If you think about the contexts in which we talk about things being fun, often there's a certain kind of misery or effort that's involved with it. The difficulty of travel, getting all your bags packed and your work done and navigating the airports and all that. That sort of struggle.

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

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.

We have so many choices that it's only always our fault if we're malcontent.

You allow yourself to discover the things that are already there when you play.

Our ideas of happiness, gratification, contentment, satisfaction, all demand that those feelings come from within us. If you flip that on its head and say "What if I took the world at face value?" and then ask "What can I do with what is given?" it's an interesting trick to turn around the whole problem of how you feel.

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.