1. DEFINITIONS

  

 

   

                        a. Root concept

 

 

 

   Loosely, fun is the engagement of an identity in any improvisational

choreography intended to create life affirming or humorous emotion in

oneself and one's social environment, as opposed to deliberate choreography

to achieve a practical purpose. Due to the limits of maintaining an

identity, it is always bounded by symbiotic familiarity or by a clearly

defined technical pursuit, or both. A creature or person lacking either is

refered to as feral or wild or savage.

   Symbiotic familiarity is the only anchor for fun for a newborn, but,

with the discovery of fictitious technical pursuits (domestication),

alienated fun becomes possible, and generally dominates, due to being far

more robust.

   The emotional effect of a given pursuit is apparently achieved through

mental echoes unique to each individual and not innate in the pursuit. A

pursuit such as group musical improvisation can be abject misery for one

person and heaven for another. A radical shift of identity can equally

radically change what someone feels as fun and significantly broaden or

narrow the term for them.

   Most people keep a very narrow idea of the word fun, referring only to

what they pursue or referring only to what they dislike about other people's

life interests. But, taking everyone into account, the actual range is

huge. Nearly every human activity has someone that speaks of it as being

fun, and most have someone else who says that having fun that way is

twisted or evil.

   Fun is an antidote to the listless emotional condition common to any

sentient creature in an overtly dependent or imprisoned condition. Many

people consider fun to be morally dubious unless in such a context.

Unchecked listlessness has resulted in the death of captured animals and

babies of all sorts, apparently from a lack of spontaneous breathing. Thus

the deliberate invention and arranging of fun has become essential to any

concept of child raising and dog ownership, and often figures in success

stories of large businesses, zoos and prisoner management.

   Grimness or the opposite of fun takes three forms in common

conversational use:

   1. any overt actual focus on achieving a technical result

   2. creative liberty to a degree that emotional health becomes as

unintentional and unconscious as one's heartbeat

   3. any technical focus that consistently results in the creation of life

denying or grim emotion

   Since any socially linked technical pursuit creates emotion to some

degree, and nearly all common technical focus is socially linked, the

establishment of values about fun or grimness, and the management of fun,

appear to preoccupy virtually everyone, even some toddlers. Unfortunately,

direct verbal discussion of the topic is generally far too emotionally

volatile to be reasoned, so those who carefully ponder the nature of fun

nearly always do so privately and rarely produce any obvious verbal result.

 

 

 

 

                        b. Feminine model

 

 

 

    (Note: What follows is a man's description)

   The term fun as expressed in conversation by women appears to always

imply a self-absorbed sensory focus and no awareness of real danger or

accountability to others. Thus fun becomes synonymous with enjoyment, such

as sharing well rehearsed singing or dance, receiving a meal or massage

from a formal stranger, riding a very reliable vehicle without immediate

regard for destination, reading a story alone or not, random encyclopedic

conversation, or watching someone struggle with something unimportant.

   Women also appear to refer to actual focus on a particular technical

achievement as being the opposite of fun but a necessary part of life, and

genuine creative liberty as being criminal or self-destructive. They also

appear to assume that no one would ever independently choose to engage a

non-essential technical focus that consistently created life denying or grim

emotion, or resulted in a complete absence of all emotion.

 

 

 

 

                        c. Masculine style

 

 

 

   The term fun as expressed by men generally refers to deliberate action

or technical control in a dangerous or unfamiliar context, with other

people overtly involved in a mutually accountable way. Masculine fun always

carries an element of divine awe, related to striving in some way or

discovery of the astounding or unknown, such as driving too fast for

conditions, viewing nude pictures, engaging high speed intellectual

conversation, handling explosives or dangerous equipment, reading about

bizarre inventions or political intrigues, building something never seen

before, grandstanding in some way, looking for lost treasure, listening to

intense entrancing sounds while drugged, speedy release of sensual passion,

computer programming, or vanquishing of a legitimate scapegoat.

   Men relate to complete creative liberty as the opposite of fun, focusing

on liberty as harmless but evocative of responsibility in a divine sense.

