“Tuesday 8.30: Board meeting.” When estate agent Sally Shaw enters this appointment in her calendar, it means boogie boarding at Muizenberg in Cape Town with friends, not a meeting with suits. The “boogie broads”, mostly professional women in their silvery-blonde years, have been catching waves every week since February, even during storm warnings and when snow blanketed the nearby mountains.
Fun looks different for everybody but “true fun” combines playfulness, being connected, and immersed in the moment, says US science author Catherine Price. It is vital to wellbeing.
FUN FOR HEALTH
“We often think of fun, if we think of it at all, as a nice-to-have, at the bottom of our priority list, but it is important to our mental and physical health. Fun boosts resilience, it is energising and helps us to be more productive and creative,” Price says in an interview from Philadelphia, in the US, ahead of the launch of her new book: The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again.
Fun then is not frivolous or a selfish indulgence but essential to health and should be high on our agenda, after meeting basic needs, not least for overstretched adults and parents.
Nursing executive Lindiwe Marepula, from Cape Town, is someone who embodies the spirit of fun and makes time for it, despite the demands of work during waves of Covid.
“I love people, I like music and I like being outdoors,” she says.
When a friend called her recently on a Sunday, to join him at a restaurant where a band was playing, she was at the gym.
Within an hour Marepula bounced in, glamorous in a red jumpsuit with a matching mask, and she stayed on making new friends long after he left. The next Sunday she went on her own to a house music festival in Paarl, where she danced and explored the wine estate on a bicycle.
FREEING UP TIME FOR FUN
During the pandemic, many South Africans have been struggling to stay afloat and feel they barely get to rest. But spending less time on smartphones and what Price describes as “fake fun” — like scrolling, hypnotised, through social media or binge-watching a series — would free up time for them to find true fun.
What have you always wanted to do that you felt you never have time for?
— US science author Catherine Price
Price discovered this for herself after she wrote a bestseller called How to Break Up with Your Phone. One day while her baby was sleeping and she was taking a 24-hour break from digital devices — a weekly practice she and her husband try to follow — she found she had an hour free and couldn’t think of anything she wanted to do.
That triggered an existential crisis about what she was doing with her life, and she asked herself a question she now asks others: “What have you always wanted to do that you felt you never have time for?”
Price immediately signed up to learn guitar and after her first group class felt exuberant, a feeling that went beyond the joy of learning a new skill and lasted through the day.
BUT WHAT IS FUN? ENTER THE FUN SQUAD
That’s when she got motivated to find out why it felt so good and recruited more than 1,000 “fun squad” volunteers globally (including in SA and Nigeria) to help her define what fun was and what made it invigorating.
She asked them to describe three or four memories that stood out for them as “so much fun” and then analysed thousands of anecdotes for elements they shared.
When she distilled the results, Price came up with fun as the “confluence of playful, connected flow”.
Price also identified the concepts of “fun magnets and fun factors” to help individuals to work out what fun means to them and how to attract more of it — along with greater happiness.
FINDING FUN
“People can start by doing a fun audit to figure out how much fun they are having, or if they are not having fun — as there has not been as much [during the pandemic] — then how to have more. The definition of fun is universal, but everyone has different ways to generate it.
“If you look back at three experiences that were truly fun — who you were with, what you were doing and where you were — this will help you identify what I call ‘fun magnets’: the people, activities and settings that are likely to produce fun for you.
“You cannot plan ‘to have fun’, but you can plan these activities with people who you have fun with,” she says. Fun factors are elements within the experiences, for example, music.
In Price’s case, playing guitar with her friends made them so happy they kept playing throughout Covid winter lockdowns, in a parking lot at a safe distance apart.
They use “hot hands” warmers to keep their fingers from freezing, a heat lamp and huddle in bulky jackets as the temperatures plummet to just above zero.
The day of our interview, Price had just got a new batch of “hot hands” and a friend was making mulled wine to warm them up during the next session, she said.
FUN & CONNECTEDNESS
The boogie broads have the same enthusiasm for the surf and chilling over coffee afterwards — this week decked out in tinsel crowns.
Photographer Nicky Elliott has been the common link in the bunch of women, in their 50s or older, who are now all friends.
It may be something about the time of our life, getting closer a second childhood,
— Boogie broad Nicky Elliott
“We are just having fun and getting swept along. It may be something about the time of our life, getting closer a second childhood,” Elliott says of their playful spirit.
