#15 - Ordinary Fun

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Ordinary Fun

Last week's FunCast was about at least two kinds of fun - extreme fun, and ordinary fun. It turns out that ordinary fun has: a) little or no commercial appeal, and 2) the power to sustain life. Here's an extract from the essay:

Extreme fun is, well, extreme. Fun that is so much fun that we are willing to risk life and limb to taste it, even if only for a second. It's the fun of sky diving, bungee jumping, rock climbing, snow boarding.

Ordinary fun is the chewing gum kind of fun, even the washing dishes kind of fun that comes with the warm water and emerging sparkle and the meditation-like expanse of timelessness that ends when the sink is empty.

The problem is that it's the extreme kinds of fun that get all the press. That's the kind of fun that soft drink commercials are made of. The other, the ordinary kind of fun goes for the most part unnoticed, barely felt.

Which is precisely why so many of us think that we aren't having fun. Which is precisely why so many of us really aren't having fun - because even when we are, we think we're not, if you know what I mean.

So all the commercial dollars that go into making it perfectly clear how this car or these shoes or those sunglasses lead inevitably to the ultimate expression of all-consumingly extreme fun - leave us, for the most part, in the shadows of despair, feeling that everything else we do is dreary, funless.

Which has the effect of raising the fun threshold to the point that hardly anything ever feels fun enough. Which is fine for the commercial powers, but not so good for us, the fun-seeking many, who buy and buy in to the belief that ordinary fun is not fun enough to be considered fun at all.

You can read more here, if more is what you need to read.