NPR’s Andrew Limbong speaks with Catherine Price, author of The Power of Fun, about why it can be so difficult for adults to have fun and how people can find ways to incorporate fun into their life.
ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
When was the last time you had fun? No, really. Think about it. What were you doing? Who were you with? Did it feel fun? I mean, I’m too ashamed to admit the number of hours I’ve spent looking at my phone, laughing at TikToks or embarrassing tweets that I found funny. But was that fun? A lot of people, especially adults with bills to pay, maybe even mouths to feed, aren’t even sure how to have fun. I mean, maybe we take fun too seriously. CONSIDER THIS producer Brianna Scott searched how to have fun on Google.
LIMBONG: Are we having fun yet? For some of us, fun is, well, not that fun, you know. What is it that Jack Torrance in “The Shining” said? All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. And maybe we take fun too seriously, right? Like, search how to have fun on Google and almost 8 billion search results come up. And when did we stop knowing how to have fun? There’s people out here paying over hundreds of dollars to hire party coaches and play coaches, paying to attend seminars and workshops on how to have fun in life. All this got us thinking, what’s so hard about having fun? So we called up an expert on that. Catherine Price is the author of “The Power Of Fun: How To Feel Alive Again.”
Hey, Catherine.
CATHERINE PRICE: So what I found is that the dictionary definition doesn’t match the lived experience when people have fun. And so I decided – as a science journalist and writer, I decided, well, I’m going to try to come up with a better definition of what fun is. And the definition I came up with is that fun – or true fun, as I call it – is the combination of three states – playfulness, connection and flow. And when those three states are together, like the center of the Venn diagram, that is the…
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