Mike Rucker - The Fun Habit: How the Pursuit of Joy and Wonder Can Change Your Life

Find Delight, Fix UnHappy

The Fun Habit

How the Pursuit of Joy and Wonder Can Change your Life

Mike Rucker, Phd

In memory of Brian Rucker. When we meet again, I hope I find you with Bourdain and Cornell, drinking scotch and eating well, accompanied by Farley and Hedberg, who have us all in stitches. Your memory serves as a reminder to make the most of every day, which includes seeing this book through to the end. As a result, there is going to be a lot more fun in the world, and I know that would make you happy. I love you, bud.

I started writing the final draft of this book at the beginning of 2020. Then, as I am sure you are aware, something quite extraordinary happeneda global pandemic. I handed off the finished manuscript just as the United States was about half-vaccinated and returning to some kind of precarious new normal. Otherwise put, I wrote this book during what will (hopefully) be the least fun years any of us ever collectively experience in our lifetime.

The ideas in this book had been battle-tested under normal circumstances, but the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a completely foreign landscape. During the pandemics most challenging periods, fun was not at the top of anyones agenda, including my own. In May 2020, I got extremely sick, an aftereffect of an initially mild COVID-19 infection and the coalescing of the periods various stressors. I lost the ability to sleep for months, which made daily functioning, let alone fun, almost impossible. While there were times that the lessons in this book served me to my great satisfaction, there were also times that I struggled with impostor syndrome, writing chapter after chapter on fun while not experiencing much of it personally. Despite my setbacks, I still consider myself lucky. Millions of people lost their livelihood, lost their loved ones; the most unfortunate lost their lives. In addition to an uncontrollable virus during the pandemic, people worldwide were reckoning with systemic racism and injustice, wrestling with political turmoil, battling the challenges of climate change, and the list goes on. With so many physiological and psychological safety needs unmet, its no wonder that there werent many of us concerned about the pursuit of higher needs.

If the grim landscape had a thin silver lining, it was that it provided many with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to observe their former lifeits schedules, rhythms, distractions, and obsessionsfrom enough distance to ask important questions: Am I living the life I want? What is accidental, and what is by design? Can I live more deliberately? And even, yes: Can life be more fun?

For those working through such questions, this book could not have come at a better time. Whether we completely comprehend it or not, the pandemic made us intimately familiar with what you will see are key concepts important to this book. We experienced how painful it is to waste our precious time, locked out of many of the activities we love. We suffered from a lack of live interaction with friends and family and felt the damage that can occur when we are not personally connected to something other than ourselves. We realized the truth in the assertion, security is mostly a superstition, and all longed to return to the daring adventure.

Its time for all of us to jump back into the daring adventure and reclaim our funnot just for ourselves, but as a restorative path for our loved ones, and as youll discover, for society as well.

I have spent most of my life searching for happiness. It was like a puzzle that I could never quite figure out. As an adolescent, I was a hopeless wannabe with an agonizing desire to find my rank in the social structure of my small hometown of Davis, California. Unhappy at home, I emancipated as a teenager to see if happiness was somewhere out there in the world, waiting for me. Its been quite a journey since then.

People have always wanted to be happy, but the idea of happiness as a learned skill has never been so popular. Today, theres a happiness-industrial complex of gurus, psychologists, institutions, and organizations attempting to solve the happiness problem for good. Book after book is written on how to experience more happiness from neurological, psychological, religious, and spiritual perspectives. The promise of happiness, separate from wealth, achievement, or any other external factor, strikes a major chord. Many of us feel helpless nowadays as we try to journey toward the good life against what sometimes feel like impossible headwinds.

For everyone, from baby boomers unable to reconnect with the joys of the past to younger generations experiencing record levels of loneliness, anxiety, and burnout, the pursuit of happiness holds out hope as the answer to our problems. The thinking goes that if we can only activate our happiness switch, other challenges in life will lose their edge. Inner satisfaction can be found no matter how grim our circumstances. Did I mention that the office now has a Zen room?

As you will soon discover, pursuing happiness in and of itself can be a trap. In fact, for almost all of us, chasing happiness makes us anything but. I know because I fell for that happiness trap myself. Back in early 2016, I felt I had checked all the boxes in the pursuit of happiness: A good marriage and two healthy children. Successful endeavors as both an entrepreneur and an intrapreneur. A two-time Ironman. Well-traveled, having stepped foot on every continent. A Ph.D. with published, peer-reviewed research. Various accolades for being influential in my field. Most would say I had it all. Objectively, life was good. Furthermore, as a charter member of the International Positive Psychology Association, I had positioned myself at the cutting edge of research into happiness. Naturally, I put all the latest findings to use in my own life. As a member of the Quantified Self community, I optimized my life not only qualitatively, but quantitatively as welllogging my good days and bad days, constantly looking for correlations and ways to improve. I had reached a pinnacle. There was little else I could do to make myself happier, no technique I had yet to employ.

Im an avid blogger, and in support of this hobby, I send a quarterly newsletter on or around the twenty-third every three months (December, March, June, and September). June 23, 2016, was business as usual. I hit send on my newsletter, which was essentially a victory lap that life at that moment was amazing. Toward the end of the newsletter, I celebrated recently checking off a bucket list item with my beloved brother, Brianriding the tallest roller coaster in the world, the Kingda Ka.

At some point within twenty-four hours of hitting send on that newsletter, my brother passed away unexpectedly from a pulmonary embolism. It felt surreal: Just as my friends, family, and followers were reading how much I enjoyed the experience that he and I had shared, Brians tragic passing ensured there would never be another such opportunity. As the shock wore off, I found myself deeply sad and unsettled. This period opened an uninvited path to questioning everything.

A short time later, I found myself in the hospital needing major hip surgery. When I woke up after the procedure, I couldnt feel my legs. Lying in the hospital bed, I struggled to stay positive. Id built my life around staying physically active and benefiting from a positive mindset. Now I was adjusting to the reality I would never competitively run again, and emotionally, I was a wreck. The traditional tools of positive psychology were failing me. No matter how much I meditated or wrote in my gratitude journal, happiness remained elusive. I finally had to admit to myself these tools had lost their utility. A believer in happiness, yet not able to feel happy, I experienced significant cognitive dissonance. Id thought I had life figured out, and now I was lost again.