The Nature of Fun, Part 3

like pleasure, entertainment, enjoyment. We talked about some research on the role of fun in child development and how that might fit into a constructivist model of how how a child builds knowledge about cause and effect relationships in the world. We talked about fun and imagination, play and children, and we're back to explore a few other avenues of fun today.

That's right, the fun train continues, and I thought an interesting place to to start this episode off might be to go back and uh touch on something that we we hadn't really discussed in detail, and that is that for the majority of human history, no one had any fun, and a very large percentage of the global population isn't having fun today because fun is just an English word and one that we've only been kicking around according to

Donald Hedrick since the late seventeenth century. Okay, so presumably people were having something uh like fun before the word fun, and people in cultures without the English word fund or having equivalent experiences, but they might call it something different, and maybe calling it something different causes different sort of

associative groupings with other words and other concepts. Right, this is one of This is the thing, right, This is when you have a word like fun, what connotations does it have within a given language, within a given culture, and does that to what extent does that translate out into other cultures? So uh, and ultimately that's going to be kind of an open question here. But to get down a little bit too, um to how we use

fun and what fun means and where the word comes from. Um. I was reading an interesting paper from nineteen seventy two titled Degree Words. Uh, well, it's the book actually not not an article by American linguist Dwight to Bollinger just who describes fun as a noun that had been fully

adjectivized by quote. The younger set again, he's writing, I think the book came out on seventy two, and these may have been writings that were, uh, there were a little bit earlier, so you can roughly think, you know, middle twentieth century on this. That's interesting. So he's saying definitely that fund as a noun goes back farther than fun as an adjective. Right, and so for some quick examples of this um the use of a noun fun, you might say, if you were to use the Simpsons quote,

this is the largest car I could afford. Should I therefore be made the subject of fun? I guess? Or here's the here's here's a simpler use of the noun. Are we having fun yet? If you ask that question the answer is no and then adjective use uh. It could be an example. Here's another Simpsons quote. I don't remember this episode specifically, but can't you just bat that all the horses have a fun time? I don't recall

what episode that's from. I don't know. It's just looking for I had to find another Simpsons quote with the word fun. Okay, but the fun there is an adjective. It is describing the quality of the time they had, right, or another example of adjective use would be something that we discussed in the first episode, the movie was fun. Okay, Yeah, So you can imagine two slightly different sentences that mostly mean the same thing, but with subtle differences. You could

say I had fun at the movie. That's uh, that's a now, and you're saying fun is some kind of substance, and you experience that substance or you part partook of that substance while watching the movie. The movie was fun is an adjective describing something about out the experience, right, And so Bolinger points out that in this fun becomes an enhancer as well as I guess you know, we're talking about what does it mean when you say a movie when someone asking if the movie was good and

you say it was fun. In that case, it it's sort of like a limitter as well. You can say like it was it was up to a certain point, to a certain threshold. Interestingly, though, it's the oldest usages of fun seemed to be the use of fun as a verb. So an example of this would be this, this is something when they encounter in certain books, uh and works. So I kind of associate this kind of phrase with like sort of hay seed fiction. Uh, you might see someone say, well, we we were just funning you,

We was just funning you. I'm just fooling yeah. And while then there's gonna be a close connection there. Uh. And while this verb form isn't really used today for the most part, or certainly not the most popular use, the most widely used version of fun, we still see examples of this preserved and phrases like to make fun off right. So there it's the noun. But I think that means the same thing as funding you or making fun of you. Yes, well, actually no, I wonder I

mean funny you seems to maybe broader. That could mean making fun of but it could also mean sort of just playing with you. Yeah. I guess it's a context dependent right. I was reading about all of this in a book titled The Painted Word, A treasure Chest of Remarkable Words in their Origins by Phil cousinu and it tracks the original verb fun back to the sixteen eighties, and he writes that the exact origin of the word is uncertain. However, it might be a variant of the

Middle European word fun in which means bifool. He also points out that eighteenth century lexicographer Samuel Johnson considered fun a quote low cant word and uh. And he also points out the out the here points out that funny money also pins some of the original usage of the of the verb funny fooling to be fool. Okay, so maybe if you trace it back to its origins, it's it's possible that it doesn't just mean having a good time. It means something more with the connotations of trickery or

or guile or something. Yeah, that's what that seems to be the case. Now that's this This gets into a whole complicated area though, right, like, do the origins of words, you know, unknown origins especially, do they still resonate to any degree within a given cultural linguistic system. But the way when you look at it, it does seem like the origins of fun may indeed lie in foolishness and uh, in in this in this kind of mischief that is at the expense of something else. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so

one can't help. But but wonder, you know, we're just we're talking, for instance, about movies. If a movie is fun, that means it can't be great. And is that wonder if that has any connection with this idea that fun itself is something that has done, uh that is enjoyed

that or or encountered at the expense of something more important. Well, it makes me think about how a lot of movies that you would say, well, it wasn't good, but it was fun means something about how I don't know if the movie was successful in the way that it meant to be, but I was able to make fun out of the experience of it, which kind of like the way that maybe even if your king isn't doesn't have such a good humor himself, you know, the court jester

