Do You Remember When You Stopped Having Fun?

By the time we’re adults, we’ve often lost our ability to do things purely for fun.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

I am going to tell you about something I felt a lot of shame about for a lot of years. Don’t worry, though, this story has a happy ending!

In my mid-twenties I returned to the States after living abroad for many years. I had just finished my master’s degree, and had no idea what to do next. I had no job, no prospects, and no vision for myself. So I moved into my parents’ basement apartment, where I paid a nominal rent, and spent a few years working interesting, but low-paying, jobs. None of them required a master’s degree.

This was a time of deep disorientation in my life. A quarter-life crisis, if you will. Looking back, I realize that I was deeply ambivalent, even hostile, toward the lifestyle I knew I was expected to adopt as an educated grownup. You know what I mean. That responsible life we’re supposed to step into with career, home ownership, bills, marriage, kids, retirement savings, etc. It was your typical failure to launch situation.

One of my jobs was at the local branch of a New York-based digital news service. A coworker’s wife was a journalist with the local paper, and was interviewing young people who, like me, still lived with their parents well into their mid-twenties. I consented to be interviewed by her. She asked me something like this: “But don’t you want to have all those things your parents have? House, career, family?”

Here’s what I replied: “That stuff just doesn’t sound like much fun.”

Oh, how I cringed with shame later, thinking how entitled, lazy, spoiled I must have sounded. For years whenever I remembered that interview, I felt that shame again.

My feelings about my response to her have changed, but before I tell you how, let me share another little story.

Once upon a time, I was at the beach with my friend’s family for a week-long summer vacation. We discovered a marvelous way to make sandcastles: using very wet sand we squeezed through our fists, letting it drip onto a base of packed sand. The sandy drips created magical spires and towers. Even the grownups were impressed. We made these sandcastles every day, spending hours in deep concentration, absorbed by the flow of creativity.

“Maybe you’ll grow up to be an architect!” said one grownup.

I bet you heard something like that as a kid, and many times. We are socialized early to see things from a perspective of productivity and monetization.

As a child, I thought that was just how things worked: you turn your childhood interests into a career. I can now see the privilege inherent in such a perspective, but also the psychological violence that underlies this seemingly benign belief. Interests, activities, and talents must be monetized. It’s fine to play around as children, but as adults we are expected to make money. Play turns into work, and work must be productive. Life cannot be fun once we are all grown up.

This was what I was grappling with when I did that interview. That devastating transition we all have to make from having fun to being a grownup. Once that transition has occurred, something is lost. Something important. Life-giving.

As adults, we often feel guilty about doing something purely for enjoyment. We are constantly on guard against wasting time, getting too distracted, too immersed in our own thing. Gone are the days when we could get lost for hours in our own worlds, building sandcastles and dreaming. Think about it: when was the last time you lost yourself like that, without regard to what people might think, or what you should to be getting done instead? Grownup hobbies often have some kind of productive purpose in mind. For example, sports are fun, but they’re exercise, too, fitting them into the ever-popular “self-improvement” category of adult activities. Even hobbies that are mostly for fun or relaxation are fitted into this model by us or others in our lives. So you like sewing? Ever think about opening an Etsy shop?

The biggest loss for us, though, is the joy this type of framing leaches from our daily, moment-to-moment lives. We save our fun for the getaways, vacations, weekends, special occasions. We have this idea that fun must be saved up for like we save up money for big purchases. As adults we expect our day-to-day lives to be mostly toil. Living a “fun” life is something we associate with either rich people who don’t have to work, or immature, lazy, and entitled people who eschew adult responsibilities. We don’t even know what a fun life would look like on a daily, moment-to-moment basis outside of either of these models.

Don’t feel bad if you tend to easily fall into this type of framing. We are socialized early to see the productive, money-making possibilities of our activities. It’s part of how we survive in our capitalist ecosystem. But let’s think about our own participation in this ecosystem. Every time we tell a kid they could turn their fun childhood activities into a career, we are participating. We mean well, of course. We don’t realize we are part of a process of socialization that will eventually steal the joy from creative activities, that eventually leads to not being able to enjoy creativity at all. So let’s stop saying that kind of thing to kids.  

You know what else we can do? Stop framing our own lives and activities that way.

Adults have busy lives, you say. There isn’t time for that kind of fun anymore, that’s why you don’t do it. I would suggest that time is not the main issue. There is time if we make it. The problem is that we can’t get lost like that anymore. It’s been socialized out of us. In fact, whenever we get close to that feeling of getting lost, we experience anxiety. We yank ourselves back onto the straight and narrow path of responsible adulthood.

And then we find a child immersed in play and tell them, “Look at how good you are at that, how much you enjoy it! You could grow up to be a such-and-such.” Implicitly we are saying, Eventually you’ll have to grow up, too, and then the fun must stop.

So how do I feel about that interview now? I’m proud of it. Yes, I recognize the privilege inherent in my response, but I also see a young woman struggling with all her might against the dragging undertow of our modern adult lives. And I love that young woman for her honesty, her refusal to give in, and for all the devastating struggles still ahead for her.

Because finally she made her way to shore, and she started building sandcastles again.