"Are you having fun, son?"

how much chocolate is too much?

“To continue to have fun is to participate in a dynamic process, to adapt to the situation.”

When I was about maybe 14 years old, I plotted to have a fun night by myself in my family home, on a day that I knew everyone was going to be home late. I had borrowed a DVD from a friend, a live concert of one of my favorite bands, Mr. Big – I believe it was the Farewell Live in Japan 2002 video. I decided to really treat myself, and I bought three 3-packs of Kinder Bueno chocolates, which adds up to… 18 sticks of creamy, hazelnutty chocolate wafers.

Since nobody was home, I got to turn up the volume louder than I’d normally dare to play anything. I marvelled at the tremendous spectacle of HD quality footage of Billie Sheehan and Ritchie Kotzen trading virtuostic riffs, and I ate those chocolates until I felt sick. To this day, when I eat Kinder Bueno, I think somewhat fondly back to that day. I’ve tweeted about this anecdote at least twice over the years, and I’m writing about it again, which tells me there’s something in here that I probably want to dig into and examine.

After thinking some version of “how cute”, I find myself thinking… what an uncommon, rare event that was, that I set aside a significant amount of time for pure pleasure, and had a plan for what I was going to do with it. I find myself wondering what other moments fit this description.

I find myself thinking of days spent at LAN shop with friends. Do kids these days know what LAN shops are? I’ll describe them anyway. They were a rather specialized form of internet cafe, venues with rows upon rows of computers, and you could book computers by the hour. I remember how a friend brought me to play Counter-Strike for the first time, and how I had no idea what I was doing and would simply get killed over and over again… and yet I found it compelling somehow, and was determined to get better at it. I remember when the original DOTA craze swept through my secondary school, and guys who were particularly good at were respected for their skills. I remember when Left 4 Dead came out, and my friends and I relished the opportunity to complete the campaigns together at increasing difficulties. We’d play a round, then step outside for a cigarette break and discuss what went down. We did a similar thing playing 5 v 5 DOTA against the hardest difficulty AI bots. Sometimes we’d lose several rounds for hours before finally securing a glorious, deeply gratifying victory. Those were some of my happiest and most satisfying moments from those years of my life, definitely much more than my experience of school.

(A meme I cite in my book Introspect)

I could also talk at length about my enjoyment of live music, playing instruments, playing in bands, going to shows, chatting on the local music forum, all that stuff. I wrote the draft of an entire novel about this, and maybe it’s time I revisit it. Or maybe I could publish it in a sort of serialized way. But I digress. This is shaping up to be a post about enjoyment, about pleasure. “Are you having fun, son?” I’m struck by how rarely anybody asked me that question. It wasn’t something that my social reality cared about. But it’s something that I felt was implicitly a powerful theme in the media that resonated with me. Calvin and Hobbes was about having fun. Horrible Histories was about having fun. Some deep part of me knew that fun was important – axiomatically, incontrovertibly so – and I’m really grateful that I’ve somehow been able to keep those embers alive all the way through adulthood, particularly growing up in a culture that discouraged it. I’m now reminded of how I once wrote up a partial draft of my life’s memoirs, and I titled it Naughty Boy – because I would so often be called that, even though I was always friendly, polite and cheerful. A kid exercising autonomy and earnestly pursuing his own interests was a naughty kid, because his casual existence was a violation of the prevailing social order.

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When I was really young, fun was simple, fun was reading books, fun was playing video games, watching television. The sheer rush of say, hearing the theme song of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers as a kid on a Saturday morning, is something that’s hard to match as an adult. (Why DID all those 90s kids cartoons and tv shows have such excellent theme songs?)

As I got older, fun got more complicated. I specifically remember hearing things from adults like, “you should work hard in your youth, make sacrifices now, and then you can have fun later in life.” I always thought that was a grotesque line of thinking, and I remember thinking about kids who died untimely deaths who never got to have much fun, and adults who spent decades of their lives working jobs they hated who seemed absolutely miserable despite their fancy cars.