can can make a good time for everybody, and the king can't really do anything about it without really looking bad. Yeah, this is another great, um, great point. Something we should have talked about, I guess when we're talking about about the movie connotation earlier, because yeah, when you say that a movie wasn't great but it was fun, you could mean that in a very heartfelt way, like like, yeah, this wasn't a great movie, but it was enjoyable. I

had a great time watching it. I was able, I I enjoyed the you know, some of the imaginative ideas in it, or you could mean it like no, that movie it wasn't It wasn't good. In fact, it was horrible. But I enjoyed watching it because I I I, I feel great pleasure looking upon works of ruin. It entertains me to watch others fail, and I am deeply down a horrible person. So anyway, most of us just more food for thought, I think now, as far as I

can tell, and I was looking around for this. I no one seems to have done an exhaustive look at fun or fun like words in other languages, but I thought, might it might be telling to at least look at one related word in a not too distant tongue. So I thought we might look at the German word spas. All right. I was reading about this on your Daily German dot com by a writer and he also does see him on some YouTube videos by the name of Emmanuel,

and it's quite fascinating. So spas essentially means fun or sport. But as the author points out, you can't just throw the word in via rough translation. And this, of course is going to be an obvious reality for anyone out there who's recently taken any kind of foreign language or you remember any foreign language classes you took in the past. You can't just swap out words and expect a translation

to still work most of the time. And maybe it's possible with more closely related languages, but for instance, German to English, you're gonna mess things up if you try and translate things like that. So, for instance, with spas here, you can't say that was fun and then translate that roughly to dosivar spash like. It just wouldn't work. And

we'll get back to why in a second. So spas is apparently the Germanized version of the Italian spaso, which means fun or entertainment and comes from the Latin verb uh x expossary, which is a version of the word expondary. Uh So, according to the author here quote so, that means spash is related to expand and the author here explains that the connection here would seem to to indicate there's an idea of letting go, perhaps like to have fun is to let go, to have fun is to expand. Um. So,

I don't know. I don't know if that connection is purely lost within the confines of the German language or not, but it's kind of interesting you know. It comes back to that question, like if if you're like two or three changes away removed from the origin of a word, does the origin still resonate in the current usage? Oh? I, I feel like I see plenty of parallel to that kind of expression. Even in English. When you have fun? Are you cutting loose? When you have fun? Are you

letting your hair down? How about that? Yeah? Now to come back to just how the word is used um the author here uh Emmanuel. He points out that sposh and fun are both used differently. So in English we say something is fun, or we can say something is fun, but in German something makes fun or it makes one fun. And the example they point to is uh the sentence uh Deutsche learning mokomir spash so clunquily you could you could translate if you were bad at translating, you could

clunquily translate that to German learning makes me fun. But of course a much better and truer translation would be I enjoy learning German or to me, learning German is fun interesting, So there would be a trait ascribed to the speaker kind of it would be kind of like saying learning German makes me happy. Except it's not exactly the same thing as happiness, right right, So, uh, there's a whole article on this that your Daily German dot com.

Definitely check that if you're interested in in the German language or this particular example. Likewise, I know we have a bunch of multi lingual folks out there, and I would love to hear some other examples of like how what is the word that is like fun in another tongue but also distinct from fun? I'm I'm interested also in words that that fun can be translated as, but that also encompass things that we don't associate with fun so much. So, Yeah, any great examples of that out there,

Feel free to write in about them. We'd love to hear from you, absolutely. That's one of my favorite kinds of listener mail, actually, is when we hear from somebody who speaks a different language telling us about the idea we talked about in their language. Yeah, I remember, we got a lot of those with our episodes about days of the week. Yeah. Alright, Well, there are a couple of papers I wanted to look at examining a couple

of other aspects of fun. One began as a tangent off of the other, but eventually became so interesting that I wanted to devote its own section to it. So the first one I wanted to look at, the original one is a paper published in ten and the Journal of Positive Psychology by Harry T. Rice, Stephanie D O'Keefe, and Richard de Lane called fun is more fun when others are involved. This is about the social aspects of fun. Uh Now, I wanted to mention a few things from

their background section. One. First of all is that they uh, they cite and echoed the sentiments of the two thousand ten paper we looked at in part one, the Fun Fun Fun paper by by McManus and Furnum, And they're citing the idea that fun is really of central importance to our lives. And yet given this importance, it has been given remarkably little formal study in psychology, though related concepts like play in intrinsic motivation and happiness have received

more attention. They point out that quote the word fund does not appear as an index term in any emotion or social psychology textbook or handbook of which we are aware, which is kind of hard to believe, but so they say. Then they actually They cite McManus in Furnham's paper mainly for the idea that fun is, as the previous authors concluded, a quote complex phenomenon that has different meanings for different

types of people. And so this is the idea of the conclusion we talked about in part one, that there is actually that is there's actually very little that is quote fun for the whole family. And when an activity is fun for everyone, it's often because it is a multifaceted activity and different people can appreciate different aspects of it.

