“What do you do for fun?”
This question makes me break out in a cold sweat every single time someone asks it, which is more often than you’d think. Usually, it comes up at social gatherings when people are making small talk, and I’m standing there with a drink in my hand, trying to come up with an answer that won’t make me sound like a complete weirdo.
The truth is, I’m not entirely sure I know what “fun” means anymore.
Don’t get me wrong—I enjoy things. I get satisfaction from successfully canning a batch of tomatoes. I feel genuine contentment when I’m working in the garden at sunset. I experience real joy when I watch my kids master a new skill or when I finally nail a recipe I’ve been tweaking for months.
But I’m not sure any of those things qualify as “fun” in the way most people use the word.
When people ask about fun, they usually want to hear about hobbies that exist purely for entertainment. They want to know about the activities you do to relax, to escape, to turn off your brain and just enjoy yourself without any productive purpose.
And honestly? I don’t really have any of those.
This realization hit me hard a few weeks ago when a friend was talking about her weekend plans. She was going to a wine tasting, then meeting up with friends for trivia night, then maybe catching a movie if she felt like it. She asked what I was doing for fun that weekend.
I told her I was planning to reorganize our tool shed and test some new sourdough variations.
The look she gave me was a mixture of pity and confusion.
“No, I mean for FUN,” she said. “What do you do when you’re not working?”
That’s when I realized the problem: I don’t really distinguish between work and not-work the way most people do.
The activities that bring me the most satisfaction—cooking from scratch, tending the garden, learning new homesteading skills, building things with my hands—are technically “work” in that they produce useful results. But they’re also the things I choose to do with my free time because I genuinely enjoy them.
I’m not sure where work ends and fun begins, and I’m starting to think that might actually be a good thing.
Here’s what I’ve figured out about myself: I get my dopamine hits from accomplishment, not from entertainment. I feel most energized when I’m creating something, fixing something, or learning something new. I feel most relaxed when I’m engaged in activities that use my hands and produce tangible results.
Passive entertainment actually makes me feel restless and unsatisfied.
I’m just not wired for conventional fun, and I’ve finally stopped apologizing for it.
This might make me sound like a joyless workaholic, but I don’t think that’s accurate either. I experience plenty of joy—it just comes from different sources than most people expect.
These might not be conventional sources of fun, but they bring me more genuine happiness than any entertainment activity ever has.
I think part of this comes from growing up in a culture that treats work and leisure as completely separate categories. We’re taught that work is something you endure to pay for the fun stuff, and fun is something that exists purely for pleasure without any productive purpose.
But that division has never made sense to me.
Some of my happiest memories involve what most people would consider work: helping my grandmother in her garden, learning to cook with my mom, building projects with my dad. These activities were simultaneously useful and enjoyable, productive and pleasurable.
Maybe the problem isn’t that I don’t know how to have fun—maybe the problem is how we define fun in the first place.
I suspect I’m not alone in this. I bet there are lots of people out there who get more satisfaction from creating things than from consuming them, who feel more energized by learning than by being entertained, who find more joy in useful activities than in purely recreational ones.
But we don’t talk about this because it doesn’t fit the cultural narrative about fun and leisure.
We’re supposed to want to relax, to turn off our brains, to escape from responsibility. We’re supposed to seek entertainment and pleasure without any productive purpose. If you don’t want those things, if you actually prefer activities that challenge you and produce useful results, you’re somehow weird or wrong.
I’m done feeling apologetic about my version of fun.
So the next time someone asks me what I do for fun, I’m going to tell them the truth: I do exactly what I want to do, which happens to be things that most people consider work.
My fun produces tomatoes and bread and comfortable living spaces, and I think that’s actually pretty great.
Maybe fun doesn’t have to be separate from purpose.
Maybe the goal isn’t to escape from your life through entertainment, but to create a life you don’t want to escape from.
I’m not suggesting that everyone should abandon conventional forms of entertainment. If movies and trivia nights and wine tastings bring you genuine joy, that’s wonderful. We all need to find happiness wherever we can get it.
But I am suggesting that there’s more than one way to have fun, and some of us are just built differently.
Some of us find our bliss in activities that happen to be productive. Some of us get our thrills from mastering new skills rather than consuming new entertainment.
And that’s not something to apologize for—it’s something to celebrate.
So here’s to all the fellow “fun haters” out there who get their kicks from useful activities. Here’s to finding joy in work, satisfaction in creation, and happiness in the intersection of pleasure and purpose.
Here’s to on our own terms.
Having my own weird version of fun,
-Nichole
P.S. For the record, I do occasionally engage in purely recreational activities. I like reading books, taking walks, and having long conversations with people I love. But even those activities feel different from the passive entertainment that most people seem to crave. I guess I just like my fun to engage my brain as well as my emotions.