“There is a sense of belonging, and sometimes people are having a really hard time. Being able to have a good cry with your mates over a cup of coffee and laughing makes a difference. There is no judgment.”
For 33 years designer Joanna Onwood was terrified of the sea, but boogie broads has helped her get over that. They are kind and once rescued a giant stranded jellyfish with their boards and regularly remove plastic from the sea.
FUN TO COUNTER COVID-19 STRESS
Counselling psychologist Despina Learmonth urges her clients who are feeling stressed to make time for real fun, to stave off the more harmful alternatives.
“I’m seeing a lot of people who are feeling burdened and anxious, and turning to alcohol and drugs to feel disinhibited and deal with the stress, or turning to food and overeating for sensual pleasure,” says Learmonth, who practises in Cape Town.
“A lot of them relied on socialising for fun and there has not been as much of that. I encourage them to find something they enjoy and spend time on it, even if it is just five or 10 minutes in a day, like dancing to a song in the living room.
“Quality is more important than quantity to having fun,” she says, nevertheless urging people to try free up at least 45 minutes once a week.
Mindfulness — being fully present and paying attention to what you are doing — and creativity help people to reconnect with themselves and can enhance intimacy, she says.
FUN & NO PHONES
Price had two bracelets on during our Zoom interview — one with the words “pay attention” and the other “delights” — as reminders to appreciate the people and world around us.
Smartphones and screens invariably do the opposite, despite their value. As an always-on distraction, they disrupt attention, conversations and activities and are “kryptonite to fun”, in Price’s experience.
Social media has the power to connect, yet it pushes people to perform and curate their lives in a way that can leave others feeling left out.
NEW PURSUITS & FUN
True fun, on the other hand, can look absurd or awkward; Price once overturned while rowing in foul weather. Learning to row in a river with turtles was one of her fun pursuits and, even though she got cold and wet, she remembers that day as a special experience.
“Novelty is a powerful source of fun and trying or doing something new is often fun,” she says.
Dillon Davie is keen to try new challenges and has the commitment to make them happen. A musician and music teacher, Davie started a Renaissance and Baroque music ensemble with friends, and they enjoy performing together.
The ensemble is a passion project, says Davie, who also joined a Jewish liturgical choir, which sang at a festival in Berlin. “As a teenager I started to play music. Music triggers something in my brain and feeds endorphins,” he says.
During Covid restrictions, he turned to another pastime, chess. “Last year when we were stuck in lockdown, I started to play online to stave off the pandemic blues,” says Davie, who now plays multiple games online.
“I only have to play one move per game per day and I enjoy it,” he says.
When lockdown eased up, he went to the local chess club in Robindale, Johannesburg, and found a great group of people to play with in real life.
Marepula also found the thrill of trying something new widened her social circle. She saw a Jeep advert one day and decided she wanted to try to master a 4X4 course. Now she is one of two women drivers and the only black member of the Western Cape Jeep Club of SA and enjoys day or weekend outings doing 4x4 trails on mud and rocks, dunes and snow.
Her daughter, a civil engineer specialising in the environment, learnt from her that nothing is off-limits. “We are so close that everybody expected me to feel lonely when she left for a job in Centurion, but I don’t,” says Marepula.
ANTIDOTE TO PANDEMIC
As work-home-school boundaries collapsed during the pandemic and work became 24/7, fatigue has taken a heavy toll. Even happiness guru professor Laurie Santos, a Yale University neuroscientist, found she was not exempt and to get back on track signed up for “fun-tervention” with Price.
An unlikely candidate for surf lessons, Santos surprised herself by trying and enjoying the experience, and one day she got Price out of her comfort zone to sing karaoke with her. As a fun expert, Price says that she “had to say yes” and the time flew by.
“We were friendly before but after those three hours of belting out songs, we were friends,” she says, underlining how fun and laughter bring people together.
“Fun brings out our shared humanity, which is important in this era of polarisation. We see the best sides of people,” she says.
“Notice delight. Follow your curiosity and experiment with new interests, hobbies, and passions. Make space for activities that you enjoy. Spend time with people who make you feel alive. Commit to doing something every day for fun, as if doing so were urgent and essential — because it is,” she writes in her book.
“Fun isn’t just a result of human thriving; it is a cause.”
A New Year’s resolution for a world battered by the pandemic could be to have more fun.
• 'The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again' (Penguin) will be available in SA in January
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