Playful Connection, Not Passive Leisure, Makes Free Time Restorative

Catherine Price described fun as something more specific than leisure and more demanding than entertainment. Her central claim was that fun is not an activity. It is a feeling produced by three ingredients: playfulness, connection, and flow.

Price arrived at the subject through a problem that did not initially look like a fun problem. After writing How to Break Up with Your Phone, she had succeeded at creating more screen-free time for herself. Then she found herself alone on the couch while her baby daughter napped, with an hour available and no idea what she wanted to do with it. The phone had been removed; a deeper question remained.

That moment exposed a gap that productivity can hide. Reclaiming time is not the same as knowing what makes life feel worth living. Price had asked readers of her phone book a question she repeated here: what is something you say you want to do but supposedly do not have time for? Her own answer was guitar. She had played piano, had an old guitar bought with money from her grandmother, and signed up for a class.

The class produced what she described as an energetic, joyful feeling that had become unfamiliar in early parenthood. The word she eventually landed on was simple: fun. But the simplicity of the word was part of the problem. When Price looked for research on fun, she said one of the first PubMed results was an article titled “putting the fun in fungi,” about toenail fungus. The dictionary definition also did not match the experience she was trying to describe.

Price’s definition, developed after collecting hundreds of accounts from people around the world, treats fun as a state rather than a category of activity. Playfulness, in her account, does not require games. It means a lighthearted attitude: letting down one’s guard, quieting the inner critic, not taking oneself too seriously. She called this the hardest ingredient for adults, especially high-performing adults, to grasp.

Connection is the feeling of a special shared experience, usually with another person and occasionally, she said, with a dog. This pattern held even among self-described introverts; people would say they were introverts, then describe their most fun moments as involving other people. Flow is the state of active absorption in which time drops away — in a conversation, a piece of music, a sport, or another activity that engages attention completely.

The distinction between active absorption and passive time loss is crucial. Price said binge-watching Netflix can make a person lose track of time, but she called that “junk flow.” True flow requires active engagement and presence. It also cannot survive distraction.

Laurie Santos framed the issue for the Aspen audience as one especially relevant to people with optimized calendars and long to-do lists. The pursuit of success can quietly push aside the parts of life that make it feel alive. The problem is not that adults reject fun in principle. It is that they stop remembering what reliably produces it.

Price also raised, prompted by another session on artificial intelligence and loneliness, whether one can have fun with AI. Her own answer was skeptical. Because her definition depends on embodied connection and active presence, she said she did not think AI could fully provide it.

Elizabeth Dunn approached the question through a different data set: not “what is fun?” but “what makes a day especially good?” She described research using tens of thousands of Americans who reported whether a given day was better than an average Friday and also reported how they spent every minute of that day.

Socializing emerged as one of the most important ingredients. According to Dunn, about one to two hours of socializing was enough to substantially raise and then largely max out the probability of having an especially good day. More socializing did not hurt, but the general effect plateaued.

Time with friends was the exception. Dunn compared it to chocolate chips in a cookie: adding more kept making things better.

The more counterintuitive finding was about relaxation and leisure. Dunn said time spent relaxing and engaging in leisure was associated with a lower probability of having an especially good day. She initially thought her graduate student had analyzed the data incorrectly. The result made more sense when they looked at what people were doing during leisure and relaxation: about 70 percent of that time, she said, involved watching Netflix or television.

That kind of passive leisure lined up with Price’s “junk flow” distinction. It consumed time without producing the engagement, connection, or aliveness associated with a good day. Sports and exercise, by contrast, raised the likelihood of having an especially good day. The practical implication Dunn offered was not ascetic: socialize, and spend some leisure time in a more active form.

Work was more nuanced than the usual happiness-research shorthand suggests. Dunn said work often gets a bad reputation in happiness studies because people are not, on average, happiest at work. But in this analysis, people could work up to six hours a day without a detrimental effect on the probability of having an especially good day. Once work exceeded six hours, the probability “plummeted.” Her interpretation was not that work is inherently bad, but that too much work crowds out the time that could otherwise be used for fun.

The finding makes the session’s central distinction more concrete. Fun is not simply what happens after work ends. A life organized around long workdays followed by passive collapse may produce free time without producing playful, connected flow.

Fun is often treated as frivolous because people associate it with childhood or indulgence. Price’s counterclaim was that fun’s apparent lightness is part of its usefulness. It changes mood and energy quickly, and those effects matter in adult life.

She asked people to think of a memory that stood out as really fun, noting that adults should not be alarmed if it takes a moment. Even recalling and sharing such a memory, she said, can shift mood and energy. Because there is little direct research on “fun” as such, Price built her case through research on the three components she identified: playfulness, connection, and flow.

