It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu.

Have fun. We hear it all the time.

But recovering science journalist, Catherine Price wants us to really absorb that,

to understand fun, and how to experience more of it in our lives.

In her TED 2022 talk, she unpacks why fun is worth taking seriously.

You know, it's a lot harder than it seems like it should be.

Actually feeling alive.

And what I mean by that is that we are all constantly doing, or at least we're constantly

scrolling, but we're not necessarily living. You know, we keep ourselves busy to the point of

exhaustion, but we're also languishing. We feel a little bit dead inside. And I think we know that

on some level. I think that's part of the reason we keep ourselves so busy and distracted to begin with,

but we don't know what to do about it.

So I am here to tell you, I figured out what to do about it.

We need to have more fun.

So you might think that you're already having plenty of fun.

And that's because in our everyday speech,

we often use the word fun to describe anything we do with our leisure time,

even if it's not actually enjoyable and, in fact, a waste of time.

So for example, we scroll through social media for fun,

even though doing so often makes us feel bad about kind of everything.

Or we'll say, that was so fun, we should do that again soon.

In response to things that weren't that fun and that we don't want to do again,

...