“I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
“Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays” - Friedrich Schiller
As we are on the tail end of the holiday party season and getting towards New Year’s Eve, it is worth a moment to consider how to deal with the determinedly unfun, a tribe that has risen up in force amongst us of late. I think we’ve gotten on a bit of a wrong track culturally, I think the unfun have escorted us here, and I think we can simply change trains.
This is Jack Nicholson partying in Miami in 1998.
And here is a fun playlist that explores what he might have been listening to.
This is Audrey Hepburn at a party in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
And this is a moment from Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball in 1966, said to be one of the best parties of its time.
Which is all just to remind us that people have traditionally enjoyed having fun in the company of others. They like to dress up. Sometimes they like to dance and joke around.
Life can’t be all board meetings and formality, after all.
Parties, aesthetics and glamor give us a window into every era because they are where people are really trying and everything is heightened. Parties are an important venue where people define themselves: the Venetians by their masked balls, the Romans in their triumphs.
Parties are not the whole of fun but they can be taken as a synecdoche of fun.
The Importance of Fun
Freud said people aspire to sex; Jung said power; Aristotle, contentment; Schiller said that “Man is never so authentically himself than when at play.”
I say Schiller is closest – people aspire to something like triumph. And I will call it Fun.
Fun as I think of it is much more than parties. I would propose to use the word to take in all flavors of triumph. I would include in the spirit of fun not only the explicitly celebratory but also things that are creative, unpredictable, stylish, aesthetic, ambitious, sexy, larger than life, provocative and positive. In this sense, all versions of fun are desirable, but they can look very different, ranging from building a rocket ship, to sliding into third base, to writing a great play, to all forms of frivolity. These are all expressions of moments that are “larger than life.” They are times when we at least aspire to and perhaps even briefly achieve what Fitzgerald called “some sort of epic grandeur.” In most cases, genuine fun requires a momentary spark of, at least minor, genius. And it should be acknowledged that there is something tragic about fun: like us, it doesn’t last. Fun is, perhaps, our momentary defiance of mortality.
What’s not fun? Whining, mediocrity, boredom, the quotidian drudge, selfishness, focusing on the negative, having a small and circumscribed vision, the mean. The un fun are holding our culture back.
The Rise of the Un Fun
Not all people like fun.
Some people are anti-fun.
Once I was chatting with a corporate media trainer I had run into, who said “why do you often make jokes?”
I said, “People like jokes. Everyone likes jokes.”
She said, “Not everyone likes jokes. Some people don’t like jokes.”
Too true, Madame. As it happens. Too true.
Being anti-fun, being peevish and scolding, has become a regrettable sort of characteristic American personality of late, it has become its own sort of career ladder. I’m thinking of people who complain in public forums about jokes, about “problematizers of the canon,” about Foucaultian grifters in general, and everyone who makes it their business — not to call out serious issues, which of course is important — but to sit on the sidelines of life and try to turn annoyances into cash by calling foot faults.
Whatever its no doubt sympathetic roots, “cancel culture” has declined into a national tattle-tale frenzy trading in truly minor offenses that now get promoted into major newspaper stories. Example: making a federal case of someone mispronouncing your name.
One can only hope, surely, that, with this last, our post-Christian but still subconsciously Christian society’s progress toward the apotheosis of the victim must have reached its maximally absurd, Genet-esque, climax. One might hope but, sadly, one might hope in vain.
There is in some of these complaints the scent of the fourth quarter basketball fake foul or as they call it, the “flop.” It feels like there are people at parties and events and in life who are positively desperate to fling themselves backwards and weep in offense, imploring the referee to give them two free throws.
Recently a Lady in Waiting to Queen Elizabeth II, Lady Susan Hussey, a venerable 83 years of age, was at a cocktail party at Buckingham Palace. Lady Hussey is arguably not the best at small talk. In the early 90s she had been asked on short notice to attend a gathering with an American delegation. At the event, she asked the man next to her what he did for a living. “I’m President of the United States of America,” responded George W. Bush. So perhaps she lives in a bit of a bubble.
In any case, Lady Hussey recently met “Ngozi Fulani,” who is British born but who changed her name from Marlene Headley (to seem conspicuously foreign I presume), at this event at Buckingham Palace, where they of course receive many foreigners. Fulani (who is indeed of African heritage) was in a conspicuously African looking outfit, her name is Ngozi, and Africa is not far from the UK. To some it might therefore seem not completely insane that Lady Hussey might ask Ms. Fulani over a Veuve where she hailed from. Fulani, oddly, had been audio recording the event and was scandalized that Lady Hussey had inferred from her outfit that she might have a more-than-ancestral connection to Africa. Seems like a yellow card at worst but it went full red card.