The first benefit she emphasized was energy. Adult life is exhausting; to-do lists do not end. If an experience boosts mood and gives energy, it can make someone more available to partners, children, colleagues, and civic problems. Fun, in this account, is not opposed to seriousness. It can be a source of the stamina seriousness requires.

The second benefit was social. Price argued that fun can temporarily soften categories that otherwise divide people. Dancing at a wedding with someone’s unfamiliar relative, laughing with someone one would not otherwise interact with, or sharing a playful moment can make political party, race, nationality, or religion less salient. The other person is encountered more directly as a person. Price connected this to problem-solving in a polarized world: playful connected flow can make cooperation more plausible.

The third benefit was an antidote to loneliness. Price noted that loneliness and isolation are physically harmful, probably in part because they raise cortisol, a major stress hormone. Moments of fun are, in her description, moments of being relaxed, open, and socially connected. They counter the isolated, defended state that loneliness creates.

Santos put the argument against the Aspen setting itself: a festival filled with sessions on geopolitical threats, artificial intelligence, universities, and social trust. Why spend scarce attention on fun? Price’s answer was that the “big” issues are not solved by people who have drained themselves of the energy and connection needed to act. Fun is not a substitute for politics, science, or institutions. It is one of the ways people stay capable of participating in them.

Dunn defined time affluence as having enough time to do the things that are important to you. She emphasized that material affluence and time affluence often move in opposite directions: as people become wealthier, they can become less time affluent. Material affluence matters for happiness, she said, but time affluence matters too.

Her research tries to capture how people navigate the trade-off between time and money. In one study, students about to graduate from the University of British Columbia were asked whether they prioritized time or money. The researchers followed them for a couple of years after graduation. Students who prioritized time over money during their final year ended up happier later.

Dunn said the students who prioritized time were more likely to pursue graduate school, a career, or a job they found inherently enjoyable and fun. Her point was that creating time for oneself can open a pathway toward choices that are more closely tied to enjoyment and happiness.

Price translated that into a practical exercise: identify “fun magnets.” These are the people, activities, and settings that attract the feeling of fun for a particular person. The list is personal. One person’s fun magnet may be another person’s obligation. Santos joked that not everyone may like an inflatable monkey or a sing-along, even though she and Price clearly do.

The point of naming fun magnets is not to guarantee maximum fun every time. A dinner with the same friend may produce uproarious laughter one week and feel flat the next. But identifying the people, activities, and places that tend to produce playful connected flow gives a person better odds than simply continuing through an eight-, ten-, or twelve-hour to-do list.

Some fun needs space carved out in advance. Other fun appears in small opportunities already inside ordinary life: making a joke with a colleague, putting down a phone while speaking with someone serving coffee, or greeting the person delivering the mail. These are not replacements for deeper relationships or larger blocks of time, but Price argued that the small moments add up.

The practical tension is that fun becomes more likely when treated seriously enough to plan for, but too much optimization can kill the playfulness that makes it fun. The answer offered was not to schedule every delight, but to know one’s likely sources of aliveness and protect enough time and attention for them.

Price’s claim that “distraction is kryptonite to fun” follows directly from her definition. If fun requires flow, and flow requires total engagement, then anything that pulls attention away from the present situation undermines it. She used the ordinary example of dinner: people are laughing, someone receives a text and reaches for the phone, and the moment breaks.

The phone does not have to dominate the evening to change the experience. Dunn described a study in which researchers took over a table at a local restaurant for about six months. Each night, a different group of friends or family members came in for dinner on the researchers’ tab. By coin flip, participants were assigned either to keep their phones out and available or to put them away. The instruction was embedded casually among other housekeeping details so participants would not focus on phone use as the subject of the study.

People with phones out felt significantly more distracted. They were not using the phones constantly; this was not the stereotypical image of teenagers staring silently at screens. But the availability was enough to matter. At the end of the meal, groups with phones out rated the experience of dining with friends and family as less enjoyable than groups told to put phones away.

They also reported being more bored. Dunn connected this to Price’s flow framework: when people slip out of the conversational moment, the moment itself feels less interesting.

The researchers also videotaped the meals. When they later coded the videos, they saw that phone use was contagious. When one person used a phone, others followed. Dunn drew a non-scolding practical conclusion: putting away one’s own phone at dinner can have ripple effects, making the whole experience more enjoyable for others as well.

Price resisted a simplistic anti-technology frame. A phone can be a tool; one might use it to plan the dinner by texting friends. Her argument was about relationship and attention. Many of the most time-consuming apps are designed to steal attention, and attention is the resource that makes experience real. If two people are physically together but one is absorbed in a phone, they are not fully together.

Her higher-level question was: what do you want to pay attention to? If people do not decide, she said, a company will decide for them.

