Having fun is a lot of work

Recreation as a means of identity formation

“I feel sick — maybe more caffeine will help”

On Sunday morning, my husband’s alarm went off at 4:45 AM. I woke up 29 minutes later to a tap on the shoulder and a phone screen in my face that read 5:14. “You have 16 minutes before we need to be in the car,” he urged matter-of-factly.

We ended up departing seven minutes late. I gagged down some yogurt in the passenger seat, half-asleep and nauseous¹ from waking up so early.

After 13 months of living only an hour and a half from Bay Area tech bro vacation spot du jour Lake Tahoe, we were finally devoting a day trip to a hike around the lake. The outing required a respectable amount of forethought.

The week before, we had decided it was time for our first Tahoe excursion.

A few days before, I spent half an hour scouring AllTrails for the right spot and plotting our parking strategy, assembling a Google Doc with map screenshots and notes.

The night before, we packed our Camelbaks with bathing suits and changes of clothes, and in the morning, we filled their bladders with water and stuffed haphazardly constructed peanut butter-and-banana sandwiches in their side pockets.

Then, we drove for one hour and 50 minutes, put 10 rumpled singles into a fee envelope for parking at a campground, and proceeded to hike for five hours: Nine miles, 1,500 feet of vertical gain, and a chilly, half-naked dunk in the lake. By the time we got home that night, our faces windburned and bodies wrung of every last ounce of capability, we laid on the couch and marveled at how different the previous 12 hours felt from our standard Sunday (couching, football, side-by-side computer time).

Damn, I thought, shifting around uncomfortably, unable to find a position that relieved my restless legs, Having fun is a lot of work. Usually, I reserve this type of energy for…well, actual work.

A couple of months ago, I read an essay with a sentiment so seemingly contradictory that it stopped me in my tracks (I’d share it here, but unfortunately, my Google searches aren’t returning any useful results). The author’s argument was that you needed to take your free time more seriously: You don’t need to ‘start jogging,’ she wrote. You need to ‘train for a marathon.’

While it struck me at first as thinly veiled neoliberal rise-and-grind propaganda, the longer I sat with it, the more sense it made: The things you do for money have stakes. There’s an observable return on investment for your time and energy spent, in the form of paychecks or success. Although the pressure those stakes introduce might seem antagonistic, it’s necessary to maintain engagement. It’s what makes us give a fuck, and therefore, try.

I always feel vaguely anti-feminist quoting Greek philosophers since the entire field seems predicated on the idea that only ancient men had anything worthwhile to say, but as Epictetus wrote, “You become what you give your attention to.” Our attention—the most concentrated form of our consciousness—is what defines our existence.

In the absence of other things in your life with external accountability (a tutor or teacher you pay), deadlines (an impending race you’ve already signed up for), or goals (a challenging song you want to learn), your attention will naturally melt toward the burning gravitational pull of the thing that does have stakes: the area of life where you can observe progress being made.

This is why it took me 13 months to visit Lake Tahoe despite it being within 100 miles of my house, and instead I spent approximately 56 weekends in a row lounging around and idly chipping away at emails.

who needs the mesmerizing wonder of nature when you have six seasons of Love is Blind?

Most of the time, weekend plans that require effort induce the same feeling of dread that I get when I’m in a small group and someone suggests we play a complicated board game. Can’t we just watch TV or go out to eat?

For years, this default setting seemed perfectly acceptable. Who cared if my pastime of choice was leisurely half-working and listening to podcasts? Wasn’t it better than doing blow with strangers off sticky bathroom counters or spending my Saturdays trolling a Nordstrom? I was being productive! I was resting (…for the following week)! Doing nothing costs nothing, so I’m being responsible! And, it’s worth mentioning, the entire internet seemed to come around and agree with my assessment of what quality wind-down time looked like:

Over the past few years, something has shifted in the perception of acceptable recreational behavior, or the way people talk about their hobbies: people are gleeful to admit they have no hobbies, no interests, no verve. Somehow, one of the main “hobbies” accepted by the masses is staying home, laying in bed, scrolling on their phones and watching television.²

Laying in bed and scrolling on Small Screen while Big Screen plays a show? Don’t threaten me with a good time! A commenter on the essay quoted above posed this challenge: Name five hobbies you have that don’t involve media consumption.