So imagine a family board game. Some family members might find this fun because they like games they inherently enjoy well what McManus and Furnum called like the achievement factor

of fun. These are like focused activities where you are maybe getting into a flow state, or you are trying to focus all your attention on doing them correctly, and that sort of thing, where others in the family might still enjoy the activity, but for totally different reasons, maybe because they enjoy relaxing in the company of family and the game doesn't really matter to them, Or others might enjoy the game because they like talking and joking while

the game's going on. That's what they called the socializing factor of fun. Now for more background, The authors here also look at UH some studies that exist not so much about the nature of fun itself, but about the

consequences of having of having fun in various environments. So, for example, there are a lot of studies that seem focused on the idea of having fun at work, and they cite a big list of papers showing that quote experiencing fun at work, either in job related activities or socializing with co workers positively predicts higher job satisfaction and

lower employee burnout and turnover. However, I think many of us know the flip side of that about how in some cases it can be rather excruciating when the boss or a coworker wants to insist that you have fun. And there are actually studies on that too. They cite a couple of them. I picked one to highlight and read and full, and I gotta say, I found it really interesting. So I actually want to make that whole paper aside quest that I'll come back to after I'm

done talking about this one. So Rice and co authors in Seen were focused on the social aspects of fun. UH. They were trying to see if there are major differences between the experience of solitary fun, you know, when you're having fun because of the activity you're doing, versus social fun, in which fun is potentially because of the activity, but

also because of the social context. And so to highlight some of their main findings, remember again, these are going to be averages because many people do have very different ideas about what fun is. Even though there are trends, on average, people have more fun doing things with others than they do doing things alone. But there are important exceptions to this trend. People tend to have more fun

sharing and experience with a friend. In some of these experiments, they literally ask people to bring a friend as opposed

to sharing the same experience with a stranger. And I thought this was an interesting contrast with the study about childhood development that we talked about in the last episode, where children on average seem to have more fun with a novel toy as opposed to a familiar toy, or seem to have more fun with a toy about which some functional mystery remains, like if you still haven't figured out how it works or all the things you can

do with it, some amount of novelty or uh. Still, ambiguity about the mechanics of a toy makes it more fun. So when it comes to inanimate objects for play, familiarity more often leads to reduced fun. And yet in this case, the authors here find that the opposite is true with people. You tend to have more fun with a friend than

a stranger. Though I guess an important consideration for that is the difference between a friend and a stranger is more than just the difference in familiarity versus novelty, because usually a friend is somebody you have chosen on purpose to spend time with. I wonder if you tested this with other familiar versus novel relationships apart from friendship, like bring a coworker or bring a relative, the results might

not be the same. That's interesting too to think about in terms of children, because when you when you start looking at like the world of play dates, um, you know, in some basis that's a child that a friend that has been chosen by the by one child by one of the children in question. Other times it's just, hey, these two adults know each other, they both have a child at the same age, So guess what play date

is happening. The whole world of like of childhood development and play is so rich with different possibilities, like because you also get into the world of like, Okay, now we have two children hanging out together. They may squabble over a toy, but if you have two of the same toy, then they may engage in something called parallel play, where they're both they're not really playing with each other.

It's not really a social interaction, but they're both kind of doing the same thing at the same time, which I guess is kind of a necessary developmental step to get to that point to where you're actively playing together. But I would bet even in a lot of parallel play, if they're not constantly playing together saying a cooperative or competitive way, they still at various points kind of check in with one another and see what the other is doing.

Would would you agree with that? Yeah, It's kind of like imagine two kingdoms that have a ward in the past, and now that they're they're working towards interaction and for now we're just we're just happy that they're both doing our own thing, but we do have to check in with each other every now and then to make sure that you know, everything is still cool, and you are also interested, like, how are they playing with that toy? Can I do that with mine as well? Exactly? Yeah.

So this study also related fund to the so called core affect model, which is a two variable description of the consciously accessible features of a person's basic neurophysiological state. And the two values are hedonic valence and arousal. So hedonic valence is pleasure versus displeasure, and arousal is activated versus de activated. And you can imagine, uh, these two

variables forming a graph with four corners. So in the unpleasant de activated corner, you could be depressed, lethargic, board tears, I don't know, think you know, waiting on hold on a call with your insurance company for hours. In the pleasant deactivated corner, you could be peaceful, relaxed, and content, maybe lying in a hammock in the shade. In the unpleasant activated corner, you could be extremely frightened or distressed and anxious. And in the pleasant activated corner you could

be excited, happy, or ecstatic. So I think you know, the middle of a concert, seeing your favorite band, or playing a really fun game. And the authors here found on average that experiences that people describe as fun actually increase both low activation and high activation pleasant states. So people think describe things as fun, and it seems to push them both in the hammock direction and in the concert direction. But social fund, specifically fun with other people

increases high activation pleasure. However, there was a there there was an interesting exception to all this, and it was the variable of the trade loneliness. They found quote that loneliness moderated the latter effects, such that lonely individuals received a weaker boost from shared compared to solitary fund. So in general, people have more fun if they're having fun with other people, but specifically, the trait of being lonely makes people less likely to get that additional boost from

having other people around when they're having fun. And I thought that point was really interesting. The author's right quote. Previous research has suggested that loneliness is less a matter of spending time alone and more a matter of not experiencing a gain in positive emotions from social activity. And uh, I don't know if I'd ever heard it put exactly this way before, but that absolutely rings true to me. Like, in my experience, loneliness is not simply not being around

other people. People often describe feelings of loneliness most acutely, like in really close temporal proximity to social events. Like a feeling of loneliness might come on when you are leaving a party and reflecting on the party or the social event that you just attended, sort of thinking about the idea that you were surrounded by people, but there was like a problem. It felt like something wasn't right.

