The Director at Play, 1956 Anon
The Unbearable Lightness of Bunting
If you are reading these words on the day of their publication, you will no doubt be aware that today, the last Friday of January, has been designated National Fun at Work Day. The accompanying bumf enjoins us to focus on creating laughter and good vibes while tackling our tasks. One imagines this being achieved through the aid of balloons, novelty mugs, and an email from HR containing at least one exclamation mark too many.
Now, I should say at once that your Director is not opposed to fun. Nor, lest rumours spread, am I temperamentally incapable of it. Literature offers us plenty of solemn warnings about the dangers of joylessness: Dickens did not sketch Gradgrind as a hero, and Shakespeare rarely gives the puritanical characters the last laugh. I am not one of those who thinks a smile is a sign of moral weakness. I have laughed at work; I have even (whisper it quietly), on occasion, enjoyed myself there. But there is something faintly comic, and deeply troubling, about the notion that fun is best achieved by being officially designated, scheduled, and branded.
As you know, dear reader, your Director has an eye for a paradox and there is certainly a curious one at work here: the moment fun is mandated, it begins to leak away like the helium from a novelty balloon. Shakespeare, who had a sharp eye for the moral comedy of forced cheer, returns to this idea repeatedly. Malvolio, smiling his way into yellow stockings, is ridiculous not because he is joyful, but because his joy is imagined, scripted, and entirely unshared. It is a performance for an audience, rather than a genuine connection. All the mirth is aspirational rather than relational, and so it curdles like custard in a cold breeze.
Being told to have fun is rather like being told to ‘relax’ or ‘be spontaneous’. The instruction defeats itself. Fun, like happiness, has a habit of arriving unannounced and disappearing the moment it realises it is being scrutinised by a management consultant with a clipboard.
Aristotle understood this long before motivational posters did. The good life (eudaimonia), he argued, was not a matter of pleasure maximisation but of flourishing: a slower, thicker achievement bound up with purpose, virtue, and relationship. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi captured this in his concept of Flow, his term for that state of total absorption where self-consciousness vanishes and time seems to warp. Essentially Flow then is the fun of the serious person. Critically, Flow is often hard work and it requires a high level of challenge. It is the antithesis of the low-stakes whimsy of themed office days. As Viktor Frankl testified from the bleakest of circumstances, happiness is not something to be pursued, but rather it must ensue. If it arrives, it does so as a by-product of something else.
The same is true of fun. It is not a target to be aimed at, but is there when absorption, shared purpose, and the sense that what one is doing actually matters is present. And yet, in our age of valuing only what can be measured, we persist in treating it as a ‘deliverable’. Whatever that is.
There is also a subtle category error lurking beneath the bunting. Fun is not the same thing as joy, and joy is not the same thing as meaning.
We can see this most clearly in play. Johan Huizinga, in Homo Ludens, describes play not as frivolity but as a fundamental mode of being, governed by its own internal rules. Children who are truly playing are rarely laughing; they are often intensely focused, deeply serious, and occasionally fractious. Anyone who has interrupted a group of children in the middle of an elaborate game knows the look: it is not delight you see, but irritation. You have disturbed something important.
Much the same is true of good work. George Eliot, as we have discussed, once remarked that the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts. Those kinds of acts are rarely accompanied by whooping and balloons.
The moments we remember most fondly are not usually those that were labelled as fun in advance. They are the moments when we were absorbed, stretched, perhaps even slightly overwhelmed, but aware that we were doing something worthwhile with other people. Fun may have broken out along the way, but it was never the point. As educators, we intuitively know that we do those in our charge no favours by teaching them that work is a chore to be sweetened with manufactured fun, rather than a place where they might find their most profound satisfactions.
This is where the managerial instinct tends to go awry, a tendency that writers from Kafka to Zamyatin would have recognised immediately. Faced with disengagement or low morale, the response is often to add a layer of cheerfulness: a themed day, a slogan, a set of activities designed to inject energy into the system. These gestures are usually well intentioned, and sometimes mildly enjoyable. But they also risk treating the symptom rather than the cause. If work feels empty or alienating, no amount of compulsory joviality will put that right.
