So Just What is Fun, Anyway?

I'm writing this blog about fun, but what is fun, anyway? I'm not sure that I've ever bothered to define that..... So let's try.

To start with, fun is hardly an absolute concept; it changes with every person, with every situation, with every circumstance. If we pick up a dictionary (Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language, second college edition, 1984, which I have on my shelf) we'll find among the definitions for "fun" the following: "a source or cause of amusement or merriment, as an amusing person or thing."

Hmmm. I don't think that helps too much. Dictionaries are too formal, anyway. So I googled "fun definition," and I found this: "Recreation is the use of time in a non-profitable way, in many ways also a therapeutic refreshment of one's body or mind. While leisure is more likely a form of entertainment or rest, recreation is active for the participant but in a refreshing and diverting manner. ..." Maybe the Internet is too formal, too.

Or, more likely, maybe defining something as amorphous as "fun" is harder than it looks. How can we define something, in a way understandable to everyone, if the very concept is experienced differently by everyone? Even the question has to be phrased in a convoluted way, if we try not to be completely self-referential when talking about the concept.

As you can see, the difficulties here are many. Is there a way out of this?

Well, yes, there is. We can just admit that "fun" is a purely self-referential concept. There is no activity, which one person defines as fun, which will not be though unutterably dull or useless by at least one other person. Fun is defined internally, by the person engaged in it, and that's that.

So now let's get back to the fun!