Why Fun Starts Feeling Childish as You Get Older

Nasreddin once climbed onto his roof to fly a kite. His neighbour leaned out of a window and called up to him: "Hodja! Are you not ashamed? A grown man, with a kite."

"Ashamed before whom?" said the Hodja.

"Before me."

"Then come up and fly one yourself," said Nasreddin, "and we can be ashamed together, and it will cost us nothing."

The neighbour did not come up.

It is worth being precise about what happened on that roof, because the joke is hiding a fairly exact piece of machinery.

The kite had no view about the age of the hands holding it. The wind had no view. The only view in the entire scene belonged to a man at a window who had put his own kite away some time ago — and having put it away, he needed the man on the roof to put his away too. That is the quiet cost of having quit something: other people continuing starts to look like an accusation.

Notice, too, what the Hodja does not do. He does not defend the kite. He does not argue that play is healthy, or restorative, or a legitimate use of an afternoon. He asks who the audience is, and then offers the audience a kite.

That question is the usable part. When embarrassment shows up mid-enjoyment, name the watcher. Say the name out loud if you can manage it. Sometimes the watcher is a real person who really would say something. Sometimes it is a composite — a parent, a former colleague, a vague idea of what someone your age is for. Either way, naming it turns a diffuse atmosphere into a specific claim, and claims are far easier to disagree with than atmospheres.

Then watch the timing. If the verdict "this is childish" arrives in the middle of the activity, treat it as suspect. Mid-activity is the point of maximum self-consciousness and minimum absorption — the moment you are watching yourself do the thing rather than doing it. A judgement issued from there is not a report on the activity. It is a report on how exposed you feel at the awkward entry, before anything has had a chance to become fun. Check in afterwards instead.

And take the Hodja's arithmetic seriously, because it is the strongest move available. Ashamed together costs nothing. Invite one other adult into the same foolishness and the embarrassment has nowhere to stand — not because you have argued it away, but because it needs an audience and you have just recruited the audience onto the roof.

If you want somewhere to start: do one thing this week purely for fun before deciding whether it is appropriate. Do it badly on purpose. Notice whether the dread is about play at all, or about being visibly bad at something in front of people — a separate fear that has dressed itself up in your birthday.

Play does not leave us. We leave it, one glance over the shoulder at a time, checking who is watching, until one day we look at the empty street and call it growing up.