I sat up a little straighter. Reading? Fuck. That’s media consumption. Well, I like to listen to podcasts… I thought, patting myself on the back for my intellectual curiosity, before realizing that this, too, constituted consuming media. My only two pastimes that passed the sniff test: going for walks and playing piano, a new addition as of this January. Crucially, none require any sort of ongoing commitment.

It’s the difference between playing piano for half an hour when I’ve grown tired of Reddit’s infinite newsfeed, and signing up for weekly lessons that require time, energy, and expense; between going on a 20-minute walk around the block after meetings, and devoting an entire weekend day and 3,000 calories of physical output to a challenging hike.

It seemed sufficient to have a few little diversions to satisfy the small-talk question “What do you do for fun?” without feeling like a total loser (learn Taylor Swift songs on piano, watch TV, go on a real hike approximately once a year, rage-read books about patriarchy). These non-committal leisure activities just served to fill the time between sessions of the thing I actually gave a fuck about (personal finance world domination).

For some, true prioritization of your hobbies might feel obvious, natural. For me (and maybe others who like their jobs a little too much), the idea of taking recreation seriously goes against my internalized capitalist instincts to expend as little energy as possible on things that don’t allow me the exquisite dopamine rush of checking something off a to-do list.

But my apparent non-choice to reserve all my real time, energy, and money for my work has led me down an increasingly narrow path of identity formation—my little world may be rich, shiny, and fulfilling, but it is small, one-dimensional. Sometimes I worry it’s made me one-dimensional, too. When the only thing in your life deemed worthy of exertion is your job, your identity is reduced to this single point of failure. The good news is identity creation is an active choice: You become what you do.

My friend McCall used to ski recreationally. Now, she’s avalanche-certified.³ She skis all the time. The mere sight of the terrain she hurls herself down is enough to make me clench my butthole. She gets up while it’s still dark outside on weekdays and makes the trek out of Denver to the nearest slope, gets a few runs in, and drives back home before clocking in. This is the only difference between being ‘someone who skis’ and a skier: a regular investment of time, energy, and money.

At first, it was a hobby. Now, it’s part of who she is. I asked her how she managed to be as committed to her recreation as most people are to their paid work, knowing she bears all the same rote obligations of adulthood that I have. She said:

Effort and exertion aren’t a finite resource. Getting my avalanche certification and doing more back-country skiing has trickled over into so many other parts of my life, because it stretched my sense of self and capability.

Meanwhile, somewhere in California in close proximity to the most beautiful nature on the North American continent, Katie’s distressed over a surly comments section.

The 31-year-old American cyclist Kristen Faulkner who won gold in the women’s road race for the first time in 40 years signed up for an introductory cycling clinic on a whim in 2017 because she wanted to spend more time outside. She was just a gal with a fancy job in New York City who was like, “Eh, that looks fun,” took classes, joined a team, and won Olympic gold six years later.

I have no such delusions of Olympics grandeur—but her story is arresting because it’s proof our adult identities are malleable; our limits self-imposed. Becoming a willing beginner at something means expanding my carefully refined little world to accommodate the messy and humbling experience of the novice. Training, taking classes, or signing up for things with external expectations means putting some part of myself, however small, on the line. Even now, my complicated-board-game resistance flares at the idea. Wouldn’t it be easier to just keep doing the thing that I already know I’m good at?

But there’s another part of me that wants to approach the things I do for fun with the same level of intensity and commitment as the things I do for money and career advancement. What more “self” might be out there, yet undiscovered?

When we were finishing our last mile on Sunday, I was walking ahead of Thomas on the trail. “I want to do more things like this,” I said to the dirt, studying my foot placement to avoid rolling an ankle. I heard him snort softly behind me.

“You say that literally every time we do anything,” he mused.

“That’s because every time, I’m reminded how fun it is to leave your house.”

Naturally, I hurried back inside to write about it.

1. Does this happen to anyone else? Why does this happen to me? Avoiding early flights has become part of my moral code since realizing getting up super-early makes me feel like I’m going to barf.

2. This essay, “The Mainstreaming of Loserdom,” went viral a week or two ago, and it captured part of what I’ve observed in myself perfectly.

3. The certification is called an AIARE1 (pronounced “Area One”), and she had to do a shit ton of classes to get it. I’ve never met anyone as excited about snow science.