Fun, Reconsidered

2026-03-25 - 09:02

Listen to the AI generated audio article. Your browser does not support the audio element. As I was leaving the office, the last question my editors had asked lingered: “What do you do for fun?” That was the assignment and whatever the answer was, I should write about it. That was the point of the question. The room had gone silent for a few seconds. My nervous humming was all I could hear as I looked to the intern beside me for support. “Reading books, watching movies...” she offered. She wasn’t wrong, but that’s not what anyone wants to read in a magazine’s lifestyle section anymore, perhaps, when there is already plenty of content about slow living, reading, and analog hobbies. For the first 15 minutes of my commute, I kept returning to the question: “What do you do for fun?” By the 25-minute mark, I was having a mini existential crisis. I had been asked about my hobbies, education, work, and personal life, but I must admit it had been quite a while since someone had asked what I do for fun. Even when I’m asked about my hobbies, I feel I have to demonstrate my value. Every answer should fit the cliché “my biggest flaw is that I’m a perfectionist” template. A short while later, I found myself tallying up all the fun I’d missed in life, debating whether I’d really had fun at all, and trying to figure out the criteria I was using to measure it. The rest I can’t articulate. My thoughts came in fragments, each one contradicting the last. Somewhere in the mess, I landed on the answer: I scroll on social media for fun before I go to sleep, which felt depressing and unsatisfactory. Was it really that damn phone? I discovered that I often found fun in the mundane. After a long day, or even before one, I have no zahla, as we say, for anything loud or unfamiliar, in an uncomfortable location, filled with strangers. I consider myself a woman of my time. Still, I caught myself wondering: was it always like this? “It was doubtlessly quite different for my mother’s generation,” I caught myself thinking. They had no constant electricity, two TV channels at most, and lives shaped by far more immediate concerns. The most important resource they had through it all was their community. They gathered with relatives, neighbors drifting in and out, filling evenings with conversation, laughter, shared stories. That’s how my mother remembers it. My aunt jumped in with her recollections of the Indian movies they sometimes got to watch on the big screen. My questions hung in the air around me. I was the only one paying them any mind, while my aunt and mother drifted into their own conversation, the control over which had long slipped out of my grasp. Left with several unanswered questions, I needed other perspectives. I found them in a mother and daughter: 21-year-old Maria Dervishoghlyan and her mother, Susanna Harutyunyan. “There seems to be no motivation for your generation to have fun...” Susanna said. “...to go somewhere new, even though you have more options than my generation did.” It is true in most cases, but in Armenia, even though we have more options, they all seem to be the same: cafes with the same playlists, the same minimalist interiors, and nearly identical menus. More has become less. Maria pointed to another shift. “Social media has given people the choice to stay at home and connect with their friends or loved ones online,” she said. “This isn’t for me personally, but the choice is there, it can’t be denied.” Even so, meeting in person to spend time and have fun can still be quiet and relaxing. Personality plays a huge role in how individuals, or even generations, prefer to have fun. The two shared more similarities than differences, though some tensions surfaced. Susanna claimed that she could never understand the appeal of K-Pop and its popularity, while Maria said in a private conversation, “She knows everyone’s biographies and likes to watch Korean dramas with me.” Not fully understanding or accepting a phenomenon entirely doesn’t prevent people from finding ways to enjoy it. Many don’t understand why my generation seems so self-obsessed and spends so much time on social media, even though they often do the same. Social media has harmful side effects, but it is also one of the easiest ways to unwind after a hard day. There is no need to leave the house, or even your bed. Scrolling through social media and experiencing a range of emotions in a short amount of time works for many people with busy lives, such as those balancing college, work, classes and extracurricular activities. Diana Amirgulyan is a therapist at the Tchaikovsky Music School in Yerevan. Students of different ages, as well as teachers, often visit her office for consultations. “Communication, self-expression, and a sense of belonging,” Diana says, are the most important psychological needs for children and teenagers, and they have stayed consistent across generations. The ways people have fun have changed, but people have remained the same in their basic needs and wants. Instead of dismissing social media and attaching a single label to it, why not be more flexible and make sure it serves us? We often look for extraordinary answers to our questions while ignoring the most obvious ones. The world has changed, and so have the ways people have fun and spend their free time. Its impact on us is stronger than it was on previous generations. Screen time and early, mostly unmonitored access to the internet have distorted our perceptions of fun and with much else. Even so, as we age, we try to shift our perspectives and practices. Social media will always be a controversial topic to navigate, especially when it comes to existential questions like: What is fun? Are people still having it? Or are they having fun in ways that differ from previous generations? I may not have answers to all of these, but what I do have is a small, personal plan: when I finish writing this, I’ll make myself a cup of coffee at 5 a.m. to carry me through the tail end of an all-nighter, in the hope of making it to my 9 a.m. class. Maybe that counts. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, it’s mine. Comment Cover photo by Roubina Margossian. LIFESTYLE Contemplation March’s SALT issue, “Contemplation”, takes a reflective look at how we live, unwind and make sense of the world around us. From rethinking what fun means for a new generation and the quiet lessons of turning 25, to the liberating pull of rave culture as a space for self-expression, and the enduring realities of water scarcity in