Men are disheartened and horrified by people with actual single-minded

focus on a single technical result, as if they have become robots or

insects. Most men in technological societies have some technical focuses

they have independently taken interest in which overtly create life

denying or grim emotion in everyone involved. The focuses are often hobbies

or subjects of intellectual study. Significantly, men in poorer societies

or subcultures tend to avoid focus that makes a grim vibe unless

consistently coached that way by someone else. Though men will recognize

delight associated with certain activities, no man appears to notice emotion

actually being created or destroyed.

 

 

 

 

                        d. Denial mode

 

 

 

   Some people believe that life-affirming emotion occurs entirely without

human initiative, and so they don't refer to the creation of it as fun but

instead refer to the feelings as serious, in the same class as defecating.

Some people also relate likewise to humor in non-verbal form, such as

giddiness about a project. Deeply religious people and emotionally immature

people often take this outlook on fun.

   Inevitably, uninvolved observers are still inclined to refer to the

activity of those people as fun for them all the same.

 

 

 

 

                        e. Legislative concept

 

 

 

   Governments tend to consistently outlaw or regulate what men call fun,

tending to intensify the divine awe potential of their fun, and pay for

infrastructure to support what women call fun, making it safer and easier

to achieve. Governments appear open to anyone's use of the term fun as

valid.

 

 

 

 

                       f. As a definition of childhood

 

 

 

   Many women define the end of childhood as the end of fun, and consider

that children are owed by society a period of unaccountable sensory fun.

Men who give the idea any consideration have an opposite view, that the

best fun begins with independence. Either way, childhood can be defined by

fun.

  

 

 

 

                        g. As the defining element of passion

 

 

 

   Any person, device, institution or location that appears to overtly

facilitate or destroy uncompromised fun for someone, becomes, for them,

associated with life affirmation and light-heartedness, inspiring passionate

devotional relationship or serious loathing.

   Facilitating or trashing fun for someone can be an unintended side

effect, as with a kitten appearing cute to an unnoticed observer, or

deliberate as with the United States declaration of independence. For many

people this kind of interactive humorous life affirmation is the defining

element of all love feelings. The article about love expands on this.

   Unfortunately, the spontaneous response to feeling passionate often

comes out bizarrely inappropriate. Passion is frequently embarrassing or

confusing for the passionate person, inspiring a brutal reaction to both

delight and loathing. Even when passion feels fun it can inspire a person

to launch a barrage of oppressive demands. Oddly, a lot of harsh responses

to feeling passionate, such as scolding and whining, are traditional in a

particular family or culture, those involved defining the response as

positive interest even though they all feel rotten. Many people speak about

this as a normal cost of having fun and of having relationships with other

people at all, though modern intimacy appears to be tending towards briefer

and politer association, often in hope of finding more friendly passion.

   There is no catch-all term in English for negative passion. It is a

subject of exhaustive study even for otherwise mindless people. Loathing,

hatred, anger, vengefulness, disgust, contempt, abhorrence, fear,

repugnance, vehemence and antipathy are all words used in conversation to

describe it. Even the word passion generally means the negative. Few people

show success at embracing love without losing kindness. The inspiration to

deliberately help someone else in their pursuit of fun does arise, but quite

often with a backlash of jealousy if the help suceeds. To prevent this a

lot of people avoid all deliberateness with other people's fun, preferring

reliance on luck and private prayer to make a world that has love

happening, speaking about it fatalistically if their life has been loveless

for quite a while.

   Long term love appears to always be deliberate though. Talking with the

few people who clearly have some measure of old love inevitably includes

stories of overtly making magic happen for the others.

 

 

 

 

                        h. As the defining element of play

 

 

 

   Play is fun with a fictitious technical focus or a deliberate

choreographic boundary. The first requires the allocation of energy without

a genuine payoff and the second requires at least one sponsoring individual

who remains left out, so play is a compromise that most people and all wild

animals abandon at some point in their lives. Play is also the only form of

fun that gets mainstream academic recognition and study, due to so many

people being cast into the role of sponsoring it, forced to focus on it

without being in it.