Fun is an impact! It’s not just some vacuous sense of enjoyment, it’s an ethos of willfully enjoying a game shaped by arbitrary limits—this cultivates a joyous approach to the world that lets value to life flourish, but not one they can access through transgressing the rules

An old aphorism about golf calls the game “a good walk spoiled.” That funny quip underscores a fundamental feature of games: games make no sense, and yet we take them seriously precisely because they make no sense. The philosopher Bernard Suits calls that seriousness “a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” 15 Golf is a desirable experience because it distorts space and time in order to make the player’s experience of a landscape more deliberate. We seek out this deliberateness when we play.

Fun is not a feeling, it turns out. And it’s certainly not the feeling of enjoying ourselves by doing exactly what we want, by making something easy or by rewarding ourselves with points, as if life is some latent version of Space Invaders that turns chores into chortles. Instead, fun is a name for deliberately manipulating a familiar situation in a new way. We can only have fun once we have accepted the truth of a situation and treated it for what it is. When we’ve agreed to suspend our disbelief in its preposterousness. Golf isn’t a good walk spoiled, but a way to transform landscapes into a centuries-long hobby.

And like golf, the things we tend to find the most “fun” are not easy and sweet like the Bankses’ cleanup routine. Manual transmissions and knitting are fun because they make driving and fashion hard rather than easy. They expose the materials of vehicles and fabrics, and they do not apologize for doing so. They make playgrounds in which gear ratios and yarn loops become materials like ceramic floor tiles or zoysiagrass or espresso. Terror is at work in real fun, the terror of facing the world as it really is, rather than covering it up with sugar.

The process of fun turns out to be work. But not work like you find in the workplace. Rather, work like you find when working something: working wood, or working the muscles, or working the dance floor. In each of these cases, the extraction of pleasure or enjoyment we derive does not constitute the fun of the act, but the experience of oscillating between the potential and actual properties of a set of people, things, events, and ideas outside of us. In Marshall McLuhan’s terms, fun is the process of flipping figure and ground, taking something unseen and forcing it to become visible again or anew and taking something obvious and hiding it away temporarily. In Martin Heidegger’s terms, fun is taking something ready-to-hand (in use, but unseen) and reframing it as present-at-hand (outside implementation, with potential). And then, after circumscribing a playground around it to set its materials in relief, imagining and deploying new actions on and with that thing.

This explanation may sound somewhat abstract and unnecessarily philosophical, but actually, it’s precisely what people do when they partake in the activities they think to call fun.

Golf isn’t a good walk spoiled, but an approach to encountering a designed and tended environment. A playground made of playgrounds. First, a natural environment is reformed into a manicured one, with fairways, rough, sand-and-water traps, rocks, curves and switchbacks, trees, and so forth. In this respect, the golf course is similar to the English garden, insofar as both create an invitation to pastoral traversal. The garden stops there, and that fact is its delight: the opportunity arises to watch, to think, to listen, to stroll, or to attend to nothing whatsoever.

But at the golf course, traversal is only the beginning. The ball and the clubs and the rules of the game shift the ground of the course— the actual grounds, in this case— into figure. They recast the fairways and roughs and greens as possible vantage points or obstacles for moving the ball toward the hole. New playgrounds get circumscribed as others fall away, and then spring up again anew. The golfer’s own strength, experience, adeptness, and tactical wherewithal perform further oscillations of figure and ground, use and potential. So do the other material conditions that might intersect with the game: the weather, such as the effects of heat on the golfer’s stamina or the effects of a prior rain on the ball’s ability to rebound from a bounce on the fairway; the time of day and week, and its impact on the crowds on the greens; the familiarity of a local course, or the novelty of a new one; the languor or pressure of a particular foursome, filled with friends or family or strangers or business prospects. Instead of a good walk spoiled, golf is a walk refactored, turned in on itself like a helix, again and again.

The gyres and volutions of fun activities help explain another counterintuitive property of the phenomenon. Fun isn’t a distraction or an escape from the world, but an ever deeper and more committed engagement with it. The golfer who fails to engage with the various figures of the course and its related materials, whether through incompetence or refusal, is likely to have far less fun than the player who has, through practice and attention, found reason to address those conditions as a part of the play experience.

Proponents of Csikszentmihalyian flow would add a codicil here: that the novice or the amateur’s fun only arises from goals and capacities carefully balanced between anxiety and boredom. And here, the role of flow may indeed have a place: difficult courses like Pebble Beach or Torrey Pines push even competent golfers to the edge of useful action. Without the capacity to engage the materials of golf as materials, to work them like one works wood, the resulting experience would be inferior.