Maybe some kind of depth or richness of social interaction that other people appear to be experiencing from talking to friends at a party doesn't really seem to work for you, Like, you don't get that same benefit. And they cite several studies such as Hawkley at all in two thousand three and Si and Rice from two thousand nine pointing towards the conclusion that the core trait of people who experience loneliness is quote a relative lack of intimacy and enjoyment

in interactions with friends. Now, I think trait loneliness can can fluctuate, so, like you know, I think some people can probably say from experience that, like you can go through more kind of lonely periods in your life where that that is an experience for you and then fortunately come out of it and uh find situations where you

get more enjoyment from social interaction. But that does appear to be a very important, uh limiting or mitigating factor in the idea that bringing people along for your fun activity makes it more fun. That is true for note, for most people, but not for everyone. Right right, And again I guess it also depends on the yet the activity,

the people that might come along. Uh yeah, there are there are other factors to to tease a part there than now I'm ready to jump into this uh this side quest paper about uh the idea of having fun at work. Remember that this was originally in the context of being a counterpoint to a whole bunch of studies that found essentially there are positive there are benefits to employees having fun at work and saying, you know, your employee, it would be really great if you can make work

a fun environment. That's good even for objective measures for the bottom line of a business. And so the paper I read here was by a an author named Peter Fleming who was associated with the University of Cambridge at the time he wrote this. I think he said an Australian University now um but the title is workers Playtime, Boundaries and Cynicism in a Culture of Fun Program, published in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science in two thousand five.

And I will try to summarize this as breezily as I can, but had so many interesting little tangents in it. So Fleming starts by talking about how, beginning roughly in the nineteen eighties and continuing through to the time this paper was written, there was kind of a fad complex among business academics and management consultants and company culture gurus that was all centered around the idea that the workplace

had to be fun. And this was based on some actual research like there were study is and also just popular workplace anecdotes that seem to show tangible gains for businesses when their employees had fun at work, with claims that work you know, when your workers are having more fun, they're more motivated, more productive, more committed to their jobs, more innovative or creative, they provide better customer service, and so forth, all of which might be true. In fact,

I think it probably is true. And even on top of that, more recent studies show that when employees have fun at work or have fun socializing with coworkers. They tend to report higher job satisfaction, less burnout, and the rate of employee turnover is lower. But okay, so you imagine you have these facts in hand and you want to implement that knowledge. So you're a manager or a business owner, how do you make sure your employees are

having fun? Uh? So fleming rights quote through informal dress codes, office parties, games, humor, zany training camp, joking, and so on. Organizational members are encouraged to loosen up and find more pleasure in their roles. So this concept, of of course, has been explored in satire many times over the years. I mean, obviously The Office explores this a lot. The awkwardness of workplace fun but also the release of workplace fun. I mean, those are two common themes on that show.

Um also the the excellent recent series Severance. Uh this is this doesn't spoil anything, but the basically the basic concept for anyone unfamiliar with it, is that you have a neural implant that separates your uh, your your home life from your work life, your AUDI from your any, and your any has no memory or knowledge of your AUDI and vice versa. And so there are a lot

of themes in this show regarding fun in the workplace. Uh. There's, for instance, in this show, the the employees try to win such privileges as the pre waffle party eggbar social where they win it. There's like this little cart that's brought out and it has like fancy deviled eggs on it and some punch, and yeah, everybody wants this and it does even in the show, and it's kind of quirkiness. It seems kind of delightful, and it made me almost

nostalgic for enforced fun in the workplace. Well, of course, yeah, and that that highly said it can be a mix, right, Like Zaney training camps might sound kind of dreadful, but office parties can be fun or not. Sometimes they are. Humor and joking are certainly good, right right, Well, sometimes they are. But I wanted to read a section directly from Fleming here to give you a little more flavor of what you know, some of this uh you know, company culture guru inspired uh joking might be like so

um Fleming rights quote. Perhaps the best known proponent of staged corporate humor is bar su. He maintained that management can use joking, laughter, and smiling to develop vibrant and creative organizations. In fact, it's applicability is apparently universal, and then Flaming begins a quote from this source. Humor plays a vital role in helping to close the communication gap between leader and followers, helping to extract information which might

not otherwise be volunteered. It also enhances trust, facilitates change, and encourages plurality of vision. Humor breaks down barriers between people and makes an organization more participative and responsive. It follows that an environment that is amenable to humor will also facilitate organizational learning and renewal. And then Flaming himself goes on. The underlying paradox here, as in much of the prescript of literature, is that humor is ultimately a

