I think a lot of the misery that people experience comes from that sensation of boundlessness, of infinite possibility.

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.

If you stop someone who's talking about something being fun, and say "Well what do you mean?" it's almost impossible to answer.

We don't like to think of ourselves as subject to the forces of the world, we like to think of ourselves as exerting that force.

Fun doesn't have anything to do with pleasure, necessarily. I think this will be terrifically unintuitive for people.

If you start the day not really expecting substantial change, but anticipating some small new revelation or some small alteration, then over time you're able to find them in more places.

The more you're drowning in familiarity, the better the fun is. It requires less novelty to produce even more gratification. And it's something that didn't come from you. It was about the other thing - the thing you were experiencing, or the people you were with, or the mechanism you were operating, or whatever it might be.