But these local minima of fun rely too heavily on human goals and accomplishments, and not enough on the unassailable nature of reality. Flow may help us optimize experience, but viscosity is needed to understand where such optimizations might take place. A supposedly inferior experience, like the novice golfer at Pebble Beach, is only terrible if we are unwilling to engage with boredom or anxiety in the first place, if we are so selfish as to see our performance as central to the encounter with a sublime place like Pebble Beach.

Fun is not only the delight in success, but also the panic of uncertainty, the agony of failure. It arises when figure and ground swap places and surprise us. The familiar turns strange; we no longer grasp it fully. There, facing the world’s stark truth, we either throw up our hands in disgust or dread— or we persist and discover something new.

THIS PROCESS OF discovery that we have heretofore nicknamed fun is a good candidate for the physical therapy we require to overcome ironoia. Irony, remember, arises when we fail to trust things as they are, but instead hold them at arm’s length for fear they will turn on us or otherwise disappoint. But in the symptom we also discovered a possible cure: treating the sensation of ironoia as a signal that something is worthy of further attention. As a sign that we’ve already found or constructed a playground— all we need to do is accept the invitation to make use of it.

The desire to encapsulate something in the safety of a new covering or to reject it as insufficient signals an opportunity to renew one’s commitment toward it. My flight-mate’s discomfort at the air marshal (the ironic not-fun “super fun”) or the novice golfer’s anxiety when facing the unfamiliar rituals of a foursome— these moments of distrust offer evidence that something deeper and weirder is present than each agent had previously considered possible.

And just as Wallace argued that satisfaction and joy and contribution might come from work— even boring work— as much as from entertainment, so the feelings that we might extract from a particular playground are far more numerous and more complex than the simple, easy pleasure we have mistakenly named “fun.” Anxiety, uncertainty, sorrow, and even misery and horror prove compatible with fun, once we’ve allowed ourselves to think of fun as treating something for what it is rather than as a nickname for diversion or satisfaction.

A job is made fun not by turning it into a game, but by deeply and deliberately pursuing it as a job. Jobs are fun when their work is meaningful, when their activities matter, and when the act of conducting them can be done over and over again with increased commitment. Fun can’t be added to something, like sugar to coffee or like songs to chores.

In their book All Things Shining, the philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly talk about this same issue in the context of Wallace’s depression and eventual suicide: in a secular age, meaning has to come from within, created from nothing. 16 Dreyfus and Kelly argue that this demand to make something wholly from nothing, by sheer force of will, is the weight that undid Wallace— and that the same demand is eating away slowly at all the rest of us, too. Wallace’s desperate attempt to make fun equal delight on the cruise he took for Harper’s or to see literary and televisual irony as a means to uncovering hypocrisy are the desperate grasps of the secular ironoiac who knows that dissatisfaction is only your fault, given the infinity of options available instead of ocean cruises and contemporary fiction and golf and air travel and all the rest.

But near the end of Pale King Wallace puts his finger on an alternative: boredom. Working through boredom in order to find deeper structure can form the boundary and contents for a playground. “It is the key to modern life,” he writes, “If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.” 17 Embracing boredom doesn’t really mean enjoying being bored. Rather, if we can bore through the boredom when paying attention to ordinary, mundane things (tax returns and televised golf are Wallace’s examples), then something magical happens underneath. Ride that out, writes Wallace, “and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.” Achieving this bliss requires giving yourself over to the structure of a situation rather than asking it to return its spoils to you.

This tactic is the cure for ironoia, too: you accept that meaning can come from outside of you rather than from within. Perhaps, even, that it must.

THE SUSPENSION OF FOLLY

Along with Mary Poppins, we assume that finding the fun starts with us rather than the thing itself. That we must bring something to the table that makes intolerable things tolerable, like a song covers chores or like chocolate covers broccoli. But as Suits suggests, a game is something good enough on its own, something for which on-its-ownness is precisely the point. Suits calls this willingness to accept the arbitrariness of a game the “lusory attitude.” Golf would be worse than “a good walk ruined” were it a Broadway song and dance number about dropping balls in holes, Mary Poppins style.

To reject these systems as insufficient is certainly possible— the ironoiac does so all the time, after all. To doubt that anything positive, credible, or long-lasting could arise from something like the thankless, arbitrary world, or else to capture its surface effects and to see them as mere signs, exchangeable for one another via new proverbial blister packs of ironic appropriation. Or else to assume that you yourself are unprepared for them, not good enough for Pebble Beach— or anything else. It turns out we can hold ourselves at an ironic distance, too. But to issue such rejections just because the materials in our midst are annoying or unsatisfactory is to miss the point: they are meant to be annoying and unsatisfactory. Meaningful things contain something abhorrent, something revolting even though sublime. And every now and then, when you stare down their abhorrence, they will reward you.