Generally speaking, when people use the word fun, it's like a placeholder. You know, "How was your evening?" "Oh it was fun."

When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.

Fun has to do with habitual activities but then also terrifically novel or unusual ones. It works as a sort of strange milkshake of those concepts.

We're used to thinking of fun as a sort of synonym for light pleasure.

The more you're drowning in familiarity, the better the fun is. It requires less novelty to produce even more gratification. And it's something that didn't come from you. It was about the other thing - the thing you were experiencing, or the people you were with, or the mechanism you were operating, or whatever it might be.

If you stop someone who's talking about something being fun, and say "Well what do you mean?" it's almost impossible to answer.

The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.