Excellent post. Are you familiar with the ideas relating to flow?
Thanks. I’ve heard of flow. I think it’s a lot easier to retrospectively explain why a flow experience made something fun, as opposed to using the idea of flow to predict what will be fun. It seems hard to input the challenge and skill parameters in real life.
I would suggest that you encountered the right amount of challenge and skill required to enjoy yourself (as well as desire to do the thing). For future working conditions you might want to find something more difficult to do. than basic sign-making...
Maybe a little. I always wondered why a lot of things that were supposed to be fun weren’t. It seems to me that doing the fun thing for an even slightly important reason was a big factor between fun and unfun. So I don’t think it can feel too directionless. That feels like a new thing that I know.
My other line of thoughts on fun things has to do with what would be fun for really obvious evolutionary-psychological reasons. The one big idea that fell out of that so far is Gathering Gardens of Myriad Difficulty.
I don’t just want to play caveman, if you notice, people still hunt for sport, and they love it! So, why not gather for sport? I mean, have you guys ever looked for easter eggs? I would still do that.
Forest gardens/food forests are forests with lots of edible vegetation that humans put there on purpose. If you wanted, you could make it more or less difficult to gather by changing the populations and types of plants. You could do it with other people if you wanted. Maybe it would end up being similar to going to a park for a day, maybe it would be more like a hunting trip, maybe it would be both. And I’m sure there’s plenty of novelty to be found in the space of all edible vegetation. The various edibles would take up an implicit value within a particular forest if there were barriers to trading it on the global market enough, you could trade edibles if you wanted. Imagine gathering an edible that was high in a tree and extremely rare in this forest; I sure would get a kick out of trading that for a visually impressive amount of inferior edibles.
I believe there are a few. but hardly enough to be worthy of comment. I think the main 2 problems were bugs and plant-care-is-hard.
play caveman
examples: sports, lifting, cooking, building buildings, repairing things.
a lot of things that were supposed to be fun weren’t
I wonder if you feel like “fun” is not “work” so you can’t because that would be doing fun which would be (I know someone who is slowly teaching himself to like fun where he previously wouldn’t allow himself to)
I think the main 2 problems were bugs and plant-care-is-hard.
That contradicts my understanding of forest gardening. It’s one of the oldest agricultural methods, it’s low maintenance, and polyculture encourages diversity, which would seem to make pests a considerably smaller problem than in monoculture.
I know of this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon_Food_Forest but I have to ask the question; if they are so great; why don’ they exist more often? There is likely something that I am missing from the picture.
Excellent post. Are you familiar with the ideas relating to flow?
Do you know what might be fun in the future now?
Thanks. I’ve heard of flow. I think it’s a lot easier to retrospectively explain why a flow experience made something fun, as opposed to using the idea of flow to predict what will be fun. It seems hard to input the challenge and skill parameters in real life.
I don’t quite understand the question.
having had the experience to discover an instance of fun that surprised you; do you think you learnt to find future instances of similar fun?
Yes; I agree, flow is a good retrospective explanation. there is also this picture:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Challenge_vs_skill.svg/300px-Challenge_vs_skill.svg.png
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law
I would suggest that you encountered the right amount of challenge and skill required to enjoy yourself (as well as desire to do the thing). For future working conditions you might want to find something more difficult to do. than basic sign-making...
Maybe a little. I always wondered why a lot of things that were supposed to be fun weren’t. It seems to me that doing the fun thing for an even slightly important reason was a big factor between fun and unfun. So I don’t think it can feel too directionless. That feels like a new thing that I know.
My other line of thoughts on fun things has to do with what would be fun for really obvious evolutionary-psychological reasons. The one big idea that fell out of that so far is Gathering Gardens of Myriad Difficulty.
I don’t just want to play caveman, if you notice, people still hunt for sport, and they love it! So, why not gather for sport? I mean, have you guys ever looked for easter eggs? I would still do that.
Forest gardens/food forests are forests with lots of edible vegetation that humans put there on purpose. If you wanted, you could make it more or less difficult to gather by changing the populations and types of plants. You could do it with other people if you wanted. Maybe it would end up being similar to going to a park for a day, maybe it would be more like a hunting trip, maybe it would be both. And I’m sure there’s plenty of novelty to be found in the space of all edible vegetation. The various edibles would take up an implicit value within a particular forest if there were barriers to trading it on the global market enough, you could trade edibles if you wanted. Imagine gathering an edible that was high in a tree and extremely rare in this forest; I sure would get a kick out of trading that for a visually impressive amount of inferior edibles.
I believe there are a few. but hardly enough to be worthy of comment. I think the main 2 problems were bugs and plant-care-is-hard.
examples: sports, lifting, cooking, building buildings, repairing things.
I wonder if you feel like “fun” is not “work” so you can’t because that would be doing fun which would be (I know someone who is slowly teaching himself to like fun where he previously wouldn’t allow himself to)
That contradicts my understanding of forest gardening. It’s one of the oldest agricultural methods, it’s low maintenance, and polyculture encourages diversity, which would seem to make pests a considerably smaller problem than in monoculture.
I know of this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon_Food_Forest but I have to ask the question; if they are so great; why don’ they exist more often? There is likely something that I am missing from the picture.
Yeah, I’m not sure either. There are more economical ways to perform agriculture, of course. That’s probably part of it.