serious business. It is unsurprisingly driven by very sober corporate motives. The obvious difficulty of institutionalizing an experience that is usually considered spontaneous was intimated by Hudson in two thousand one and executive for Brady Corporation. She observed that humor and fun can be developed through exerci eyeses that may feel spontaneous, but are in fact well orchestrated through party events such as brady Fest or the Lego program, in which employees

play with Lego blocks like children. That's that's a that's a loaded statement. I mean, there are plenty of adults out there who who who have fun with Lego blocks, and there's nothing wrong with that. I love Lego, I am. I'm so excited about the idea of playing with Lego blocks on my own terms. If my boss told me to play with Lego blocks, I don't know, that might

be a little different. Well, and I guess my approach would be what it could be worse at least, and we're not doing trust falls or anything like that, or having to pretend to attack each other that sort of thing. Yeah, so so so, So what was the actual observational component of this paper? Well, Fleming here took part in a field study where he observed the workings of a customer

service call center in Australia pseudonymously called sun Ray. That's not the real name, but that's why he's calling it for the purpose of this report. So this is a qualitative report. And this company was selected because it was known for trying to create a fun atmosphere at work, and Fleming performed a bunch of in depth confidential interviews

to understand how the culture of managed fun worked. And this culture of fun has too many facets to get into all of them here, but it's everything from you've got planned activities like there was one described as sort of like high school musical theater where employees would be like bust off somewhere to learn and then perform a

song and dance routine. Uh. To dress up days where you would dress up like a superhero or you'd wear pajamas to work to a handbook of company philosophy that includes a bunch of stuff about the three FS, which are focus, fun, and fulfillment, And to read from Fleming here quote when an employee embodies the three f's, they are said to have the right attitude. This involves a set of performances that communicate a positive personality, a childish playfulness,

and a belief frame of mind. Importantly, however, a genuine expression of these demeanors, rather than mere surface acting, is

mandatory at Sunray. The Fund's got to be real, okay, so um Fleming found through his observations and interviews that, in fact, though there were some people who did appreciate this culture of managed fund One of the core results of these top down attempts to make work fun was a mounting sense of cynicism in a subset of employees, which he traces to to a blurring of the boundary between work life and non work life. The dissolution of this boundary was not necessarily, in fact probably not in

most cases a good thing. Yeah, the blurring of that boundary always seems to be right for contention, no matter which which direction things are getting blurred in, because it can certainly feel weird when and when employees are encouraged to bring more of their outside self into work, But it also feels weird if they're encouraged to leave it at home, like there's there's there's not really, you know, it's very imagine from the employer's side of things, it's

a very tricky area to navigate because it seems like you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. Yeah, And there's another kind of paradox or double bind like that that we'll get to after the conclusion here. So uh, deep interviews revealed to Fleming that several of the major problems with the culture at this company of man. The culture of managed fun here uh came from the dissolution of of boundaries and UH. This dissolution of boundaries represented

a couple of things. One of them was condescension. Some employees felt that the regime of fun was actually infantilizing, treating them like kindergarteners rather than as adults with dignity and self respect. And like two of the main work non work boundaries blurred in this arena where the boundaries between work and school and the boundaries between work and family.

So you know, if you are made to feel like you are a student and your boss is the teacher, or made to feel like maybe you are a kid and your boss is the parent, that that's a kind of like unpleasant and condescending boundary to blur. Uh. And as a compliment to this, I didn't mention it earlier, but there's a whole section about how it's sunray this workplace. They used a lot of messaging about how they are a family, and much has been written about that concept lately.

But to read from Flaming quote, in its most patronizing form, paternalism erodes this rational sense of self and endeavors to instigate a childlike membership role that simultaneously positions management as benevolent caregivers. You can see why this might be unpleasant for some people. Okay, so first this condescension. The second

uh boundary blurring problem is inauthenticity. Basically, by constantly insisting that work is something else, work is something fun, that work is like a party, or work is like family, or work is like a game, many employees were driven to reflect on exactly the ways that work is not like any of these things. So to use the example of family, if a family is in you know, families can be a lot of different things, but in the best sense, maybe a family is supposed to be about

unconditional love. Is that really what a workplace is like? No, No, generally not unless your workplace is your family, and which case that's there's even more work or more room for for a complex complex understanding there. But but yeah, for the most part, it is. It is. It is far from unconditional. It is very conditional. Oftentimes you will sign a document that that spells out what those conditions are. Yeah, yeah, uh,

so there's that. But in the case of so that's like the family comparison, but imagine the boundary blurring with other types of more fun oriented stuff. So suggesting that work is like a party or work is like a game. A key difference is that fun non work activities are generally things you do freely. You know, at least under the right can editions, you are doing them of your own volition. And they are also generally things that you are free to stop doing as soon as you decide

that they're not actually fun. Workplace events are not like this. You know, the boss says it's time to have fun now actually borders on an oxymoron, which I think sort of reveals an interesting fact about fun itself that we haven't really gotten into much yet. Fun, for some reason, at least in my mind, entails some assumption of freedom.