To make that question operational, Price offered a three-part technique she calls WWW: What for, why now, what else. She suggested putting a rubber band or hair tie around the phone for a few days, simply to interrupt automatic pickup. The first question, “what for,” asks whether there is a specific purpose. The second, “why now,” asks what in the moment triggered the reach — urgency, boredom, loneliness, the desire for distraction, or the social cue of someone else picking up a phone. The third, “what else,” asks what could meet that underlying need better.

If the need is connection, one might call a friend rather than scroll social media. If the need is a break from work, one might take a walk rather than read the news. One might also choose to do nothing: stare at a wall, look out an Uber window at a cloud, and tolerate the driver wondering whether everything is all right.

Price did not say the answer can never be “look at the phone.” The aim is choice rather than default.

Santos said she teaches the WWW technique in her Yale happiness class and that students particularly value the “what else” question because it makes opportunity cost visible. The thing displaced by the phone may be work, rest, connection, or fun. The point is to notice the displacement while it is still possible to choose differently.

The most counterintuitive application came from Dunn’s recent work on happiness and carbon. Santos framed the barrier as moral: with wars, political breakdown, climate change, and other crises, people can feel that they are not supposed to have fun. Dunn’s answer was that hard problems may be exactly where joy and fun are most needed.

Any social movement needs energy, Dunn said, and the climate movement, in her view, has been starved of joy. People in a good mood tend to be better at thinking of creative, novel solutions, she argued. More practically, people are more likely to stick with changes they enjoy than changes framed only as sacrifice.

Her vacation example made the point concrete. As a happiness researcher, Dunn said, she wants people to have great vacations. But flying is carbon-intensive. The question is how to preserve the pleasure of vacation while reducing emissions.

Dunn described a Dutch researcher who surveyed tourists at many kinds of attractions, trying to identify which activities produced the greatest joy. In Dunn’s telling, the first look at the data suggested that the specific attraction mattered less than expected: eating, shopping, visiting a historical monument, and going to a museum all seemed to put tourists in a good mood. The major exception was a day spent mostly on travel, which she said “sucked out the joy of tourism.”

Dunn’s conclusion was that some vacations could be taken closer to home, including as a “hometown tourist.” She noted that people rarely visit the attractions that draw tourists to their own region. The most likely times they do so are when visitors come from out of town or when they themselves are about to move away. Because these attractions are always available, residents do not use them.

This was not a demand never to fly or never to go to Aspen. Dunn proposed thinking about “return on emissions”: when one does spend carbon, is the experience producing enough joy and connection to justify it? She said she used to fly in and out quickly for talks. Now she asks how long she can stay, enjoy the experience, meet people, and “suck the most joy out of every pound of carbon” burned.

She then applied the joy lens to voting. Dunn said happier people are more likely to vote, and that life satisfaction is as strong a predictor of voting as education. She also said field experiments show phone banking is less effective than hosting a party near a polling place. In her framing, joy and social energy are not decorative. They can be part of how civic participation becomes more effective and more sustainable for the people doing it.

Price gave an example from Philadelphia: a get-out-the-vote party by Daybreaker, the organization known for early morning sober dance parties. The event near City Hall featured a loud DJ, pole dancers, and Bill Nye the Science Guy talking about the Constitution. People danced, saw pole dancers taking pictures with Bill Nye, and then marched to City Hall to register to vote.

The claim was not that every crisis can be solved by parties. It was that movements built only on dread, duty, and sacrifice may exhaust the very people they need. If fun supplies energy, connection, and creativity, then designing joyful forms of action can be a practical strategy.

Dunn’s research on money and happiness led to a narrow but useful prescription: using money to buy time, especially by buying one’s way out of dreaded tasks, is associated with greater happiness. But she acknowledged a common objection. If a person buys time, that time can simply be absorbed into the next item on the to-do list. Instead of completing ten tasks, the person completes eleven.

Dunn said she has not demonstrated the next step scientifically but uses it in her own life: explicitly link the purchased time to something fun. If there is an unpleasant Saturday task that can be outsourced once a month, decide in advance what enjoyable thing will occupy that freed time. The linkage is the important part.

Santos gave a food example. When she orders takeout on an exhausted day, she puts a “timestamp” on it. If cooking pad thai herself would have taken ninety minutes or two hours, she asks what she will do with that time. She would have bought the takeout anyway; the shift is noticing the time created and using it more wisely.

Price connected this back to fun magnets. If someone knows which activities, people, or settings reliably attract fun, then the purchased time can be routed toward those.

But Price pushed back against the idea that fun requires large amounts of time or money. One of her favorite stories from her research involved a man sitting on a park bench with his nephew, trying to catch leaves as they fell from a tree. It was free, brief, and vivid. Price used it as a literal illustration of a line she likes: opportunities for fun are floating around in the air all the time; people have to reach out and grab them.

