Catherine Price's True Fun: A Three-Part Test and a Fun Audit

Try a one-question test on your last month of free time: after this, did I feel better or just finished? Most evenings on the couch land on “finished.” A Saturday morning spent badly at a pottery class, complaining about the clay the whole time, often lands on “better.”

That test is close to what Catherine Price built a book on, though the question is mine, not hers. In The Power of Fun (2021), she defines fun as the overlap of three things: playfulness, connection and flow. When all three show up together, she calls it true fun. Activities that give you none of the three, like scrolling and binge-watching, are what she calls fake fun, “the junk-food category of fun” in her words to Philadelphia magazine: it feels fine in the moment and leaves you unfulfilled later.

What are the three ingredients of true fun?

In an interview with the Freedom app’s blog, Price said she could not find a satisfying dictionary definition. The nearest was “lighthearted pleasure,” which missed that people’s most fun memories were often deep as well. Her working version was “playful, connected flow.” Her three parts, as she described them there:

• Playfulness: a lighthearted attitude, not “goal driven in the way that we so often are in our adult lives.”
• Connection: usually with another person. She said even introverts reported that their most fun experiences often involved someone else.
• Flow: the state of being so wrapped up in the present that time passes unnoticed.

A definition worth quoting on its own: true fun is playfulness, connection and flow happening at the same moment.

Which parts are Price’s idea and which are research?

Keep these apart, because the book’s framing makes them feel like one thing.

Flow is established psychology. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced it in Beyond Boredom and Anxiety (1975) and developed it in Flow (1990). Later work by Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi (2001) lists features such as intense concentration, merging of action and awareness, loss of self-consciousness and distorted time. I read these in a Wikipedia summary, not the originals. The same summary notes that flow is mostly measured by self-report after the fact, and that researchers still argue about its dimensions.

The combination is hers. By her own account she drew on a background in mindfulness and positive psychology and on experiences people shared in a survey; one book summary puts the number at about 1,500 volunteers, though I only saw that in the summary’s commentary. That summary also says research on fun itself is limited. The claim that these three ingredients together are what people mean by fun is a useful hypothesis from a science journalist, not a finding from a trial. I could not confirm that she builds the book on Stuart Brown’s play research, so I am not attributing it to her.

How do you run a fun audit?

Price uses the phrase for “the process of figuring out how much fun you are (or are not) currently having.” In the Freedom interview she describes the steps roughly like this, and I have added my own example for each:

1. Carry a notebook for two weeks. Whenever you notice playfulness, connection or flow, write one line. Note when two or three happen together. A late-night argument over board game rules might score all three.
2. Recall three experiences you would call fun first. Write down what you were doing, who was there, where, and what objects were around.
3. Look for repeats. The people, places and activities that recur are what she calls your fun magnets.
4. Put a magnet on the calendar. She gives the example of playing music with friends.
5. Recheck every few months. Something that was fun can stop being fun.

She also names what gets in the way: an obsession with productivity and the belief that fun needs money or possessions. I would add a column for the dull defaults in your week. A common one is the evening where nobody proposed anything, so everyone watched something.

What does a fun date with friends look like?

Take the audit result and book it. A fun date, as I would run it, has four parts:

• Pick from the magnets, not from the usual. If your three memories all involved cooking something badly with others, do that again, not dinner out.
• Add a little challenge and a little looseness. Flow tends to need a task of the right size; playfulness tends to need permission to be bad at it. A pottery wheel, a new trail, a card game with house rules do both.
• Leave out the phone. Price links lost playtime to phone preoccupation, and a photo for later is a way of leaving the moment.
• Score it afterward. Did you get playfulness, connection and flow? Which one was missing? That feeds the next audit.

Friend groups already know this, which is why plans like a standing weekday slot with the same people outlast one-off invitations. The parkrun crowd at Bushy Park has run a version of it for years on a Saturday at 9am, where the start time does the organizing.

Why do fun plans with friends get cancelled?

My own observation, not a study: fun plans are the easiest ones to drop because nothing is owed to anyone. Saturday at 9 collides with a late Friday, a slow phone, one more snooze, and by 9:20 the group chat has gone quiet. Nobody decided to skip the fun. The start slid.

Price’s advice to put the magnet on the calendar solves the choosing, not the starting. A calendar entry is easy to swipe away, and no friend notices a person who just never shows. If the weak link in your own plan is the first twenty minutes, an external hold on that moment is worth having. DontSnooze is a narrow tool for that: it is an alarm that wants a short video within 30 seconds, and if you do not send one, a random photo from your camera roll goes to your friends. That only addresses getting up. The pottery, hike or card game still has to be good.

There is also a middle option, which is to give the plan to someone else to hold. Half of the group arrives early, or whoever has the car makes the call. Whoever is collecting you at 8:45 is an alarm with a face.

What should you actually do this week?

Do the cheap part first. Tonight, write down the last three things you did for fun, who was there, and whether you felt better or just finished afterward. Tomorrow, text the people who showed up in two of the three.