Fun Day

What the day is

Fun Day is observed on April 1, an open invitation with no particular rules. Fun at work is covered in January and fun without money in October; this one is about what fun actually requires.

Origin and background

The useful distinction is between pleasure and enjoyment. Pleasure is passive and it satiates: it is agreeable while the stimulus lasts, it stops when the stimulus stops, and each repetition delivers a little less. Enjoyment involves doing something slightly beyond your current ability, and it is what people are describing when they say they lost track of time. The psychologist who named that state called it flow, and its defining condition is a match between difficulty and skill. Too easy produces boredom, too hard produces anxiety, and the narrow band between them is where the hours disappear.

This is why an evening of undemanding entertainment can pass agreeably and leave nothing behind, while a hard game, an instrument or a long argument with a friend is remembered for years. It also explains why fun is so often mildly effortful, and why the days people nominate as their best usually involved some inconvenience.

The second robust finding is that we are bad at predicting any of this. Work on affective forecasting shows people systematically misjudge what will make them happy and for how long, generally overestimating both the intensity and the duration. Applied to a free day, the plan that sounds most appealing over breakfast is frequently not the one that produces the best afternoon, and the reliable correction is to consult what actually worked last time rather than what sounds good now.

Company is the most consistent variable of all. Across large studies of daily experience, time spent with other people rates higher than almost any solitary activity, including the solitary activities people say they prefer.

How to take part

• Pick something slightly beyond your ability rather than something easy.
• Check what you actually enjoyed last time, not what sounds appealing now.
• Involve somebody else. It is the single most reliable factor.
• Leave the phone alone, since divided attention is the enemy of absorption.
• Accept a little inconvenience. Effortless rarely turns out to be memorable.