The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.
A fun movie is something that is pleasurable without being demanding, you don't have to think too hard.
Fun has to do with habitual activities but then also terrifically novel or unusual ones. It works as a sort of strange milkshake of those concepts.
We think we want enjoyment, and that enjoyment is incompatible with work, and somehow we have to import the pleasure into these miserable experiences. That takes for granted that there's not fun or play to be found in the work itself.
If you stop someone who's talking about something being fun, and say "Well what do you mean?" it's almost impossible to answer.
For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.
Generally speaking, when people use the word fun, it's like a placeholder. You know, "How was your evening?" "Oh it was fun."
The more you're drowning in familiarity, the better the fun is. It requires less novelty to produce even more gratification. And it's something that didn't come from you. It was about the other thing - the thing you were experiencing, or the people you were with, or the mechanism you were operating, or whatever it might be.
With sports and games, you have fun despite working very hard, even despite failing repeatedly. Even the fun of a night out, you have to get somewhere and do all the conversational, social work of being out. There's effort involved. But then when you're finished, you can conclude, "Actually there was something gratifying about the hardship that I just encountered." That discovery of novelty is where the molten core of fun is.
If you think about the contexts in which we talk about things being fun, often there's a certain kind of misery or effort that's involved with it. The difficulty of travel, getting all your bags packed and your work done and navigating the airports and all that. That sort of struggle.
We're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure.
Fun doesn't have anything to do with pleasure, necessarily. I think this will be terrifically unintuitive for people.
When we think about play and games and the situations in which having fun is seen as an outcome, they often have to do with repetition. You're returning to something again, and even despite that similarity, you squeeze something new out of it.
When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.
