Fun and Fulfilling

What makes you happy?

Yesterday, I got into the weeds with you about equity and efficiency, and how they’re often conflated into one big ball of what we describe as “good” or “bad.” There’s something similar going on with happiness, centered around the concepts of fun and fulfilling.

Back to that opening question: what makes you happy? Go ahead and answer however you’d like, unless that OCD urge to finish every time before commenting is more powerful than your urge to play this game (I get it!):

People often talk about wanting to be happy one day. This usually falls into the fulfilling category of happiness. This probably means you’re worry-free on a day-to-day basis, for starters—it’s pretty difficult to be fulfilled if you’re stressed all the time.

You’re probably already familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. You’ll sometimes hear it called Maslow’s Pyramid, and it has become a staple of psychology in the 21st century as more and more people have climbed up the ladder of needs and into the global middle class.

This is an incredibly useful framework for understanding the wider world of human needs. If your body is in distress or you don’t have physical safety, it is remarkably difficult to allocate any resources to anything other than those two things.

Fun can even show up at the base of the pyramid, but fulfillment almost always means you’re closer to the top. Your basic needs have been met.

The pyramid gets a little fuzzy sometimes, so I wanted a framework that’s much easier to remember or to conjure up in your mind, so hopefully it’s a useful simplification. Is it fun or is it fulfilling? You can probably have fun before you climb pretty high up the pyramid, but it’s going to be tough to find fulfillment.

Now, do you remember being happy as a kid? I remember experiencing a lot of the usual things kids say make them happy. I played in the pool as much as I could, and that made me incredibly happy. Pizza, likewise, could always warm my hedonistic heart any time, and I really appreciated Daffy Duck.

Collectively, these things were incredibly fun in the moment, but they certainly didn’t make it all the way up to the top of the pyramid.

By contrast, salvaging my first comic book from the trash provided me with a mixture of fun and fulfillment. Collecting comic books became much more than coveted trinkets I owned, but instead much more like bond certificates that might appreciate over time.

Don’t judge me.

I’ve written a lot about these fulfilling moments in my life. That’s because, in the long run, fulfillment is everything, and fun fades. Even still, some of those fun moments can turn into fulfilling memories if you can hang onto them for a while. My first experience with the Beatles was certainly fun, but the transformation in my life that exposure enabled was fulfilling.

Winning $100 for delivering newspapers (really, for collecting money) was certainly both fun and fulfilling, and today I recognize the importance of that gesture from the world to me. The message I got was that I could work for myself and earn a decent income, even if the reward was a one-off.

Then, there’s deep fulfillment, like when you add a new family member into your life and grow to love them. Firmly embedded in this category has been adopting Dinkles:

Dink-Dink has a nice ring to it, but also lends itself to cutesy permutations. One of these nicknames I’ve settled on is Dinkles, and so I like to post pictures of her with the non-working hashtag #dailydinkles nearly every day from my Notes.

Let’s turn back to my original question now: what makes you happy? Does it help to split it into these simple categories, or is it too simple?

Has your fun ever turned into fulfillment?