{"id":818,"date":"2011-12-30T00:58:30","date_gmt":"2011-12-30T05:58:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bennesvig.apps-1and1.com\/?p=818"},"modified":"2011-12-30T00:58:30","modified_gmt":"2011-12-30T05:58:30","slug":"fun-vs-happiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennesvig.com\/fun-vs-happiness\/","title":{"rendered":"Fun vs. Happiness"},"content":{"rendered":"
Writing a book isn’t fun.<\/p>\n
Choosing to eat healthy isn’t fun.<\/p>\n
Learning an instrument isn’t fun.<\/p>\n
Quitting a job you don’t care about with nothing lined up isn’t fun.<\/p>\n
Learning a new language isn’t fun.<\/p>\n
Pregnancy isn’t fun.<\/p>\n
The difference between Fun and\u00a0Happiness\u00a0isn’t semantics. Knowing the difference shapes your life.<\/p>\n
What is Fun?<\/strong><\/p>\n Fun is temporary. It’s the emotions you feel during<\/em> an act. College kids are really good at having fun on the weekend. Fun doesn’t last. Fun is eating a cupcake for dinner. You derive pleasure from the act, but 20 minutes later you’re not satisfied.<\/p>\n What is Happiness?<\/strong><\/p>\n The emotions felt after<\/em> an act. Knowing how to play the guitar brings me happiness. Having written a book makes me happy. Being able to say that I memorized and recited the entire I Have a Dream speech from Martin Luther King Jr. makes me happy. Being able to say I’ve done stand-up comedy and not bombed.<\/p>\n Every example above involved a miserable process. Nothing about the process was fun. Writing a book is\u00a0grueling. Writing jokes and preparing to tell them for the first time to a group of people who don’t know you is terrifying. Learning an instrument is frustrating. I can’t blame people for quitting. I quit piano as a kid, much to my later regret. Memorizing the I Have a Dream speech took 4 almost sleepless nights of audibly repeating the speech to myself for hours at a time. An awful experience, but it raised my grade in my American History high school class from a B to an A.<\/p>\n