In Person / Linda Matchan
Boston Globe Magazine, 12/8/02

The Bummer Years

I WAS TALKING TO A friend I hadn't seen in some time, and she asked me a question that took me by surprise.
"What are you doing for fun these days?" she said.

She might just as well have asked, "What are you doing for positive growth in your stock portfolio?" What am I doing for fun? Fun - now there's a distant concept. Who has fun anymore?

Not a lot of adults I know, judging from what I'm hearing. "Do I have fun?" says a friend, a busy father of two. "Now that I think of it, no."

"Fun? What's that?" a girlfriend says dismissively.

Discouraged, I try changing the way I phrase the question. "Have a nice weekend?" I say cheerfully to a colleague early on a Monday morning. "Who remembers?" he grumbles. "Kids' homework. Errands. Coaching games."
I would not consider these people to be, in general, dull or morose individuals. They're just desperately seeking fun in a frenzied 24/7 rut of a work world.

Which isn't to say that life is without pleasure, because there are many pleasures, whether it's seeing your kid play that soccer game or enjoying a good meal or even watching Tony's latest act of villainy on The Sopranos, which I'm ashamed to say is what passes for a good time in my household once a week.

But pleasure is not the same as fun - pure, unadulterated, joyful, silly, blissful fun, the kind that kids are really good at, like jumping on a pogo stick or going for a bike ride when there's no secondary gain. involved, like losing weight or getting somewhere. Real fun has to be pointless, with no asterisk it. You shouldn't pay a price for it later, facing a mountain of laundry or emails that have accumulated while you were out having fun.

Often I find that even when I'm having fun, the fun gets obscured by the guilt of not being somewhere else more important (or even more fun) - or getting something accomplished. Sometimes, even when I'm in the midst of having fun, my habitual, reflexive need to accomplish as much as possible in the course of a day takes over and de-funs the activity by translating it into something more goal-oriented.

Take, for example, apple picking, an activity I consider great fun, at least in principle. It's fun to be outside. It's fun to eat the apples. It's fun to climb a tree when the orchard owner isn't watching you. But the last time I hit the orchards, the fun was eclipsed by my anxiety that I was wasting valuable time, my need to salvage the day with a useful, tangible byproduct. For days, the apples sat on my kitchen counter, accusingly. "Make us into pie," they seemed to be saying to me. "What are you waiting for, you lazy slug? We should be applesauce by now."

Sometimes I console myself by saying that funlessness is a life-stage issue - that once my kids are grown or I've retired from work, I can go back to jumping on pogo sticks, implausible as this might seem. (I tried my daughter's hula hoop recently and ached for days.) But it's a pretty long stage of life, and the time has come to stop deferring fun. How long should we have to be deferring fun?

Which is why, recently, I set out to have fun. My goal was to take a day off and work on a quilt, an activity that may be marginally fun to most people but a lot of fun to me.

But a few minutes into it, that anti-fun anxiety kicked in to remind me of all the things that weren't getting done while I was amusing myself: I wasn't buying the groceries; I wasn't going to the bank to straighten out a mistake on my monthly statement; I wasn't going to the post office to mail a card that would be late if I waited; I wasn't even exercising!

My fun lasted all of an hour - but it really was fun! Next time, I'll try for 90 minutes. I've penciled it in on my calendar in the next available time slot, three weeks from now.