why are we being told to have more FUN?

It’s hard not to notice the shift in the kind of video essays appearing on our YouTube feeds these days. Slow living. Romanticise your life. Embrace your inner artist. Quit the job that drains you. Follow what your heart desires. The messaging, regardless of the specific video, tends to collapse into the same quiet instruction: 

live in the present,

have more fun,

the hustle isn’t worth it.

This isn’t a niche corner of the internet. This is the mainstream feed. And what’s striking isn’t just the content itself, but how swiftly this shift has happened, essentially within the gap of a single generation. Our parents were told, with great conviction, that discipline and sacrifice were the architecture of a good life. We are being told, with equal conviction, to go on a solo trip and journal about it.

The question I have isn’t the why of this content existing but why we are so willing to believe it. There is something in the contemporary psyche that hasn’t just stumbled upon the idea of a happier, less fraught life but has been quietly waiting for someone to make it feel acceptable

One of the most thrown around reasonings for this ideology tends to be about the “cushioning” we have. This is a fact that our generation is living a way better life than our parents did, at atleast materialistically. Most of us or the “middle class” are comfortably seated in a spot where the incessant worries are past us and beyond us is a fruitful future, glimpses of which we are constantly fed online

But if comfort is so widely available, why does happiness need to be constantly advertised to us?

Maybe it is the weird state in which we have been delivered this comfort. All of this ease has been handed over at a time of existential crisis, resulting in a perplexing cocktail none of us like the taste of.

It may also stem from the feeling that the old paths lead to NO DESTINATION anymore. The once-obvious belief that education naturally translates into financial security is almost obsolete now. Money, comfort, fame and other peripheries have become more unpredictable than ever.

All these realisations combined cast the past as a hazy, almost utopian memory and the future an anxiety inducer.

So what is the best bet? choose “having fun” as a coping mechanism and collapse everything into the present timeline.

But the question still lingers: is “having fun” a fitting mantra for our time?

Yes, but selectively and carefully.

The best thing would be to treat it as a “mood” which it is. This mindset might not withstand the time when the cushion starts slipping from underneath just to reveal the hard wooden bottom, or when the aesthetics of slow living arent able to keep up with the arithmetics of the adult life

Ending with this quote I read somewhere that – “Everyone is an artist until rent is due”. Maybe the goal shouldn’t be to ‘have more fun,’ but to build a life we don’t need to ‘fun’ our way out of.”