How reimagining what 'fun' is can boost our productivity and happiness, writes nireyal
— or tasks in our work calendar that don’t sync with how we value our time. When you binge on The Office rather than doing your taxes, watching Michael, Pam, and Dwight is your way of avoiding an activity you deem to be a tedious task. The secret to staying focused at times like these is not to abstain from The Office — you’ll just find another distraction — but to change your perspective on the task itself.
Huh? Doesn’t fun have to feel good? Not necessarily, Bogost says. By relinquishing our notions about what fun should feel like, we open ourselves up to seeing our daily activities in a new way. Play can be part of any difficult task, he believes, and though play doesn’t necessarily have to be pleasurable, it can free us from discomfort — which, let’s not forget, is the central ingredient driving distraction.
We’ve all heard Mary Poppins’s advice to add “a spoonful of sugar” and turn a job into a game. Well, Bogost believes Poppins was wrong. He claims her approach “recommends covering over drudgery.” As he writes, “We fail to have fun because we don’t take things seriously enough, not because we take them so seriously that we’d have to cut their bitter taste with sugar. Fun is not a feeling so much as an exhaust produced when an operator can treat something with dignity.
TV, social media, and other commercially produced distractions use slot machine-like variable rewards to keep us engaged with a constant stream of newness. Bogost points out that we can use the same techniques to make any task more pleasurable and compelling. He gives the example of mowing his lawn. “It may seem ridiculous to call an activity like this ‘fun,’” he writes, yet he learned to love it.“Pay close, foolish, even absurd attention to things,” he says.
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