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Last week, I know, you were all wondering, Why isn’t Matt writing anything? Where are the Trying! emails I’ve come to depend on for wisdom and advice in these tortured times? Has something happened? When will he return? Well, I’m back now, as you can tell, and I was gone because I was gone: My family and I were off on our annual ski trip, this time visiting Mont Tremblant, outside Montreal. Every day, accompanied by two other families, we dined richly — from dollar oysters and poutine and obscure cheeses to a hunter’s pie stuffed with at least four different animals — and at night we played endless rounds of mahjong. Most of our time, of course, was spent riding the gondola to the top of the mountain and hurling ourselves down at top speed, my wife, Jean, and I on snowboards, everybody else on skis. The snow was excellent (for the East Coast), the temperature neither too cold nor too warm, and the lift lines uncrowded.

In the middle of one of my runs, however, in a speedy part before a transition to a different piste¹, my brain, which usually goes quiet while my instincts and muscle memory take over, suddenly started throwing questions at me. Why so fast? What if you get hurt? And, more fundamentally: Why are you doing this in the first place?

As I carved through the snow, I tried to break down what I was feeling in that moment. With enough velocity, the arc of a turn created a kind of centrifugal force that my body both fought and embraced, tensing pleasantly, exerting but relaxed. At times I'd hit a little bulge of snow and catch a tiny air — a minute hop at best, but the sudden release from gravity was liberating, and the ease with which I could bounce around the mountain spoke to another delight, that of mastery. I hesitate to use that word. I’m no serious shredder; I avoid half-pipes and terrain parks; dude, I’m 51 years old. But I have enough ability to ride through just about anything within bounds on a mountain. And more important, I am comfortable doing that. I know what I’m capable of, and I enjoy being able to perform without stress or fear, and to luxuriate in a steady — not erratic or spiky — flow of adrenaline, endorphins, and dopamine.

All of that ran through my mind while I was coming down the mountain, and all of it felt … inadequate. These explanations and intellectualizations might make sense now, on the page, to a reader like you, {{first_name|my friend}}, but they only hint bluntly at the real truth, the finer truth. Which is this: I ride a snowboard because it is fun.

But that explanation is inadequate, too. Because it’s fun? What kind of childish, reductive reasoning is that? It can be applied to anything any of us do: I run because it’s fun, write because it’s fun, drink wine because it’s fun, watch movies because they’re fun. There are longer, more complex motivations behind the fun of each of those, but the most superficial and most important part is the fun. Without it, nothing else matters. But to state it earnestly is ridiculous. I sound like one of my teenage daughters, who get exasperated when I probe their tastes. They like the things they like because they like them. Fun things are fun. Especially tautologies!

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Fun was a constant problem back when I was a travel writer. I’d be leaping into alpine lakes in the mountains of the Wyoming-Montana border, or I’d climb a tree in a Paris park, or I'd eat couscous at a weird Algerian restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City, and when the time came to render these experiences into words for my editors and my readers, I’d have to set aside the visceral purity of those moments and transform them into something more meaningful, more edifying, more grown-up.

On the whole, I think, that’s a good thing! You wouldn’t want to read reportage that stops at “I liked it. It was fun.” I wouldn’t want to write that kind of thing, either, because I enjoy breaking down what I see and feel, connecting my experiences to my memories, to history, to the broader culture — and then assembling it all into a work that is, if I’m lucky, more than just a collection of closely observed moments. That’s my idea of fun!

But that’s not why we travel. I mean, many of us probably set out from home with the hope that the journey will amount to something significant, but even so we tend to line up destinations and activities that are — fingers crossed — fun. Maybe the itineraries are familiar, sure bets, or maybe they’re novel experiments, but either way we are hoping to enjoy them as they are, well before we understand the context and delve into the subtext. The pleasure is the point! (Yes, even when we’re talking about type 2 fun.) We’re in it, first of all and most important of all, for fun.

At least, that’s what I’m always telling my daughters — growling through gritted teeth — when they’re skeptical about a planned excursion, like ice skating in a flooded forest: “It’ll be fun, goddamit!” That’s all they really want, right?

