Can Writing be fun?

 My dear friend suggested, after reading my last post, that writing can have more than one purpose, and what I was arguing, namely writing as a form of thinking, was merely one of the many purposes for writing. For instance, writing can be for remembering; writing can also be for fun. Now I would like to leave the remembering part for the next post. For now, let's talk about fun.

Can writing be fun? Yes. But what kind of fun is that?

To answer this question, there are basically two approaches, both of which lead to the same conclusion. I will start with the easy approach: the supply side of the fun.

Now, what are the things that are mostly considered fun? Entertainments. Movies. Music. Video games. Hanging out with friends. Partying. Sightseeing. Travelling. TikTok. Youtube. Netflix. These things can be placed into an imaginary spectrum, with one side being totally brainless, and the other side requiring some sort of effort. Let's take music for example. Listening to music can be fun. Playing musical instruments can be fun. But these two are very different kinds of experiences. Someone who does not know how to play guitar can hardly get any fun out of it, and when you ask him/her "do you enjoy playing guitar?" the answer would neither be yes nor no, but would simply be "I don't know how to play guitar." Fun or no fun is not even there. The person lacks the judgment precisely because he/she lacks the prerequisite of it, namely, the ability of certain performance.

To see it as a spectrum instead of an either/or situation is actually quite helpful here. Because, if we see the latter kind, the one that requires effort, as "acquired tastes," then the degree of acquired-ness is actually inherent for any activity if it is to be fun. Every fun is an acquired taste. You don't get the fun from Tiktok automatically, you learn it pretty quickly (and Tiktok wants you to learn as quickly as possible.) You don't start a game without first learning its rules. Even those that seem to require zero effort, like listening to music or hanging out with friends, actually require some sort of effort such as recognizing the chorus and being friendly. We see these activities as automatically fun, because we've acquired them so deeply that we can automatically enjoy them without any conscious mental effort.

And this can be the real distinction for the two kinds of fun: some can be automated, others cannot. And all the habits that people wish they had acquired -- working out, reading, writing, learning a new language, learning to play an instrument, tidying up the house -- are the ones that can hardly be automated. All the bad habits are the ones easily automated. 

In a sense, writing can never appropriately be called a habit, just like playing guitar is more appropriately seen as a skill, a technique, not a habit. The fun of a skill is different from the fun of a habit, precisely because the former grows and the latter doesn't. This is the demand side of the fun. What exactly are we seeking when seeking fun? The opposite of boredom, the escape from mundane repetitions. Most resilient bad habits has this trait of "various rewards" that keeps it from becoming boring, like gambling, drinking, video games (if you consider it a waste of time), Tiktok. But you get another kind of boredom, the "ennui" of life, when you immerse into any such habit. Because despite the various rewards on the surface, be it the always fresh new jokes from Tiktok, or the accumulation of resources from an idle game, deep down you know it goes nowhere. It's just a mental trick to lure you into thinking "I am doing something constructive" until all of a sudden you just realized the variety of the rewards are all fabricated, designed for some other purposes, like getting you to see more ads or showing you with the limit that seperates a hardcore free gamer and a pay-to-win gamer. 

This is the real reason why we need constructive habit, the skills, the techniques, not to "be a better person," nor to "live out your potentials," but simply to really have some fun in your life. That being said, you don't automatically write for fun, just as you don't grab a guitar and randomly strike the strings and call it fun. A skill requires effort, systematic effort. Now I do object any so-called tactics for writing. Just like playing guitar, there are actually infinite ways of playing it right, infinite possibilities, but there nevertheless are established ways to learn the basics before you sail into the vast uncharted ocean of guitar playing. All the same for writing.

A skill has its aim, the fun is just the byproduct of the process. For writing, the aim is always to think elaborately and clearly. Whenever you try to replace the proper aim with just having fun, you neither get the fun nor the original aim. I do agree with Lana del Rey's lyric, "happiness is a butterfly; we should catch it while dancing."