. Go through your life and cut out all the things that aren't fun. Even if something is neutral, or mildly enjoyable, delete it. How much of an average week in your life survives the audit? If you’re honest (and this won’t work if you aren’t honest) probably not a lot of it.

It’s natural for fun to be a big part of life when we’re younger. We all accept this. Implicit within that is also the acceptance that fun lessens as we age. Now that’s a hell of a mindset. Adulthood comes with obligations, duties, responsibilities. All of these things have the same flavour of “if I didn't have to do them, I wouldn't”. OK then, why do we have to do them? Well, if we don’t do them, something bad will happen. Something worse than however bad it feels to do them.

Much of adult life is organised around preventing bad outcomes. It’s tireless prophylaxis. Defence mode. It’s easy to forget the point of doing these things. Maintenance activities (which is what these things are) are supposed to maintain things for a reason. So often, though, we don’t have much time, energy, or inspiration left by the time we’ve done our daily upkeep. We’re maintaining lives that we forget to actually live.

I had this teacher who told a lot of great stories. Many of the stories (including this one I’m about to tell you) actually don't make much sense, but for a young mind they worked extremely well. This one is about a lamplighter.

Before electric streetlights, someone had to go out each evening and light them by hand, lamp by lamp, street by street, across the whole town. That was the lamplighter. He carried a long pole with a flame (or some other ignition mechanism) at the top. In her story, by the time the lamplighter had lit all the lamps on his round, it would already be time to turn them off again. And then, by the time he put them all out, it was time to light them up again. I didn’t question this. Suppose I just assumed that lamplighters never slept and were strange Sisyphean entities. But the endless, hopeless feeling it gave me, actually got to me. Got into me, somehow. It frightens me to this day.

There’s a lot of lamp-lighting going on in our lives. At some point, you need to do something with the light you’ve lit, or be content at times to work in the dark.