When we are kids, we revel in having fun. The world revolves around having fun at the early stages of life. You can see the instinct clearly in Buddy, who is still a young dog at three. When he wakes up in the morning, all he wants to do is play. He will come up to our faces in bed and try to convince us that its time to get up to play. He is far less focused on eating hours earlier than he is on playing. As the day wears on, he retains his willingness to have fun, but the energy level starts to dissipate and the preference for rest comes to the surface and gradually gets stronger than the need to have fun. He can reenergize at the drop of a hat or especially with the arrival of a potential new playmate. Buddy is initially discerning and skeptical of new people, but very quickly warms to them if they are prepared to play with him. So its fair to say that he judges people based on their willingness to have fun with him. He cares less about their character or their politics, but it absolutely matters to him whether they are inclined to play or not.
In all of us, we are driven at some point to put away the games of youth. Corinthians is where Paul writes: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” That’s almost certainly the root of the phrasing that reverberates in our ears. It’s one of the most quoted lines in the Western canon for the idea that maturity requires renouncing play. But the underlying notion is older and shows up in several independent traditions that converge on the same idea. There was a Roman coming-of-age ritual where boys wore a bulla (amulet) and kept toys until the toga virilis ceremony, at which both toys and the bulla were formally dedicated to the household gods, a literal, ritualized “putting away” of childhood objects as the marker of entering manhood. This is one of the oldest concrete versions of the practice, not just the metaphor. Greek paideia and the ephebic transition also had Greek boys moving from play-based education to civic/military training (the ephebate) as a formal transition, games belonged to a phase that had to be exited to take on citizenship and arms. Protestant work ethic, especially Calvinism, recast idleness and play as morally suspect and productive labor as a sign of grace. This gave “putting away games” a moral-religious charge it hadn’t fully had before. Leisure wasn’t just outgrown, it became something close to sinful if indulged past childhood. But then there was romanticism’s backlash with Wordsworth, Blake, and later thinkers reversing this thinking, treating childhood play and wonder as something adults lose at their peril, not something virtuously discarded. Wordsworth said in My Heart Leaps Up that “The child is father of the man”, and that inverts the hierarchy entirely. So you’ve got two competing inheritances running through Western culture simultaneously: the classical/Christian view that maturity means renouncing play as a discipline, and the Romantic counter-tradition arguing that losing the capacity for play is itself a kind of impoverishment which is part of why “you’re never too old to have fun” lands as a meaningful corrective rather than a throwaway line.
Yesterday, before heading out to dinner, Kim wanted to go over her Wabash High School Reunion run-of-show and specifically, her medley. The first song, Hooked on a Feeling starts with the infectious Ooga-Chaka, Ooga-Chaka. That chant, which we all recognize immediately, was originally a kind of pseudo-Native American war chant sung by backup singers on Johnny Preston’s 1959 song “Running Bear.” Blue Swede’s Swedish frontman Björn Skifs heard it and lifted the “ooga chaka” hook wholesale into his cover of B.J. Thomas’s “Hooked on a Feeling” (Thomas’s 1968 original had no chant at all). Blue Swede’s version became the massive hit, and the chant, despite having no actual linguistic meaning (Native American or otherwise), became permanently associated with the song. It’s had a long afterlife too: it’s the opening needle-drop in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), which is likely where a lot of younger listeners first encountered it. So, when we went to dinner, I said as we walked up to the table that Kim and I needed to enter with a chain-gang bit saying Ooga-Chaka, Ooga-Chaka, even though our guests had no idea what that was all about. I thought it would be fun.
I am not always in a fun mood, but I try to have a festive and fun way about me at all times, always looking for a laugh, always trying to get a reaction out of people. These days we like to level criticism at people like the administration buffoons that Trump has put in place and call them unserious. Trump is always cracking wise and he thinks he’s being funny, but I think unserious and fun are not opposites. Unserious means that when you are supposed to be serious (i.e. when the circumstances demand it), you are flippant or nonchalant. Being fun is for all those other times when seriousness is not required. Some may have a more restrictive view of when fun is appropriate, but those must be the classical/Christian folks versus the Romantics like me. The desire for fun by humans stays remarkably stable. Studies on subjective well-being and leisure motivation generally find that the drive for pleasure, novelty, and positive affect doesn’t really diminish with age… what changes is the cost-benefit calculation around pursuing it. Studies show that older adults report higher emotional well-being and life satisfaction than younger adults, partly because they’re better at curating what actually generates enjoyment and cutting the rest. Fun becomes more intentional and less impulsive. Older adults are simply better at predicting what they’ll actually enjoy and that causes nostalgia-driven fun to increase. As we age, the capacity for fun stays intact; it’s the packaging that changes. People who report the most fun in later life tend to be the ones who kept experimenting rather than assuming their 30-year-old preferences were permanent. That’s where all my landscaping whimsy comes from and why I like to shock and surprise people at social gatherings. I find that being fun is …fun…and it sure beats spending your golden years being too serious.