Fun is an important, even a critical, part of life and we don’t get enough of it. This month I explored Michael Rucker’s treatise on how to change that.

I’m an Enneagram 7 (we’ll talk more about the Enneagram in future posts but for a 7, novelty and fun are Big Deals). Yet as we “grow up” it becomes a lot harder to make having fun a priority, and let’s face it, in the last few years it has been even more challenging to have fun. If you work in the US, you might also be asking how the 24/7/365 work culture in this country can even allow for such a concept as fun.

That’s why I was so excited to read this book. Mike Rucker decided to study fun after his beloved brother suddenly passed away and he needed major surgery himself. He realized that he had spent years, and lots of energy, trying hard to focus on being happy, and this worry about being happy was, well, not making him happy. Instead, he stopped worrying about being happy and started to deliberately create of joy and pleasure in the present moment. He found that his well-being improved dramatically.

Without giving away everything that he writes, he makes a number of good points. One of his key concepts is his PLAY model, where you characterize everything that you do in a day as either:

Pleasing activities, easy and enjoyable (think walking your dog)

Living activities, challenging things that make you feel alive (think a challenging hike or a deep conversation)

Agonizing activities, joyless work and unpleasant tasks, (think doing your taxes), or 

Yielding activities, easy activities that don’t add value to our lives (think scrolling social media).

Mike says that when people sort their time this way, they, first, realize how much of their time goes toward things they don’t actually enjoy, and, second, how many of these things they can thoughtfully reduce or ditch so they can spend their time more enjoyably. 

I did this for several days and I was kind of surprised to see how much time went towards activities that really didn’t serve me. And if that’s you, too, he provides some concrete suggestions on how to get your time oriented more enjoyably. 

This book has some kind of (for me) revolutionary suggestions too. For example: it’s a human trait to try to make sense out of our world, but maybe we could ease up on that task sometimes and direct some of that energy towards pleasure and enjoyment instead? I found that kind of mind-blowing, and very intriguing.

As I read through the book, I thought a lot about how often in the last few years I’d had FUN.  And it actually wasn’t that often. Having read this book, “finding delight” is in my mind more, and that is one of the takeaways that Mike Rucker wants for readers of this book. In fact, for me this book is going to be kind of a once-a-year read.