The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

although having fun sounded simple, it wasn’t. When I asked my blog readers about their ideas about fun, several readers responded.
    ----
    M aking things is something that I get fun out of. I’m a great fan of crafts, but I find the fun is far increased when I am making a present for someone. This Christmas, I have a pretty ambitious project in mind for the boyfriend, but I know he’ll love it and the challenge is giving me so much fun, as well as the anticipation that he’ll appreciate it. Coming up with ideas myself is an intellectual challenge, followed by themechanically creative challenge of realising them, and this is a combination which I find very fulfilling and fun.
     
    Reading overseas blogs, including yours of course, is fun to me. Every weekday morning I read them over coffee (since I live in the Far East, they are updated while I’m asleep). Needless to say, it helps to learn foreign language (in my case, English). But what I find fun most is to find a person who has a similar taste, way of thinking, etc., in a different culture.
     
    Books are a great source of joy and fun for me—collecting them, reading them, looking them up on the internet. It gives me great pleasure to open a “new” book whether it was previously used or fresh off the press.
     
    My weekly Latin class is a whole lot of fun for me. I have been meeting for four years now with a few other individuals to sight-read Latin, review grammar, and talk about whatever comes up in conversation. I fell in love with the Latin language in high school and never had the opportunity to pursue further study until now. And that has made me very, very happy.
     
    What’s fun for me? ANYTHING creative…anything! The BEST fun is the kind of coloring book that has a very complex picture on only one side of the page…and a new box of beautifully sharpened colored pencils. Next best…a piece of stamped material and the colored cotton floss required to complete the embroidery.
     
    Here’s a tough one: I do not find it particularly fun to sit on the floor and play with my children with their toys. I love cooking with them, reading to them, talking to them, watching movies with them, going on walks with them, and taking them to age-appropriate places. My idea of a really good time is to pick my five-year-old up from school and go out for a snack. But I don’t find playing with Polly Pockets (with the older one) or Little People (with the younger one) particularly fun. And I feel very guilty about that at times.
     
    For me fun is…debating, tinkering (e.g., inside the guts of hardware or software), building (hardware/software), reading blogs (all kinds), telling my kids stories of my youth.
     
    Seriously, I have come to the realisation that I don’t have fun anymore. I have got to do something about this before I become a glum, boring, sad person!
----
    Like that last commenter, I wanted to bring more fun into my life.
    FIND MORE FUN.
    When I thought about fun, I realized to my surprise that I didn’t have a good sense of what I found fun. Only recently had I grasped one of my most important Secrets of Adulthood: just because something was fun for someone else didn’t mean it was fun for me —and vice versa. There are many things that other people enjoy that I don’t.
    I love the idea of playing chess, going to a lecture on international markets, doing crossword puzzles, getting a pedicure, eating dinner at a hot new restaurant, or having a subscription to the opera or season tickets to the Knicks. I can see exactly why other people enjoy these activities. I wish I enjoyed them. But I don’t. Some blog readers experienced the same tension:
    ----
    O ver the last few years, I’ve started figuring out what I really find fun. I realized I had a lot of stuff and activities in my life that I didn’t enjoy. These were things that others find fun, but they just weren’t to me. Accepting that what others find fun won’t necessarily be fun for me felt like a huge breakthrough. It’s hard enough to stay in touch with what’s fun for you without thinking that you should like something that others find fun. For instance, I enjoy movies, but there are cheaper activities that I enjoy much more. So, I have gradually cut them out of my life. I will gooccasionally with a friend, but I don’t watch nearly as many as I used to and I used to watch a couple a week.
     
    My husband posed this question to me a year or so ago—“What do you find