Small blocks can matter. Price described a 30-second dance party timer in her house that can lift the mood or break tension with her daughter. Santos adapted the idea during work-from-home days by using a few minutes between Zoom meetings to play a short Mötley Crüe song on Guitar Hero. The alternative, she said, would likely have been checking a trivial email or scrolling Facebook or Instagram.

The point was not the particular tool or song. It was that very small blocks of time can be repurposed from low-value default behavior to something that produces energy.

Connection was not presented only as an aspiration or a cure for loneliness in the abstract. It appeared as a set of concrete practices: meals without phones, talking to strangers, recurring classes with friends, shared delights, civic parties, and small moments of play with family.

Price’s simplest advice was to put down phones and talk to someone. She also described a practice she learned from the poet Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights: notice and share delights. Notice something in the environment or in an interaction that delights you. Put a finger in the air and say “delight” out loud.

Price said the practice draws on evidence for noticing and naming positive things, saying them aloud, accompanying them with a physical gesture, and sharing them with other people as ways to boost mood. The practice can be individual or shared. Her family has a jar of delights on the kitchen table, where they drop written delights. She also suggested creating delight for other people; her own example was buying inexpensive portable disco balls and sending them to friends with no explanation.

Dunn offered one planned strategy and one serendipitous strategy. The planned version was calendaring fun. She said she has a very busy friend she was not seeing, so they committed to a weekly fitness class together. The class creates a recurring hour with one of her favorite people.

The serendipitous version was talking to strangers. Dunn said her research shows that even a brief chat with someone one does not know lifts both people’s moods. People underestimate others’ interest in talking to them. She called this part of the “secret sauce” of Aspen Ideas: people speak to one another there in a way they often do not elsewhere. Her invitation was to practice it there and take it home.

An audience question about anxiety, OCD, and predisposition to fun clarified that the right kind of fun has to be discovered, not inherited. Santos acknowledged that people differ in their ease with connection, and that introversion and extroversion matter. But she emphasized research suggesting people often misestimate how social connection will feel. A self-described introvert may still discover that many of their most fun moments involve other people.

Price added that anxiety can be a barrier because playfulness requires letting down one’s guard. If someone is constantly worried about judgment or other people’s reactions, playful connected flow becomes harder. Her recommendation was behavioral: try things, ask what the worst outcome would be, and let small successes build confidence.

Dunn emphasized that a person may simply not have found the right kind of fun yet. Santos and Price may love sing-alongs; Dunn said she was kicked out of chorus in seventh grade for throwing other kids off tune, so a sing-along is anxiety-provoking for her. The point is not to conform to socially approved versions of fun — parties, amusement parks, clowns, group singing — but to find one’s own.

Price was explicit: “Don’t let other people tell you what your fun is.”

Santos returned to the value of what Price calls a fun audit, while acknowledging that the phrase sounds painfully unfun. The exercise is to analyze recent or memorable moments of “real, real fun”: who was there, what was happening, what patterns appear. Santos said that when she first did this with Price, she realized that many of her fun memories involved music or dancing, even though she had not thought of herself as musical. The audit revealed something she could build into her life more deliberately.

A question from a choreographer turned the discussion toward arts, physical activity, and public education. Price argued that schools underestimate fun’s role in learning, whether through music, art, or a teacher who makes students laugh. She asked people to think of their favorite teacher and suggested that they probably had fun in that class.

Her reasoning followed the same definition: when people are having fun, they are open, attentive, present, and focused. That is a good state for learning. She criticized an excessive focus on test scores and the removal of opportunities for children to socialize. She also praised the movement toward phone-free schools, especially bell-to-bell policies in which students do not have devices during lunch or recess. Those are the moments, she said, when children joke with friends, laugh, and interact. Teachers and administrators tell her the lunchroom and hallways are louder now because students are no longer silently staring at phones.

Santos added a warning about turning playful activities into work. Schools and parents can take the very things children love — science, art, music, sports — and convert them into performance, grades, or achievement. The danger is not only for children. Adults do it too. But for children, it can transform a source of play into a source of pressure.

Dunn described an attempt to preserve playfulness in her own University of British Columbia classes. She still has to grade some work, but she uses in-class team competitions and avoids making all of them directly about grades. When competitions are for grades, she said, students get a “mean, hungry look,” and she has to deal with complaints. So she created “psychology gold,” a classroom currency students can win during activities. At the end of the semester, they use it in an auction.

Some prizes are supplied by Dunn, including donations to charity or lunch with her. But she said the magic comes when students bring prizes: a weird cactus, condoms, sourdough bread, and other objects. The gold motivates participation without making the experience primarily about grades. Dunn framed it as a model for “psychology gold opportunities” elsewhere in life: a bit of structure or reward that gets people moving without turning play into extrinsic performance.