A bit of a lighter topic today: What is fun?

This seems like a simple question that would be tempting to hand-wave away as a "Well you know..." but the more I think about it the less cut and dry it seems.

Some prompts to get you thinking

• What are the merits and purposes of fun?

• What makes something fun? Though different people find different things fun, is there a common thread that makes those things fun?

• Is it easier for some kinds of people to have fun than others? What kinds of situations lend themselves to fun experiences, which make them difficult?

• Are there ways for people who have forgotten how to have fun to "get back in touch with fun?"

• Do you think you have enough fun? Too much?

• How much fun is the right, or a good amount?

When it comes to decision-making, perception and so on, what are your beliefs about the role and merits of feelings/emotions vs reasoning?

Some common positions:

• Emotions tend to get in the way of reasoning - we should primarily rely on our logic and rationality to guide us. When feeling strongly about anything we should block it out and try to think purely in a rational way.

• Reasoning can distract us when the right answer is to empathize or trust our gut feelings; it's easy to be misled by a convincing argument but gut feelings can see through that.

• Emotions and logic each play a role in observation and judgment. If both didn't have a use, why would we have evolved to have them?

A lot of people probably don't go all the way one way or the other. Even if you don't have a particularly strong reason for why you feel one way or the other, feel free to express what you believe.

I was originally going to post this as a response to a different thread and realized it would make a better post by itself.

One of my favourte expressions:

When America sneezes, Canada gets a cold.

When I was growing up and American and Canadian media were still relatively separate, it was widespread Canadian opinion that America was a political shitshow at the best of times and we were grateful that we weren't like it. I would even go as far as to say there was widespread cultural anti-Americanism.

Fast-forward to 2024 where most people are getting news/entertainment from almost exclusively American-dominated sources like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and so on, and increasingly our political culture has become blended in with theirs, and frankly, we have begun to inherit what I feel to be their distasteful way of doing politics.

An example: The sheer amount of hyperventilation I saw among my left-leaning Canadian friends over the Trump election victory in 2016 was unbelievable. I'm rarely shocked by things, but some of my friends were genuinely insisting that a second Holocaust was unironically about to unfold. I mean they were fully committed to the idea that minorities were actually going to be rounded up and put into death camps. Totally bonkers stuff. (Nevermind any of the economic or political context that lead to pre-WW2 Germany).

What's more, this election had felt extremely personal to Canadians in a way American politics had rarely if ever been before. And there was a certain point where I stopped and said "Huh, this is weird. How did we get here?"

I felt for perhaps the first time that politically my fellow Canadians had completely lost their minds in ways that felt previously reserved for the Americans. And increasingly I see Canadians wrapped up in American political slogans and battles that largely don't apply to the Canadian context.

Ex: People seem to think Canada's got some similar lines to Democrats vs Republicans but in the past mock elections I've seen the Democrats would win in Canada with something crazy like 80% of the vote. Trying to impose those dichotomies onto the Canadian political context (Conservatives vs Liberals) just doesn't make sense, but people still do it because it's what they're being shown.

I would say the government itself has been largely ineffective in ensuring that the Canadian voice doesn't get completely drowned out by the American perspective. (Canadian content laws have largely not worked with the internet, and it's been difficult to make tech giants like Facebook comply, as we've already seen).

So, am I the only person who's seen this and feels this way? Americans, if you're here, what's it like from your angle? Interested to hear people's thoughts.

Open question: What do you think a normal person's moral responsibilities are and why?

Some angles you can (but don't have to) consider:

To themselves, family, friends and strangers?

Do you have thoughts about what it takes to make a good person or at what point someone is a bad person? (Is there a category of people who are neither?)

What do you think the default state of people is? (Generally good, evil or neutral by nature?)

Conversely do you believe morality is a construction and reject it entirely? (Even practically speaking when something bad happens to you?)