This is the question, Robyn, my life coach asked me a few months back. I was a bit dumb struck by the question and pondered for a moment. No, actually, I haven’t had fun in the past two weeks. I am starting up a new business and had spent much of the past two weeks on my marketing efforts and quarantining as much as possible. I hadn’t been riding my horse or engaging in any physical activity for months due to a hip injury. I had been meditating and spending time on reflective, self-care activities and while enjoyable, I wouldn’t define these activities as fun. I realized my weekly activities were not 100% balanced. On the day of our call, I could not even think of anything fun that I desired to do. COVID-19 had curtailed my activities and brought much grief into my life. My family has had two deaths this year and we have another family member who has cancer. I have been feeling sad, how do I go about having fun?
She encouraged me to incorporate fun activities into my life because having fun is good for you. She had recently completed some Zoom cooking workshops and also takes long hikes enjoying nature. I decided I would take action to incorporating more fun into my life. The landscape has changed due to COVID-19 restrictions, so I had to rethink how to do this. I turned to the internet.
Michael Rucker is an organizational psychologist who studies the science of fun. His title is “Fun Expert” and his website has years’ worth of articles, blogs, and podcasts regarding the topic. In 2016, his younger brother unexpectedly passed away. He was grieving and finishing up his dissertation when he discovered that there is a research gap in the literature surrounding the idea of fun.
He discovered that fun can pull us out of despair because we have agency in any moment to add positive emotion to an experience. Fun can transcend our emotional state. You don’t have to identify as happy to incorporate fun into your life. He advises people to practice having fun. He talks about deliberate fun. Scheduling fun into your calendar sounds like just something else to put on your to do list but he suggests investigating where you are spending your time over one week and find some opportunities to change things up a little bit to enjoy things more.
Sometimes the feeling of happiness is elusive but you can move toward happy moments by having fun.
I was talking to Emily Ruiz, from the barn and she has written an article for Positive Psychology called “First Step in a Meaningful Life: Logotherapy”. I read the article and we talked a bit about Viktor Frankl’s theory disagreeing with the psychoanalytical idea of Freud’s pain pleasure principle. I recalled from my days as a psychology major that Freud’s pain pleasure principle says that avoiding pain and increasing pleasure is at the core of the decisions we make. Well, certainly having fun would increase our feelings of pleasure.
We both prefer Dr. Frankl’s theory which proposes that a human being’s motivation in life is to find meaning, not pleasure. He believed that people are motivated by something called “will to meaning.” He proposed that life can have meaning even in the most miserable of circumstances. Motivation for living comes from discovering your life’s purpose. Dr. Frankl developed his ideology after surviving detainment in the Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. He wrote “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
I find Dr. Frankl’s life story very inspiring. Every day we are given the choice to choose our attitude.
While I prefer Dr. Frankl’s theories to Dr. Freud’s theories, I do think finding new ways to have fun during this pandemic is a good idea. Putting some of my energy towards finding fun activities to increase feelings of happiness is going to bring my life into balance.
So, despite my challenges right now in my life, I have decided to cut myself some slack and look for small ways to enjoy life more and have fun here and there.
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