The Fun Habit

A component of our well-being relies on fun, play, and leisure, and modern life has eroded our opportunities to enjoy these essential components of vitality. (...) Instead of enjoying activities on our terms, we turn them into statistics to be parsed (p. 8-9).

Instead of enjoying activities on our terms, we turn them into statistics to be parsed. (...) Our brains are actually programmed to fixate on the gap between where we are and where we think we'll be happy. (...) When we talk about having an hedonic experience, it typically has two components -anticipatory and consumatory pleasure. (...) Science has now come to understand that, for a lot of us, what really drives us in the pursuit of pleasure is often not the experience of feeling good itself, but the allure of pleasure from a potential reward or positive outcome and the accompanying good feelings when we have predicted correctly. there are three reasons for this:

1. We are good at anticipating. (...) the anticipation isn't necessary connected to pleasure at all. (...) Urged on by dopamine, then, we haphazardly pursue happiness, instead of genuinely enjoying the gift of happiness itself. (...) Once a change becomes familiar, our happiness returns to our unique "set point" -the same level of happiness that existed for us prior to the change.

2. We are good at adapting. (...) We eventually acclimate to our new reality and return to whatever default level of happiness we were originally accustomed to.

3. We are good at comparing. (...) Our hapinness is almost like a mass hallucination. We compare ourselves against others in whatever consensus reality we are living in within that moment (p. 8-11). 

Validation increasingly comes from outside sources, from a Nothing army -strangers who have little or no real interest in us or our well-being. (...) We now understand that the opposite of pleasure to be ennui -dissatisfaction resulting from a lack of stimulation and enrichment. If ennui is an enemy of fun, the Nothing is fun's ultimate villain.

We go from feeding the Nothing to feeding ourselves and those we genuinely care about. When oxytocin is present, we tend to act more prosocial and better actualize that it's not about ourselves and how we rank against others, but rather that we are better when we are supporting each other (p.14).

An enjoyable life is just as important as a well-rested one (p. 20).