Also, the adults who said that shit never really seemed all that happy themselves. I think that was the real crux of it. They all seemed frustrated. I think if I met some truly happy adults who said that, I would’ve taken that message more seriously. But when I looked around – and I had to look far beyond my immediate social environment – it seemed like the happiest adults were those who had kept having at least some fun throughout their lives. They kept their spirit intact. As Al Pacino’s character said in Scent of a Woman, there’s no prosthetic for an amputated soul. That sort of thing always resonated very deeply with me. I desperately wanted to keep my soul intact, whatever it was. That meant I had to have fun, I had to keep a sense of child-like joy and wonder with me throughout. And I believe I have done that. And I don’t spend nearly enough time really expressing gratitude to my past selves for protecting that animating spirit, despite everyone telling me I was naive, irresponsible and so on.

the dose maketh the joy?

What else is there to say about the matter of fun? I’m already sensing that I’ve skimmed past a couple of salient branching paths. One of the things I wanted to note was how… ham-fisted? my approach was, regarding the excessive chocolate. I had this child’s understanding of, “if some chocolate is good, surely more chocolate is better!” And it turns out of course that the dose maketh the poison, and too much of any good thing ceases to be very good.

I’d like to spend more time and energy really getting good at understanding what makes something fun, or more precisely, how to create substantially fun experiences. This ties up so much with everything. I find writing good tweets much easier than writing good essays, and writing a good book is much harder still. It seems true that the “bigger” or “longer” an experience is, the more thoughtful you have to be to make it good, because you have to account for more variables, more concerns. There are some parallels here with how a coffee date is easier than dinner, and how a summer vacation fling is easier than a happy marriage of decades.

There is some irony in the fact that I have in some ways agonized so hard about this question with regards to my writing, that I neglected to do much writing in the process. I thought, without articulating it clearly to myself, “well, I’ve spent years of my life writing copious amounts, so surely I can afford to spend some time thinking about writing, putting off the writing until I make some sort of breakthrough in my thinking-about-writing.” Big mistake! I now know from experience that you have to be writing at least a little bit at least some of the time.

I’m reminded of something a friend wrote about how they decided to take a break from life for a few weeks, disregarding their fitness, diet, obligations, etc, and they just ended up feeling like shit because of it. Turns out that you can’t really do that for longer than maybe a week before things start to get bad. Hey, it’s another form of the chocolate dosage puzzle. How much chocolate is good? How long can you enjoy living in filth? Even a beach vacation in paradise gets tiresome eventually!

I have more to say about everything. The school vs gaming meme, I think is super compelling and revealing and I’d like to think really long and hard about how popular gaming is with young boys all over the world, and how quick mainstream society has been to dismiss that as frivolous-at-best and soul-destroying at worst. I won’t pretend that it can’t be bad, I’ve personally seen friends go deep into the abyss of gaming-induced hell. But if you ask me, it’s never really the games themselves that are the root of the problem. The deeper issue is almost always that the person had a gaping hole in their lives that gaming filled. That’s an important difference. I think many addictions are like this. (Consider the rat park experiments, where rats in healthy social environments were found to consume less morphine than rats in isolated cages.)

But really at the heart of everything I think is that I’d like to have more fun myself, and get better at having fun, and have more nuanced and textured sorts of fun than ever before. As I said, I was told as a child that “if you work really hard now then you can have fun later”. Well, I did work really hard throughout my twenties, in my own way, at my own thing. I used to write prodigiously on all my commutes to and from work, so that I would get good enough at writing to someday be able to do it for a living. And I spent years solving for distribution, talking to as many people as I could, so that there would be a market for said writing. So in a sense, I’ve “succeeded”. I’m living my childhood dream. Which is resplendent and beatific for a while, but then you acclimate to it, and then you have to ask, what next?

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So yeah, maybe there’s no fun that’s both simple and eternal. To continue to have fun is to participate in a dynamic process, to adapt to the situation. To keep having fun means you have to recognize when you’ve had enough chocolate, or you’ve been playing for enough hours, or when it’s time to write the last sentence on a particular essay and hit publish. ;-)