The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.

The actual effort that you can exert upon the universe is fairly limited.

I think the most important thing to realize about play is that it's this thing that's in stuff, it's not in you.

We're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure.

Forcing your spouse to stop doing that bad habit that drives you crazy, or making your kid be better at math or at art or at swimming, or making your parents or your in-laws not be annoying in the way that they're annoying, these are sometimes doomed goals.

With sports and games, you have fun despite working very hard, even despite failing repeatedly. Even the fun of a night out, you have to get somewhere and do all the conversational, social work of being out. There's effort involved. But then when you're finished, you can conclude, "Actually there was something gratifying about the hardship that I just encountered." That discovery of novelty is where the molten core of fun is.

For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.