Faux Fun

The problem with things like drugs, alcohol, sex, food, pornography, gambling, shopping, and related acts of consumption, from the fun perspective, is that they are, in fact, up to a point, exactly that - fun. And then they aren't as fun as they used to be. And then you do them anyway. You do and overdo. Dose and overdose. And then they kill you.

This is because they are each, in one way or another, artificially sweetened. Artificial. They look like fun. They feel like fun. But eventually they turn into its opposite. They take life away.

What we have here, especially vividly given these extreme cases, are examples of what I choose to call "faux fun."

Faux fun looks like fun, acts like fun, tastes like fun, even calls itself fun. It tastes good, very good, sometimes extraordinarily good, and then it sours, becomes rancid, bitter. It tastes like sweet fun, only to become sickeningly sweet.

The taste of faux fun feeds on you until there's nothing left. Eventually, it's not you at all, it's the alcohol, the drugs, the game, the machine, the insatiable need, the disgust. You can have faux fun seeing people in pain - schadenfreude - from making other people afraid, from hurting people. And it tastes just like fun. But it's not.

Faux fun also tastes like something bad for you, something you shouldn't be having. Real fun, the fun that faux fun is falsifying, tastes like life, like health, like you at your best, like a day at its finest, like love at its deepest.


from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith