Fun mostly happens at the second-by-second level

This has been stuck half-written in my drafts for three years because it was a bit too much like yelling at depressed people for being depressed, and I was having trouble finding a framing that avoided that.

I still haven't solved the problem, so sorry in advance if this post is annoying, but I got reminded of the Lurpak anecdote in it today and thought I'd chance finishing and publishing it anyway.

Earlier in the week [edit: well, actually back in 2022] I was getting frustrated at some people on Hacker News who were bad at having fun, and started writing a rant. This seems mean. It's not their fault that they don't know how to have fun, and of course they are already suffering by not having fun. This is my attempt to make it a bit more constructive.

The thread was this one where the OP is stuck in a rut and asking for help to get out. A lot of the practical advice is good, but then one of the top-rated replies starts with the following:

It looks like you have discovered that life is boring. Doesn't matter in tech or any profession, we work to create wealth and get so engrossed in it. Once we conquer the "wealth" part we feel we don't have a meaning or a purpose anymore. And life is actually boring. To see life is boring and has no meaning is intelligence. I would go as far as to say only fools don't realize that life is boring and go on distracting themselves endlessly...

and keeps on in the same nihilist vein.

The top-rated reply to the reply starts as follows:

I don't think life is _necessarily_ boring as you claim. It's just that a lot about life is boring, particularly working at a job you don't intrinsically enjoy as well as things like commuting, preparing/waiting for food, etc.

But a best friend? A delicious meal? Making love? Learning something you want to know about? I could go on.

This is pushback of a sort, and sounds like a more enjoyable worldview than the one it's responding to, but it still has a weird-to-me ontology of fun where fun either does or does not attach to whole lumped activities like "commuting" or "a delicious meal".

Anyway, at this point I got frustrated and went to fill my recycling bag with cardboard:

I'm really enjoying disassembling cardboard boxes at the moment [edit: still enjoying this in 2025]. I got some Ikea furniture recently so there's lots of cardboard in the flat. The most satisfying part is where you score a line roughly in the cardboard with scissors, and then bend it, and then the whole thing snaps nicely along the line. Filling up the bag neatly like in the photo is also pretty good.

Another story: a while back, I had a bug where I couldn't taste much (not covid, just your standard issue pre-covid crappy bug), so I was wondering what to eat, and trying to figure out what I might enjoy. After considering some options, the only thing I felt really excited about was "opening a new tub of Lurpak butter and seeing the nice flat surface". Which sounds very stupid, but I did genuinely enjoy that!

Anyway, the point is that things that are fun are often very small, and sound kind of trivial and silly when you write about them. My sense though is that they are actually very important, and that most fun bubbles up from this kind of second-by-second experience. There just isn't much fun available in big pre-packaged narrative lumps, even the apparently positive ones like "having a delicious meal". Whereas you could break open even the duller-sounding lumps like "commuting" and find a decent amount of second-by-second fun inside. If you are spending your life up at the level of the lumps, then fun is going to top out at a pretty low level.

I wish I could shout at the Hacker News repliers to JUST GO LOOK AT SOME THINGS, LIKE ACTUALLY LOOK AT THEM FOR ONCE, AND SEE WHICH BITS YOU LIKE in a way that would actually help. I can't, so instead I wrote this annoying post.