The Power of Fun — How to Feel Alive Again

The Problem with Fun

Most people, when asked if they are having fun, will say they’re fine. They have leisure time. They watch television, scroll through their phones, occasionally attend social events. The surface of their life looks like a life that contains fun. But something is missing — a quality of aliveness, of genuine pleasure, of being fully present in an experience rather than merely adjacent to it. The activities that fill leisure time don’t produce what fun is supposed to produce.

Catherine Price, a science journalist whose previous book was about phone addiction, spent years asking what had happened to fun — to the spontaneous playfulness and genuine pleasure that had seemed more accessible in childhood and that had become, for her and for many of the adults she spoke to, elusive in a way that was hard to articulate. The Power of Fun is her answer: a research-backed argument that what we call fun, in common usage, includes two very different things, and that the distinction between them explains why so much of what we do for relaxation leaves us feeling vaguely depleted rather than restored.

True Fun

Price’s central contribution is a definition of True Fun that distinguishes it from counterfeit fun — from the passive consumption and numbing out that fills leisure time without filling the people who consume it. True Fun, in her framework, is not a feeling but a convergence: the simultaneous presence of three elements that, when they occur together, produce the specific quality of aliveness that we mean when we say something was genuinely fun.

Playfulness is the quality of not taking an activity too seriously — of bringing a spirit of lightness, improvisation, and unself-consciousness to it. It is distinct from competition, from performance, from the monitored quality that social media has introduced into leisure: the sense of doing an activity while also curating how the activity appears. Playfulness requires the temporary suspension of self-monitoring.

Connection is the quality of genuine presence with another person or with an activity — not adjacency, not the experience of being in the same room while separately on your phone, but actual contact. True connection in this sense is rarer than physical proximity suggests, because connection requires attention, and attention has become one of the scarcest resources in the information economy.

Flow is the state described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — the absorption in an activity at the edge of one’s ability, where the challenge is high enough to require genuine engagement but not so high as to produce anxiety. Flow is incompatible with distraction. You cannot flow and check your phone.

When all three of these elements are present simultaneously — when you are being playful, connected, and absorbed in flow — True Fun happens. Price argues that this convergence is what people are actually seeking when they reach for their phones or turn on the television, and that those activities consistently fail to produce it, which is why the seeking continues without resolution.

The Fake Fun Problem

The distinction between True Fun and fake fun is not moralistic — Price is not arguing that television is bad or that people should feel guilty for scrolling. She is making an empirical observation: that certain activities are consistently identified as fun in anticipation but do not produce the felt sense of having had fun in retrospect.

The reason, her argument suggests, is that passive consumption blocks or prevents the three elements of True Fun. Watching television is not playful in the required sense — it is performed at you rather than engaged with by you. Scrolling produces proximity to other people’s images of connection without producing connection itself. And neither activity produces flow — both are calibrated to prevent the disengagement that would send you away.

This is the specific genius of the attention economy: it has created experiences that simulate the surface of fun without delivering its substance, while simultaneously crowding out the conditions under which True Fun could occur. The phone slot-machine dynamic — the variable reward schedule that keeps you scrolling — is optimised to prevent boredom without enabling genuine absorption.

Finding Your Fun

Price’s practical contribution is the SPARK audit — a process for identifying what has produced True Fun in your own life, which she argues is necessary because fun is individual. What produces the convergence of playfulness, connection, and flow for one person will not produce it for another. Some people find it in music; others in cooking, sports, board games, crafts, hiking, dancing. The point is to identify the specific activities and social configurations that have reliably produced it for you.

This individualisation is the most honest aspect of the book. Self-help’s tendency toward universal prescriptions — here is what will make you happier — is replaced by a process for self-discovery. The framework tells you what True Fun requires; you have to figure out what, in your specific life, delivers it.

The practical exercises scattered through the book are specific enough to be useful without being prescriptive. Price asks readers to notice when they are genuinely having fun and to examine the conditions that produced it. She asks them to schedule protected time for the activities they’ve identified. She asks them to examine the ways their phone habits displace conditions for True Fun rather than creating them.

The Deeper Argument

Beneath the practical advice is a more serious argument: that fun is not trivial. The book’s title — The Power of Fun — is not ironic. Price is making the case that the felt sense of aliveness that True Fun produces is connected to meaning, to vitality, and to the difference between a life that is being endured and a life that is being lived.

This is consistent with a broader literature — on peak experiences, on flow, on the importance of play for adult wellbeing — that self-help has tended to treat as peripheral and that Price argues should be central. If True Fun produces the convergence of engagement, connection, and absorption that psychological research associates with wellbeing and meaning, then its systematic absence from adult life is not a trivial complaint. It is a significant deprivation.

What the Book Gets Right

The Power of Fun is at its best when it is making the central distinction clear and helping readers apply it to their own lives. The three-element definition is genuinely useful — a better tool than “fun” alone for thinking about what leisure time is for and why so much of it doesn’t satisfy.

Price’s honesty about her own struggle — the fact that she wrote the book partly in response to her own chronic joylessness, that she was not writing from a position of achieved wellness but from the middle of the problem — gives the book a credibility that more authoritative self-help lacks.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — A clarifying intervention on a subject that most self-help ignores. The three-element definition of True Fun is immediately applicable to your own life.