Having Fun Won’t Make You Happy
If I ask you to imagine someone having fun, what do you think of? Probably someone smiling and laughing, enjoying themselves at a party, the beach or maybe an amusement park. If I ask you to imagine a happy person, you’ll probably conjure up a similar image.
So are fun and happiness the same thing?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, mostly because I’m fortunate enough to be at a point in my life where I’m having lots of fun! I’ve spent the last year traveling the world, so I’ve had no worries about jobs or responsibilities and have had the unusual opportunity to have fun pretty much every day.
I started wondering whether all this fun has actually made me happier…
Strangely enough, I’m not sure that it has. I’ve enjoyed many of the things I’ve done and they’ve given me some happy memories, but I don’t think the fun has made my life happier overall.
This is quite a shocking realization really, considering that most of us spend our lives in pursuit of fun as a means to happiness.
So what’s the truth about the link between fun and happiness?
While I was pondering the question of fun and happiness, I read a couple of books which touched on the subject — Happiness is a Serious Problem by Dennis Prager and The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.
Both books made me realize the difference between fun and happiness: fun is temporary, happiness is ongoing.
Fun brings about positive feelings like excitement, pride and hope and of course positive feelings make us happy.
However, according to modern psychologists, well-being is actually made up of five elements and positive feelings are in fact the weakest element. (See my article The 5 Elements Of Well-Being for more details about the elements of well-being). Positive feelings are not enough for a happy life, because those emotions fade away so quickly.
This is the main problem with fun — we are only happy while we are doing a fun activity. As soon as the fun stops, the positive emotions stop.
I’ve have done all sorts of fun things over the last year — scuba diving, horse riding, trekking, lots of partying 😉 — and those activities made me happy while I was doing them, but added little to my life satisfaction once they were over.
Like most people, I thought that the more fun I had, the happier I would be. Of course, the problem with fun is that it delivers diminishing returns — something that was really fun the first time is less fun the next time. This is how people become addicted to fun and end up spending their time, energy and money on one fun activity after another, in the hope that it will finally bring them happiness.
Life needs meaning
So if fun won’t make us happy in the long run, what will?
It seems that true, lasting happiness comes from doing something meaningful. This means working towards goals, contributing to society, creating something, connecting with people. (See my article How To Find The Meaning Of Life (Maybe) which discusses Viktor Frankl’s view that the most important thing in a person’s life is to have meaning).
The bad news is that, although doing something meaningful will make you happier in the long run, it might not necessarily make you happy at the moment you are doing it. To quote Gretchen Rubin, “happiness doesn’t always make you happy!”
A personal example of this is writing articles like the one you are reading right now. Writing brings me a huge amount of joy and life satisfaction, but it can also be quite frustrating and certainly doesn’t always feel very fun.
It would be much easier to turn the laptop off and watch a film instead. However, I know that writing this article which makes me much happier in the long run than watching a film I’ll probably forget in a day or two.
I have realized that everything that has truly added value to my life over the last year of traveling has come from doing something meaningful. Writing articles, creating my website, completing a yoga teacher course, connecting with charities, even working on a farm!
All of these activities involved effort on my part. Being active is much harder than being passive, but it is so much more rewarding.
People tend to associate happiness with pleasure, not pain. In fact, everything that leads to real happiness involves some pain. Last year, I wrote an article about whether having children makes you happy. It seems to me that this is the best example of how “happiness doesn’t always make you happy.”
Raising children is one of the most meaningful and rewarding things someone can do, but it certainly involves effort and pain. The same goes for marriages, careers and learning new skills.
How to combine fun and meaning
So does all this mean that we all need to live very serious lives working on meaningful projects and never having fun ever again? Of course not. We all need to have fun — we just need to understand that fun alone is not enough for a full, happy life.
Fun without meaning is empty. Meaning without fun is boring. So we need to find ways to incorporate both elements into our lives. Both Dennis Prager and Gretchen Rubin suggest ways of doing this.
In Happiness is a Serious Problem, Dennis Prager suggests that the best way to have both a fun and meaningful life is to have fun while doing what is significant. That is, trying to bring fun into our family lives, professions, personal projects.
In The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin differentiates between “challenging fun” and “relaxing fun”. Challenging fun is the most demanding, but also the most rewarding.
For example, learning to play a musical instrument or to speak a foreign language. Relaxing fun is easy — it requires no skill or effort — but it is also the least satisfying. The best example of this is watching TV, which is certainly fun but brings little reward.
We can use these two categories to consider the types of fun we have in our own lives. By trying to have more challenging fun and less relaxing fun, we can strive to combine meaning and fun in our lives.
To sum it up…
- Fun and happiness are not the same thing
- Fun alone will not make you happy
- True happiness comes from doing something meaningful
- The best way to have a happy life is by finding ways to combine fun and meaning
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do you agree that fun and happiness are not the same thing? Have you found a way to incorporate fun and meaning into your life?
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Originally published at ontheroadtohappiness.org on August 1, 2018.