The exact same activity could be fun if you choose to do it freely, and it can quite easily stop being fun if you were forced to do it the exact same activity if somebody is saying you must do it, well, that's not so much fun anymore. So try to make somebody play a game, even if it's a game they would enjoy another context, and you are almost certainly leaving

the Kingdom of fun. Yeah, yeah, I mean plenty of people have explored this, even if if they themselves are the boss and question turn the thing, turn your passion, turn your hobby into even a side business. And sometimes you're you're hit with the reality of this, Well, it's not quite fun anymore because I'm not entirely doing it completely on my own terms anymore exactly. And this also sort of reminds me of the study we talked about in part two about the relationship between fun learning and

free exploratory play in young children. So if young children learned by playing, and the wages of play is fun, the internal reward for experimental play behavior is the sense of fun. Uh, You've got to think about how these behaviors are usually noted to be self directed. It is free exploratory play as soon as an adult comes in and tells the child what they have to do. Is that free exploratory play anymore? And does it come with

the same sense of fun? I don't know, But anyway, this all leads up to an answer to a paradox that is emerging from earlier You know what, didn't this all start with the idea that there are a bunch of studies, or at least observations about how fun workplaces are better in in many objective measures, like their employees are more committed, more motivated, and so forth. Well, yes,

but there may be a very important taxonomic difference. The most authentically fun workplaces are the ones where the workers create organic fun for themselves, rather than the cultures of fund that are deliberately constructed by management. But there's a twist to even this. So I'm gonna quote from Flaming here. Flaming sites a number of studies in the sentence, but I'm gonna skip over those. Uh, he just writes quote.

When playful schmoozing is self initiated in this way, however, members of management often find it an affront to their authority and are quietly distrustful, even though it may actually lead to higher productivity, as Gouldner discovered in relation to quote indulgency patterns. Indeed, as Ackroyd and Thompson in ninety nine and Fleming and Sewell in two thousand two, intimated, self authored fund may even be interpreted as seditious nous

simply because it has not been officially sanctioned. So we're left in this conundrum where it's like, I would say, fun actually is good both in itself because it's it makes people happy. It's a good thing, and it's usually good in its indirect effects on business. Bosses know that fun workplaces are objectively better for the bottom line in a lot of different ways. Yet when employees create an authentic culture of fun for themselves, bosses are often suspicious

of it or hostile to it. And when bosses try to inject fun into the workplace from the top down, it can backfire and lead to unhappiness and cynicism. You could say, like, well, if you've got cynicism about attempts to have fun at work, then you've just got a

bad attitude. There's something wrong with you. But I think Fleming takes I would say, in a pro priently sympathetic reaction to to this idea, he he describes cynicism as a kind of defense mechanism, or a psychological self vaccination against the loss of dignity implied by the condescension of managed fund and against the loss of integrity implied by

the inauthenticity of managed fun. And so in the end, in the conclusion section, he offers a few final thoughts um one is that basically, if you're trying to intentionally create an environment of fun, you really need to consider how these attempts will land with respect to people sense of adult dignity and uh and integrity. You know, you want to make sure that whatever you're doing does not feel uh, does not feel condescending in fantalizing, or does

not feel kind of fake and forced. And the next point that he makes this really makes me think, Rob about your comments earlier about the relationships between fun and the tradition of fooling uh Fleming rights quote. It has been suggested that authentic fun may not only be incongruous with managerial control, but gain it's very inspiration from being

against authority. And I think there's a lot of truth to that's got to go right to the heart of it, right, Like, it maybe kind of painful to the boss's ego, but in some cases it might actually be the best thing for a business to let the employees make their own fun, even if some component of that fun is a kind of rebellious or satirical attitude to company authorities. Yeah, yeah, that's uh and yeah, this day goes straight into the

tradition of the fool. You know, the fool is the one who can who can joke with the king without being sent to the gallows, that sort of thing, you know, And you get into traditions of carnival and stuff where the uh you know where where the where the fool becomes king for a day and so forth. Yeah. Yeah, So if this is true in business, and I find myself pretty well convinced by this, I think this makes

a really strong case. It makes me wonder how the same thing might be true not only in business, but in other goal oriented team activities. Like I wonder if, for example, sports teams or military squads or the things like that also have objectively better performance by some measures when there is a sense of fun, but that fun cannot really be installed from above, and to some extent necessarily involves a spirit of camaraderie against the coach or

against the sergeant and so forth. Yeah, and I this, this definitely helps contribute to the picture that a good boss has to be the right combination of things. Um, it's easy to think again of the office in this comparison in which we have in the character of Michael Scott, we have this, uh, this, this ineffective boss, the boss that is too eager to want to be part of

the fun one. But also I seem to recall also at times like he's he that also makes him more subject to being hurt by not being part of the fund. I guess a lot of times he's he's oblivious to that as well. But there's probably I guess there's probably some great examples in fiction of of the thin skinned boss as well, the one that that really wants to

to stamp out any kind of workplace fun, a pure villain. Well, I mean, I think about how many scenes in the office involved workers genuinely making their own authentic fun, and they are having fun, and then Michael detects this and tried to insert himself into it. It's like I want to be a part. Yeah. Anyway, that's the end of my thoughts about that. But I found that paper unusually fascinating for a business psychology uh paper, Yeah, fascinating and

a certainly one that resonates still today. Obviously, the workplaces has changed a lot in the past couple of years, but a lot of these realities still still hold true. But I would say regarding the broader concept of fun, just One of the main things again I want to emphasize extracting from that is the relationship between um, between fun and authenticity, the relationship between fun and freedom, and between fun and self volition. Yeah, fun is the thing

