Normally we think of play as the opposite of work. Work is the thing you have to do, and then there's play, the thing you choose to do.

My lawnmower can't change in the way that my son can or that I can.

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

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.

When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.

Fun has to do with habitual activities but then also terrifically novel or unusual ones. It works as a sort of strange milkshake of those concepts.

Normally if you're dating, you're looking for compatibility, and then the moment that there's incompatibility, you're like, "Well, swipe left on that, let's just keep looking." In some ways I think the same lessons apply to people that apply to objects. It's just much easier to see that lesson in things because they're these fixed intangible lumps of stuff. People are not. They can change.