Oh the fun we will have
I have been thinking a lot about fun recently.
Not fun as a feeling, but fun as a category. Because it turns out, not all fun is created equal, and I've spent most of my life sampling from a very narrow part of the menu.
2020 has been, and I say this knowing how it sounds, a genuinely good year for me. The chaos that upended everything somehow created space for things I hadn't realised I was missing. I spent it with the person I care about most in the world, found my way back to hobbies that had been quietly waiting for me, and had real conversations, the unhurried kind, with the people who matter most. For all its ups and downs, the year contracted, and in contracting, deepened.
All of it has been fun. Just not my usual kind.
I am, historically, a Type 1 fun person. The immediate return, a great meal, an easy evening with friends, instant gratification cleanly delivered. I am also, if I'm being honest, no stranger to Type 3 fun: enormously enjoyable in the moment, quietly regrettable in retrospect. We won't go into specifics. The list is long.
What I had never really made room for was Type 2 fun.
Type 2 is the strange one. It's the kind you don't enjoy while you're having it, and yet look back on it with genuine fondness (sometimes even gratitude). It requires a long view. It asks you to trust a future version of yourself who isn't miserable yet.
These past few months gave me something unexpected: complete freedom of choice. No events to attend out of obligation, no social calendars shaped by other people's preferences, no gentle peer pressure disguised as plans. Just me, deciding, with no audience and no external stakes, how to spend my time.
And what did I do with that freedom? I chose things I was bad at.
Yoga, for instance. I am, by any objective measure, terrible at it (though I was considerably worse a few months ago), which at least suggests a direction of travel. Every session, without fail, I spend a significant portion mentally narrating my own absurdity. Why am I doing this. Look at you. This is ridiculous.
And yet I have never once finished a practice and thought: what a waste of time. The regret only ever runs one way with yoga, and it's the regret of not having started sooner. The misery is in the doing. The satisfaction waits, reliably, on the other side.
That, I've come to understand, is Type 2 fun. And, dare I say, I've come to love it?
I guess, It doesn't have to feel like fun to be fun.