Obviously, we don’t all consider the same things to be fun. I, for one, don’t much like dancing or drawing or singing, which a whole lot of people consider fun. I wish I did! I wish the movements I make with my hips and hands and vocal cords would line up with how I imagine them in my head, and I could begin to crawl toward the kind of comfortable proficiency I have on a snowboard. But they don’t, they just won’t, and the superficial experience of trying and failing at these activities doesn’t provide me enough pleasure — enough fun — for me to persist and to improve. Maybe, one day, if I really tried, I’d become good enough to enjoy a tango, a sketch, an aria (!), but with so many crossword puzzles, boulders, novels, and whiskeys calling out to me, with their come-hither delights, why bother? I fail at plenty of things already — I don’t need to add to the list. Failure is definitely no fun².

Whatever things we consider to be fun, I think we do all believe that fun itself exists, even if that definition, too, is going to mutate from person to person. I like to imagine Socrates puzzling this out in a dialogue with some lesser Athenian: “I have had fun, Coalemos, but these entertainments you present to me as fun — the exaggerated battles of painted wrestlers, the throwing of rocks both large and small into the wine-dark sea, the berating of the slight, the weak, the timid — diverge from my own experiences. I must ask myself: Do I know what fun is? For what can unite your violent tastes with my own preferences for roundabout arguments and the company of young people?” Well, okay, Sock, but fun ain’t as complicated as, say, virtue or the nature of good and evil. While examples of fun may vary wildly, we can say that fun itself is merely pleasure, easily and superficially accessed³, and pursued for its own sake.

Under this definition, I admit, there’s something a little solipsistic, almost masturbatory, about fun. We seek it out for a pleasure that can seem, to outsiders who don’t share our preferences, selfish — that’s how personal the experience can be. But if fun is selfish, it’s not necessarily greedy. Fun can be shared. It can be enhanced, multiplied among a group of people pursuing the same end. (Again I wish I could dance!) Fun may be hard to communicate, but it’s infectious, self-amplifying.

And it can, logically, be the opposite. Just think of the Debbie Downers unable to enjoy the supposedly fun thing the rest of us love — their anhedonia sucks joy from our own experience. Without their pleasure, ours weakens. They push the rest of us into deeper solipsism. We become aware of the uniqueness and fragility of our sense of fun and cling to it more tightly, perhaps for fear that the easy joy we’ve grown accustomed to might degrade or evaporate. Because fun is always ephemeral, flourishing scarcely longer than the fun activity lasts, and in its throes we try not to anticipate the quick dimming of the afterglow. I love crossword puzzles, and I race to solve them faster and faster, but the joy of completion almost always collapses into a cold emptiness that has me wishing all manner of violence on Will Shortz.

There are, I suspect, people for whom “fun” holds no appeal at all. Perhaps they consider easy pleasure fit only for children, babies, teenagers — creatures who play, and play unselfconsciously. Or maybe they’re somehow dedicated to seriousness. To work. To difficulty. Maybe they don’t have time — or patience — for fun. Are such people real? I’m having a hard time imagining what it would be like to reject fun of all sorts. (Obvious joke: They’re in the White House!) But if these fools do exist, I pity them. Life is hard — harder every day. To cut yourself off from joy because it seems too easy or immature only makes the daily slog rougher and less rewarding. Fun may not be highbrow. It may not make sense in the pages of our most illustrious newspapers and magazines. Fun can be downright stupid and embarrassing. But fun is ours. We humans are attuned to it, ready for it, designed for it. We’re monkeys at heart, primed for silly gestures and slapstick spontaneity just because.

What I’d like is to return some mystique to the term. Knowing what lurks beneath fun, what perturbations and tricks hide beneath its sugar-slicked surface, we should be able to toss it out at will, in conversation or in feature articles. We need to start accepting that those three little letters are not a mute but a sly invitation to an ineffable, untranslatable world of personal joy: What’s your idea of fun? Finding out is the funnest part of all. 🪨🪨🪨

This is the song by the fictional band Big Fun from the movie Heathers. It’s kind of hilarious, and kind of awesome.