Two free throws are in fact given. Complainants are given succor and prestige and eternally get to assume in some measure the mantle of a victim. The essence of the grift is to take advantage of our natural politeness and desire to accommodate or help an injured party. So it is important rhetorically that survivors of a faux pas or misplaced joke be “traumatized” and “marginalized,” never just “annoyed,” “spurned,” or “bummed,” as, say, you might be (if you even notice such things).
With respect to jokes and small offenses, Schiller said that art is the daughter of freedom. And I will extend that to say that in all civilized societies, forgiveness is the handmaiden of comedy.
Jung felt that Freud was wrong. Jung felt that everything was about power, not sex. You can put me down with Jung on this one. What the self-serious, the bitter, the terminally morbid, the dull, and the scolds have discovered is that being a scold can be a source of power.
I have come to realize that though Prometheus gave us fire, he did not give us all the ability equally to create the fire. There are people who cannot create fire — they cannot build or create a book or a joke or a company or a moment or anything. They are observers as they watch the future and culture and art created around them. Perhaps it can be said that it’s not that they are anti-fun, it is that fun as we are discussing it is simply not available to them and they resent that.
But they desperately want attention and power.
And they can complain to the manager.
I find Ayn Rand borderline unreadable and never finishable but she did have one interesting concept, which was the builders and the “looters.” Our modern scolds are like the “looters” in Atlas Shrugged. They create nothing. But they have found a way to leech power. And they have certainly been doing so.
It was the Looters who condemned Socrates to death, accusing him of “impiety.” He was, I’m sure, inconvenient to them. He certainly had the fire of Prometheus. We can presume they did not. I confess that I am on Socrates’ side on this one.
Oscar Wilde was one of the most memorable wits and playwrights in British and Irish history, performed and remembered to this day. He was accused on a minor transgression of being a sodomite and was sentenced and served years in prison after which, a broken man, he fled to France, and soon died (in his early 40s).
Every time we quote Wilde, we should resent the petty tyranny of the Looters. And every time we see Looters at work, we should remember Wilde.
The McCarthyists had some legitimate targets at first. Alger Hiss and so on. But then they ruined the careers of thousands of innocent people. The ultimate Looter grift. These movements often start with something legitimate. And then they grow.
The final exam of my torts class in law school was about a woman whose hearing had been regrettably damaged by a loud car alarm. The A+ answer recognized that if she had been injured only due to her own hypersensitivity, the car owner would not be liable as we are not trying to create incentives to defend against every possible corner case of damage — we are not trying to create a world that is maximally safe — we are trying to create a world that is efficiently safe.
Should the Very Sensitive design our social rules? Should we be creating a world that is maximally safe? There is much to be lost for most of us, if so.
We do not owe obeisance to the Very Sensitive. And needless to say, they are fatal at parties.
Have our lives been changed by the Unfun and Quite Sensitive?
As Yuval Harari points out, we have managed to turn our lives into an endless 24/7 job interview, where a minor slip up from many years ago can interfere with your life today. People are therefore much more circumscribed in what they say in public or on social media. It adds risk to life without adding anything back.
Moreover, I don’t think it goes too far to say that this discourse distracts us and creates an air of negativity. It distracts us from our highest achievements and potentialities, takes us away from an elite creator mentality and extends a victim mentality to all fields, including the arts. It detracts from fun. Just think about how many film reviews inject some sort of grifter gripe. It is hard to avoid and it makes our art worse. One advantage Asian film in general has over American film today is its lack of self-consciousness.
You can’t make great art with a muzzle on and safetyism puts that muzzle on.
Behind the scenes in television, for example, there has been, as safteyism and unfunism have taken hold, a move away from comedy (except for the most anodyne) and away from anything that feels too “elite.” If a show is too smart, like a Mad Men or Succession, too hard to write or too pitched at an affluent US audience, it will face difficulty today. Which is odd because Succession is a big hit and somehow White Lotus snuck through and is doing well and certainly seems eliteish to me (not that I’m complaining). But everyone is yearning for that middle of the road show or true crime blockbuster. Despite the rare show that slips through such as White Lotus, it’s a very sad comedown from the raft of ambitious shows of just a few years ago. I’ve posted this chart recently but for those who missed it, I would estimate we lost about 30 great shows we should have seen from 2018-2021:
In movies, the whole smart/artsy film category has recently fallen on its face (along with the rest of film, really). There are stellar exceptions such as Tar and Everything Everywhere All at Once, but in general it has been a lackluster year.
