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.

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

I think this dichotomy or opposition between work and play, between leisure and serious stuff, is definitely a bad way of thinking about the useful insights that play provides.

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

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.

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.

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