It’s been a pretty lousy three years. But don’t take my word for it. Article titles in the popular press have ranged from “How to Reclaim Your Joy After the Pandemic” to “Are You Happy? The Meaning of Life During Covid-19” and “11 Supposedly Fun Things We’ll Never Do the Same Way Again.”

For me, much of the pandemic has meant not being able to fly across the country to visit my daughter, not being able to see my friend in Rome who is like a brother to me, having to miss my granddaughter’s graduation from college, and not going to lunch several times a week with colleagues, students, and friends in between teaching responsibilities on the Berkeley campus.

But now, as the pandemic’s strictures lift, it’s time to have fun again. But what is fun?

There’s very little research on it. There’s research on happiness. In fact, UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center even has a wildly popular online course called The Science of Happiness that gets at the roots of a happy and meaningful life. But happiness and fun do not always intersect.

A study in The Medical Journal of Australia called “Blondes Do Not Have More Fun: A Non-blinded Crossover Field Study” (I kid you not) found that blondes do not have more fun on waterslides than non-blondes or bald people. And there’s an article in the Journal of Positive Psychology with the title “Fun Is More Fun When Others Are Involved,” except the researchers say in their discussion that their study of adults focuses on a social activity (building towers with blocks) rather than on “solitary fun activities” like reading. The researchers acknowledge that while “fun is a popular goal,” it “deserves more serious scrutiny.”

Indeed. They point out that prior research shows “experiencing fun at work, either in job-related activities or socializing with co-workers, positively predicts higher job satisfaction and lower employee burnout and turnover”—except when the research shows that “workplace fun may be experienced as coercive or distracting, especially when time pressure is great.” In other words, to no small degree, what’s fun is going to be different for different people.

So are there any ways that fun can be characterized—in order for you to know when you’re having it? It’s an important question, because engaging in fun activities is a way to recharge your battery and tend better to your responsibilities. [user_id]

• You forget that time is passing. When you’re really having fun, you’re in the moment. You’re not looking at your watch to see when whatever it is you’re doing will be over. Susan Magsamen, founder and executive director of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University, has been paraphrased as saying the sense of time passing without your notice is a key element of fun.
• There’s no goal. The aim of fun is not to accomplish something. Accomplishing something can make you happy, but pure fun is only about what you’re doing—not about what it will do in turn (other than create good memories).
• Fun is unalloyed. I heard on the radio recently that when answering a survey about vacations, Americans said they’d rather have a longer vacation during which they had to spend some time working rather than a shorter vacation with no work. That, to my mind, does not sound like fun. It involves goals and the urgency of time passing, which are inconsistent with fun (see the two bullets above). Chalk it up to our Puritan roots. In France and other western European countries, people often get at least five weeks of paid vacation per year. And the oxymoron of working during vacation doesn’t exist. Here, vacation time tends to be more like three weeks.

If you’re rusty on engaging in activities you find fun, it’s okay to write down a list. You might then have to force yourself to make time for a movie or to play a round of golf or get together with people you haven’t seen for a while since you’re out of practice.

You could even make a list together with friends and family—that could be fun. And right now, I’m about to do the first thing on my fun list: buy plane tickets to visit some people I haven’t seen for a while.