Right now I am facing a tiny, trippy question: am I listening to Billy Joel’s A Minor Variation because my feelings got into a minor scale sort of rut, or am I feeling down because I have been listening to it on loop one too many times lately?

Either way, the song wins — it is a gem; and if you, like me, send yourself down dark highways in a little ‘mobile after tiring evening events, this is the song to be blasting from every speaker in your car. (You are welcome.)

Besides a few physical and relational situations that have been demanding more than their fair share of my care and attention the past few months, life has been good. Still, nothing sounds as cheesy and flat and anti-climatic than “what a beautiful life!” when life just isn’t feeling that way. The classic sad-single-watching-happy-couples syndrome hits me hard these days as I see one cute couple after another take themselves out to lovely cafes, autumn hikes, and the like. Usually it makes me happy too, seeing them. Sometimes, though, my smile is there to hide tears — or worse, a scowl.

But despite the internal rainy days, I think I am having fun. The group of fellow hooting and howling at something down the street (it is Saturday afternoon as I write the first draft at my favourite cafe, no need to judge them) make me smile. I laugh at the funky ‘sausage dog’ mug set in an antique store. I take lessons in things I am curious about, and usually enjoy the practice sessions.

My overthinking mind demands that I must truly enjoy myself, though — not just in words and actions, but in experience. I know, I know — the very act of trying to define, quantify, and otherwise contain the experience makes it less than what it could be. But bear with me in this.

What does it take to actually have fun?

Is messing around to find out fun? Or shirking off as much of one’s responsibility as possible without getting found out? Or diving headfirst into something new and having to figure it out once you have jumped off? Or doing new things just because they seem novel and weird to us? Or spending way more money than we could justify on something we don’t need just to laugh about it — the reckless burn-the-banknotes moment that give swashbucklers their aura?

All those could be fun, yes. For a while. We generate lots of splashes and colors and motion when we flail our arms about attempting to move forward. But at some point the lack of results gets to us; we begin to grow tired; we start to wonder if we would ever actually swim.

(These thoughts are an extension and deepening of these mullings on plataeus earlier this month: they also apply to more than plateaus per se. To relationships, answering life’s big questions, and the like, for example.)

Having a deeper level of fun requires work beforehand — a developed understanding of context, a level of skill at the thing, and the application of self to the activity beyond the intent to enjoy one’s self. (Some would add to these a metaphisical foundation, or belief in a connection to some higher power or realm; but let us stay within this immediate-mortal space for now.) Without this foundation, our enjoyment of a thing may remain a superficial sort — the kind that looks at gold flakes and dollarstore glitter and says of both, “Pretty, pretty!’ without understanding or appreciating their difference¹ — and thus, by sheer ignorance and lack of observation, we overlook and even undermine the beauty and joy to be found in a particular pursuit.

To go deeper into one requires choosing never to go as deeply into all the rest; to ask that one’s wide-spread knowledge and engagement with reality deepen at the same rate across a scattered range necessitates an extremely slow rate of progress even in terms of decades.

Personally I fall into the second category (and perhaps shall remain there, no matter how many thought-pieces I write on the virtues of depth-driven exclusive pursuits and direct, demanding engagement); and though a part of me is still adamant that meaningful, significant depth in multiple fields is possible within one lifetime, I have yet to demonstrate it in my life. So I cannot confidently say much on this route other than that its ‘fun meter’ is somewhat crooked, precisely due to the lack of thorough, exclusive, submersion into one thing.

What heightens the dissatisfaction of this path is that, the more you know of each subject or field, the more you grasp the infinite sea of struggle and joy and fulfilment to be found in each of them. I have a folder of “Potential Futures” in my notes somewhere: it is a detailed account of what other life I could be living or would want to live — down to the color of my bike or the style of my commuter’s outfits or the brand of the drink to have at the local bar on Saturdays. It is like running to the edge of a cliff only to peer down at the glorious swells of water below, stay there long enough to have my breath catch in my throat and my eyes twinkle with the beauty of it all — but never jump. There are other cliffs to peer over, you know.

But the desires dull as times goes by and nothing is done about them; we think of biting into something for good as our teeth yellow and chip away of their own accord; we are Jacks and Jills of most trades and masters of some, but strangers to the deepest essence of all of them.

Not having this deeply satisfying relationship, of doing what you know and having the external world respond to you in kind, encourages certain approaches to life in both its heavy moments as well as its lighthearted ones. One habit it might lead to (or at least encourages) is the use of substances. We drink and smoke to relax, to shake off the tense layers about and above and within us, to forget for a moment that we are burdened individuals doing our best to sing along, however confusedly, to a world of major and minor scales (and some that are neither). Just being there and doing the thing is not enough because we are ever only partially engaged — thus we must enhance it, or enhance ourselves while we participate, because that is how we could have the most fun.

Lack of perceived upwards change tend toward cultivating self-doubt and a rethinking/re-searching of life’s meaning and direction for ambitious, self-aware folks. A lower academic grade than expected, and we wonder if we were meant to be on the path we are on. Difficulty in securing a romantic relationship with someone we fancy, and we ask what is wrong with ourselves. A comment by some third party comparing our sibling’s life and accomplishments with our own, and we run the last five, ten years over in our minds trying to discern and mend that one broken link.

Fickle creatures us humans are, with hearts that feel, souls that dream, and minds that demand to know wherefore and why. We could not allow ourselves to have fun before we write a thousand-word treatise on the subject.

“Fun” is complicated. Some say there needs to be learning and growth involved for it to mean anything. Others say it is a “vibe,” this amorphous sense of goodwill and wellbeing one feels around an activity, a person or group, and space. Yet others say it is when you come to love the small actions that make up the thing itself — when the tink, tink, tink of the mallet against the chisel is your favourite sound on earth, when you truly love to throw or kick a ball, when your fingers are most happy when gently holding a pencil poised above paper, then and only then are you truly having fun.

Different people give different thoughts. And yes, some of those conclusions are contextual, or inexplicable, or idiosyncratic to that person and their particular activity.

I suppose a good part of me is afraid of missing out on some deep, bone-warming level of fun. But it’s the same sort of “missing something I have never experienced” as my wonderings about what it would be like to have a child, or to have a schedule I could depend on, or to run a ramen bar in a small town. Whenever those thoughts arise, this thought from Kierkegaard answers me:

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”

…Yeah, I suppose.

At the end of the day, I look in the mirror and ask myself: “Is it that deep?“

***

1. This statement murmurs a request for elaboration: At a higher level of “enlightenment” or greater detachment from the material value of things, there is ultimately no difference between gold-colored glitter and gold flakes. It is only in the collective agreement of the monetary value of one over other that we go, “But of course, we would rather have the gold,” even when our appreciation and enjoyment of the two might be the same. ↩︎