Economics of Fun

The problem is that many people are not having fun. Because if you're not having fun, what's the point? Because so few people are having fun, it's hard for the rest of us that want to have fun, to have fun. All those people that don't want to or can't have fun make it difficult for the rest of us to have fun.

It's not girls that just want to have fun. Most people want to have fun, but most people can't. They figure that they have to have money, and in order to make money, they have to do something that they don't like to do. If work doesn't make them miserable, why would someone pay them to do it? You're supposed to have fun on your own time, for the fun of it.

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If you're not having fun at what you do, you'll likely make a lousy job of it. Work began as something people did to pass the time, something they did for fun. As civilization progressed, work was transformed into a daily drudge. Anything made as a result of drudgery is no fun to use. Drudgery only manufactures misery. People think they are manufacturing cars or shoes or TV sets or newspapers, but in fact they're only making congealed despair. The congealed misery just piles up. There's so much of it lying around in gigantic mounds that there's barely room for anything else.

People move to the crowded city so that they can get jobs. However, it turns out that everything is so expensive in the city that it doesn't matter that you have a job, because you can't afford anything. You even feel poorer than you did before you moved to the city, because in the city there are lots of rich people with big houses and fancy stuff, and you don't have any of that. There's also air pollution, noise and crime, which even the rich people have to deal with.

So are you better off in the city where there are all these jobs? It's no fun sitting in a cramped, windowless cubicle for forty hours a week. How about a job in retail? You wait there for someone to come in and purchase an item that you have on a shelf. Except hardly anyone comes in to purchase anything, because they're all working too hard, and they pay so much for food and housing and taxes that they have no money left over to buy anything.

That is, if there were anything worth buying. Things are made so shoddily, you have to be careful when you purchase anything. You're better off if you buy something that's used. At least you know that it has stood up to one owner. Every day the factories churn out more items, and yet the items people already have are still working fine. So what they do is, every year they add some new feature or change the design a bit, so that you can get something different every year, even if your old one is still working perfectly. The show must go on, they've got to keep stuff moving out the door.

Well, you might argue, here's a chart on the internet. The chart says everything is rosy. The chart shows an increase in retail sales, or that the price of gasoline is down, or that more people have jobs, or that wages are up. However, there's always some fine print beneath the chart, or an asterisk . It says that the figures are "seasonally adjusted for May". Now just what is that supposed to mean? Why do they have to seasonally adjust all the data? People are either buying stuff or they aren't, right? Sure, people buy more gloves in the winter than they do in the spring, but they buy more garden supplies in the spring! How exactly do they "seasonally adjust" retail sale figures? Did they use the same formula two years ago? Without knowing the details of how the figures were "seasonally adjusted", the graph is worthless. It's even worse than worthless- it's misleading. All the economic data has been fudged in one way or another. If it's not "seasonally adjusted" it's "adjusted for inflation". The only certain fact is that fewer people are having fun!