I choose to do. Uh, and I'm making a choice in the fun. If if fun is demanded of me, well then it's it's probably not fun anymore. Though again, fun is so subjective. You can easily imagine a situation where, or perhaps reflect on a situation where there was some sort of workplace induced fun that surprise actually ended up being fun. Things like that do happen, sure and too. I mentioned this, but just to say it again in

the UH. In this study, Fleming did find some you know, some employees liked the culture of managed fund, just not everybody. There was just a large subset that that founded insulting or making them cynical and so forth. And again, I would be interested to hear from from people who have his bosses h employers out there, like it has to be frustrating because it's like, okay, we were gonna do um. I don't know what's an example. I guess, well, the egg bar. You know, let's say you're rolling out the

deviled egg bar for your employee. Yes, some people are insulted by this and they think it's infantile, and so then you take it away, and then other people are hurt that they're no longer getting an eggbar. Like there's it seems like it's there's there's no way to please everybody. Let's see it giving people paid time off. I'd say that please is just about everybody. Well, yes, yes, I think I think I think everyone's in favor of that, because then it's up to you to have fun. If

you want fun, or if you can have fun. Of course, some people are gonna have to use that time to to do freelance work, or work another job, or take care of other responsibilities. Of course, but then again that's sometimes the case with with where we didn't really get into this. But but sometimes if you have workplace induced fun, well that's coming at the expense of work that you're supposed to do and expected to have completed. Because exactly

a complicating fact. I didn't mention the in fact, this is something that has talked about, like there's another problem with workplace fun. This was not so much the subject of Fleming's paper, but it was highlighted in in the Rice paper in the summary section said, another major problem with workplace fun is when people are, say, feeling like they don't have enough time to do all the work they need to do, if they're in a rush, if

they've got a big workload. Uh. People often perceive managerial attempts to inject fun as really infuriating distractions from you know what, that what they're supposed to be focusing on. Yeah, but then again, m employees are were impossible to please because I distinctly remember examples of where work would say like, Hey, we're gonna have drinks on the house for everybody after work today, and I would be like, well, I'm going home after work. Why don't you do this during the day.

Do it during the workday. That's the day that I've carved out for you. So if you're going to give me a free drink, give it to me during that time period. So again, impossible time during the workday to do that. I'm going to do my work. Yeah, thank thank Now. I thought we might come back to a topic we touched on previously. I mentioned how personally when it comes to exercise that I I would not describe

some of the experiences as fun. For example, I believe the example I used was if I'm swimming laps by myself, I would not say that's fun. I would say it's fulfilling, it's satisfying, it's good for even a flow state, and you know, a sort of headspace of creative thinking. But I would not say this is fun. I am having fun now, or I had fun doing that. But it's not just you know, it's it's dependent under the things.

If I'm swimming with my son in a cool pool, like it has a waterfall or something, and uh, you know, we're having a good time, that's fun. That's obviously fun. So this is all, of course very subjective, and as is fun itself. We had a listener right in and mentioned that they personally would only find swimming not fun they didn't reach their goal, or they weren't able to perform to meet their own expectations. And I agree that that not meeting expectations for performance is less satisfying and

even disappointing. But I would not personally state that the opposite of all of this is fun. But again, all of this is highly subjective. But I did find some research some writings on this topic, so I thought I'd share some of this here. So UH, some of this was related to some work by a World at All. Uh. The first thing I ran across by these authors was a two thousand fourteen article in Marketing Letters. UH, and

it was titled is It Fun or Exercise? And uh when the subduct The sub title for the paper was the framing of physical activity biases subsequent snacking. So the authors here looked at research to determine how the perception of fun in exercise impacted one's likelihood of later indulging in hedonistic snack um, you know, basically rewarding yourself with some sort of perhaps unhealthy treat later in the day.