As Anne Applebaum asked in 2021, “How much intellectual life is now stifled because of fear of what a poorly worded comment would look like if taken out of context and spread on Twitter?”
Indeed. One might ask where are the great novels? Or the great parties?
Is there not a feeling of a society without energy?
I don’t see the great good thing that is coming out of this new, killjoy, cowed, worried, safetyist, buzz kill, victim culture. Where is its 9th Symphony, its massive monorails, its Thus Spake Zarathustra or Apocalypse Now? No fire, no masterworks.
Finally, perhaps the worst and most telling offenses can be found in fashion and fitness. Fashion and fitness say important things about who we are.
Good lord.
Having a society obsessed with its gripes and whiners leads to what Durkheim called anomie, where an aimless society becomes increasingly disengaged and proceeds toward social disorder, suicides and depression. Indeed, we have seen all of this taking place.
There is more at stake here, as it turns out, than parties. There is life itself. Victim syndrome and looter power are taking the culture to an unhealthy place.
As Rabbi David Wolpe said, “‘Cancel culture.’ It is a semantic coup to channel rage and reactivity and persuade people to call it ‘culture.’”
The Fun Reconquista
The advocates of looter energy are the clergy of a declining and unhealthy religion. What we need is a Fun Reconquista. Step one is to stop going to their church. We just need to move to a new culture and not think about them. I have noticed by the way that the least devout members of the old church are the young.
As Twitter, chatGPT, Lens Protocol and other systems rapidly grow in influence, the power of the old church, which relies on a centralized control of narrative, inevitably fades. And they can just be sealed out of new systems. Sounds harsh but it appears to be essential. You can’t have unfun people at your New Year’s Party.
In any case, to move forward, one must have a new culture.
Notes Toward a Vibe Shift
As Elon Musk said, “Too many people have lost faith in the future. A new philosophy is needed.”
It is in fact a new philosophy – or a new culture, really – that is needed.
We do not yet have the new culture but we know that cultures can change. And now is the time for a cultural change. There are debates to be had and one can only consciously direct a culture so much (an interesting topic for another day — how much?).
But perhaps it is enough for now to take on the task of moving forward and to point to a few examples of inspiring energy. Ad then we can take it from there. To find a new culture, we have to take the best of now and also go back in time to recover and refashion things we have lost but need again.
Halston dgaf in 1964 I’m completely redesigning hats energy.
I’m going to build a theme park energy
James Brown Energy.
I’m going to make a faux biography of the richest man in the world energy.
70s Paris Vogue energy.
Drifter, Where My Vans Go (2022)
Lana del Rey 2013 Born to Die/“Summertime Sadness” energy
Puerto Rican but I’m writing a huge rap musical about Alexander Hamilton energy.
I built a rocket ship to the moon energy.
These are not separate things. All of these – the fun, the fire, the art, the music, the anti-safety, the rocket ships, and the parties, are of a piece. It’s one culture that takes on ambitious goals in an un-self-conscious way.
Trying to out victim one another has been tedious. So long and thanks for all the editorials.
As Anne Applebaum further commented, “if we drive all of the difficult people, the demanding people, and the eccentric people away from the creative professions where they used to thrive, we will become a flatter, duller, less interesting society, a place where manuscripts sit in drawers for fear of arbitrary judgments. The arts, the humanities, and the media will become stiff, predictable, and mediocre.”
We were well on our way!
2 rules:
Recognize, exit and disavow the religion of the unfun.
Create a new culture that aims high.
It is time for our country to recover its animal spirits. The spirits of Carl Sandburg’s Chicago —
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.
I hope you look forward to building something fun.
Fantastic essay...a manifesto, really. Electrifying! Thank you so much for writing this.
Wow... Simply wow. I am gestalt processor, so I can only see the interconnection and this summed it all up. The unfun need to be ignored and when they are, they will self abort. They destroy everything and art has become dull. My wife and I comment on how dull everything is in film. No erotic thrillers, no adult content where there are complicated relationships. Seriously falling in love with your blog. Dan Watanabe posted about your writing and it has been worth the visit. Please read, if you haven't, Martin Van Crevald's The Privileged Sex. It discuss issues that are part of this. This is a natural outgrowth of Foucault and extreme feminism uniting. We are massively unbalanced. Americans society has always had a propensity towards safety. Consider odd things like battleship design (we invented all or nothing) or warplanes with armored cockpits in spite of increased weight. Now those cultural tendencies are used against us to create this current mess.