Iain McGilchrist (Bingo!), distinguishes between attention that is narrow, instrumental, and controlling, and attention that is open, receptive, and relational. Engineered fun belongs firmly to the former category. It is planned, measured, and evaluated. Joy that emerges belongs to the latter. It arises when people are trusted, when relationships are prioritised, and when the work itself is allowed to matter. Wordsworth captured this kind of attention when he spoke of being well pleased to recognise / In nature and the language of the sense a deeper form of understanding than analysis alone can provide.
Real joy, by contrast, has room for seriousness, for silence, even for sorrow. C. S. Lewis was insistent on this distinction. Joy, for him, was not happiness or pleasure but something sharper and stranger: an unsought longing that pierces experience rather than smoothing it over. Tolkien gave this intuition narrative form in his idea of eucatastrophe, the sudden, unexpected turn that does not abolish suffering but redeems it from within. Neither writer suggests that life becomes easier; only that it becomes worth it.
In schools, we understand this intuitively. The lessons pupils remember years later are rarely the most entertaining in the superficial sense. They are the ones where they felt challenged, seen, and drawn into something larger than themselves. Which are the lessons that you remember? See!
There is also, dare I say, something dehumanising about the demand to perform happiness. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World imagined a society where discomfort was medicated away and pleasure was administered like a dose of vitamins. The result was not joy, but a thin, anaesthetised contentment.
When “fun” becomes an expectation, those who do not feel it are subtly at fault. The introvert, the worrier, or the person carrying an unseen burden is invited to “put on a smile” for the duration. Laughter becomes an obligation rather than a gift.
If this seems a long way from the office kitchen and the Friday balloons, it is because the stakes of how we define our satisfaction are higher than we think. If happiness is the goal, then it proves a remarkably fragile one. Solzhenitsyn, reflecting on life under Stalin, observed that happiness collapses the moment the jackboots hammer at the door. Organise your philosophy of life around feeling good, and you are unprepared for the moment when all hell breaks loose. Happiness, as a life strategy, is easily capsized.
What proves more durable is meaning. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road presses this point to its bleakest extreme. The father and son are not sustained by the promise of future ease, nor even by hope in any conventional sense. The world offers them no credible happy ending. What sustains them instead is the road itself, the act of continuing, and above all the relationship that binds them. Meaning is not deferred to a brighter future; it is enacted, step by step, through fidelity, care, and the refusal to abandon one another. In a world stripped of almost every reason to go on, the journey and the bond between them become reason enough.
This helps explain a curious truth about regret. When people look back on their lives, they rarely regret the difficulties they chose and endured; they regret the risks they never took. What gives life its weight is not that it was pleasant, but that it demanded something real of us. The deepest form of self-respect rests on a narrative that can honestly say: that was difficult, but it mattered.
Perhaps, then, the problem is not suffering itself but suffering without meaning. We do not flourish when we are perfectly protected, but when we are allowed to dance on the edge: between order and chaos, safety and risk, seriousness and hope. Fun and happiness may appear along the way, but they cannot bear the load of a life. Meaning can. And when meaning is present, joy sometimes arrives, not because it was demanded, but because it was earned.
So what might a better question be than ‘Are we having fun?’ Perhaps it is something like: Do we feel that what we are doing is worth doing? Do we feel trusted to do it well? Do we feel connected to the people we are doing it with? These are slower questions, and they do not lend themselves to posters or branded merchandise. But they go closer to the heart of the matter.
If the answer to those questions is yes, then fun will sometimes follow. It will appear unexpectedly, often at inconvenient moments. And it will look different for different people.
As for today, there will be no party hats issued from my office. But there may, I hope, be moments of shared concentration, of quiet satisfaction, and of the occasional smile that breaks out when nobody is trying to make it happen. Them’s the best kind.
Until next time: Happy reading/ Having meaning!
This week’s fun answer to last week’s fun question:
Q: What common word becomes shorter when you add two letters to it?
A: short
It seems the perfect day to retire the ‘fun’ questions and introduce a new, limited season of sign-offs. Today’s column sees the inaugural entry of The Director’s Detritus. Over the coming weeks, I shall aim to unburden myself of various shards of knowledge that are as fascinating as they are entirely pointless.
Did you know…? Genetic mapping has recently revealed that starfish do not actually have bodies at all. They are, quite literally, just heads that have learned to walk across the seafloor on their own faces.