https://ontheroadtohappiness.org/having-fun-wont-make-you-happy/

If I ask you to imagine someone having fun, what do you think of? Probably someone smiling and laughing, enjoying themselves at a party, the beach or maybe an amusement park. If I ask you to imagine a happy person, you’ll probably conjure up a similar image

So are fun and happiness the same thing?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, mostly because I’m fortunate enough to be at a point in my life where I’m having lots of fun! Over the last year of travelling, I’ve had no worries about jobs or responsibilities and have had the unusual opportunity to have fun pretty much every day. I started wondering whether all this fun has actually made me happier…

Does having fun make you happy?

Strangely enough, I’m not sure that it has. I’ve enjoyed many of the things we’ve done and they’ve given me some happy memories, but I don’t think the fun has made my life happier overall. This is quite a shocking realisation really, considering that most of us spend our lives in pursuit of fun as a means to happiness

So what’s the truth about the link between fun and happiness

While I was pondering the question of fun and happiness, I read a couple of books which touched on the subject – Happiness is a Serious Problem by Dennis Prager and The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. Both books made me realise the difference between fun and happiness: fun is temporary, happiness is ongoing.

Fun brings about positive feelings like excitement, pride and hope and of course positive feelings make us happy. However, according to modern psychologists, well-being is actually made up of five elements and positive feelings are in fact the weakest element. (See my article The 5 Elements Of Well-Being for more details about the elements of well-being). Positive feelings are not enough for a happy life, because those emotions fade away so quickly. This is the main problem with fun – we are only happy while we are doing the fun activity. As soon as the fun stops, the positive emotions stop.

Cameron and I have done all sorts of fun things over the last year – scuba diving, horse riding, trekking, lots of partying 😉 – and those activities made us happy while we were doing them, but added little to our life satisfaction once they were over.

We’ve had a lot of fun, but has it made us happier?

Like most people, we thought that the more fun we had, the happier we would be. Of course, the problem with fun is that it delivers diminishing returns – something that was really fun the first time is less fun the next time. This is how people become addicted to fun and end up spending their time, energy and money on one fun activity after another, in the hope that it will finally bring them happiness.

Life needs meaning

So if fun won’t make us happy in the long run, what will?

It seems that true, lasting happiness comes from doing something meaningful. This means working towards goals, contributing to society, creating something, connecting with people. (See my article How To Find The Meaning Of Life (Maybe) which discusses Viktor Frankl’s view that the most important thing in a person’s life is to have meaning).

The bad news is that, although doing something meaningful will make you happier in the long run, it might not necessarily make you happy at the moment you are doing it. To quote Gretchen Rubin, “happiness doesn’t always make you happy!”

A personal example of this is writing articles like the one you are reading right now. Writing brings me a huge amount of joy and life satisfaction, but it can also be quite frustrating and certainly doesn’t always feel very fun. It would be much easier to turn the laptop off and watch a film instead. However, I know that writing this article which make me much happier in the long run than watching a film I’ll probably forget in a day or two.