And their findings indicated that the more fun an activity was in the individual's mind, the less likely they were to later seek that reward of a hedonistic snack. Quote. Engaging in a physical activity seems to trigger the search for reward when individuals perceive it as exercise, but not when they perceive it as fun. So the idea here, which the authors elaborate on more in a paper from

titled is It Fun or Exercise? UH, is that the more fun and exercise is the less we're likely to focus on the work involved, which you may seem like an overstatement of the obvious. But uh, you know, if we often have to have these things spelled out in research and in these is the sort of findings. But and as we point out, pretty frequently, what seems obvious is often untrue. That's right, right, So these these statements

and ideas have to be examined. Yeah, So the idea here is if you're if you're having fun, and if you feel like you're having fun even while you're exercising, then later you're less likely to feel like you're entitled to that reward. And the reverse if you feel like that exercise was a lot of work, like, well, that wasn't fun, but I, you know, I sure did really pump the iron today. I deserve that that doughnut. I'm

entitled to that donut. And so the authors say, quote, focusing attention on something else may change the perceptions of the effort expended during the activity, reducing feelings of entitlement due to exercising. So this would seem an indicator that there's certainly a benefit beyond motivation to exercise itself, in

finding a form of exercise that produces a feeling of fun. Yeah, so that maybe if your exercise is fun, it's not just that you're more likely to do it, but also that you're less likely to try to compensate with other rewards later. So maybe if you're you're playing a sport you like versus I don't know, just running on a treadmill exactly right or um, this is an example that

comes to my mind. Anyway, I'm not a runner, so I can't speak to this, but I know we have runners out there, and if I know one thing about runners, they love to talk about running right in and let us know. But it seems that like running around on

a on a track, you're gonna have limited stimuli. But if you're out running in the world likest like most runners I know like to do like you're you're you're subject to, you know, a different environment, to different novel details of that environment, and I can imagine where that would be more likely to produce an experience of fun

whilst running. I remember I formed a very strange association with exercise years ago, where I uh, for some reason, the pattern I put together is that every time I went to the Y m C. A too and spent time running on a treadmill. I would watch televangelists on TV, and that was it formed some kind of unbreakable link in my mind. So I still sometimes associate exercise the

prosperity gospel. We're okay. The authors of this paper, they do suggest towards the end of the paper, they say, quote, listening to music during a run, making phone calls during a walk, or watching a video during a treadmill routine maybe more related to weight loss, success and to perseverance than previously thought. So, yeah, that's that's interesting. I would swimming. There are a lot of those things I can't do

while swimming. But I will say that if the the y m c A where and I swim on Tuesdays and Thursdays, there's an aerobics class in the pool, and uh, the person who runs that class always has a boom box out and they're always just really pumping out the jams. I'm talking stuff like there's orbital playing. It's you know Mortal Kombat soundtrack, uh stuff. I mean the original, the Paul Anderson original Mortal Kombat soundtrack with like KMFDM and

all that. Well, I don't know, I don't know if ever came FDM on their but you know, a lot of a lot of pumping beats, and I will say it makes those days more pleasant than the other days where it's just empty pool ambience. So I will say, yeah, I can see the difference just you know, in my own experience there. And so obviously that's going to be even more enhanced if you have some degree of control over the music or what you're watching while you are

on the treadmill. Uh did you have a say so in what you watched at the y m c A was just what was on? Uh yeah, the treadmills that each had little individual TVs and uh so you could pick what was on them. I mean if the TV works. Sometimes it didn't, but uh yeah, you had a choice. And I don't know, I often don't love a lot of what's on basic cable. So it seemed for some reason like the Health and Wealth Gospel was a was a good choice at least it was kind of interesting

in some way. Okay, I can see that. Now this also makes me think that, um, I know, in a lot of these exercise machines, you also have other forms of visualization, and especially in the light of these uh this paper that I just referenced, it's also interesting. I was looking at some other studies that were considering the use of imagery to enhance the perception of fun in exercise.

So I think the specific categories that we're looking at were enjoyment, imagery, energy imagery, technique imagery, or just straight up exercise alone without any imagery. And um, I believe they were finding that, yes, all three of these actual categories of imagery seem to have an effect on on

on the perception of fund in exercise. And I think it's it's ultimately beyond the scope of that research, but I wonder if the imagery was perceived was perceived more as a reward or an enhancement, you know, like how do you how does the how does that work on us? If is the is the imagery on the screen in front of you, that is, you know, connected to your performance on the treadmill? Do we end up seeing that as reward or is that just an enhancement of fun?

I don't know. Yeah, interesting, I don't know either. It kind of comes back to what we said earlier, like fun, despite being this thing that drives so much in our lives and in our culture. Uh, there's not as much written about as as you might expect. Also, the word fun, it's just used so often you can make searching for these these papers a little difficult as well. Yeah, yeah, a lot of papers that heavily referenced the word fun

are not really about fun, all right, everybody. Uh, it looks like the the the fun train is reaching the station. We are gonna reach the end of this particular journey, but it but who knows. We could We could be back at some point in the future if some other interesting topics come up regarding fun. And of course we'd love to hear from everyone. Again, if you have thoughts on fun, a bit to experience of fun, fun in the workplace, the linguistics of fun, etcetera. Do right in.

We'd love to hear from you. I'm sure we'll be talking about this on listener Mail episodes in the future. Listener Mail episodes of course air on Mondays and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed Who season thurstees are pore episodes. Um, hey, those are the dance music days at the at the y m c. A. There you go. Interesting coincidence there Wednesdays that's a short form artifact or monster fact. On Fridays, we do Weird How Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and

just talk about a strange film. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio.

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