I miss having fun, especially shared fun: this is one of the great tolls this pandemic is taking on me — and maybe on other “singles” or “loners” like me.
Joy, excitement, enjoyment, play (on my own as well as shared, in company) have always been very important to me, to my well-being — although, I admit, for great parts of my life I have given far too little time or importance to fun/enjoyment, especially to cultivating ways of sharing the fun with others. And some of this is coming back and biting me in the butt now. This pandemic is probably limiting or reducing the possibilities for fun/enjoyment/play for many, if not most, people. But it seems to me that I’m feeling this loss in my current life in an extremely sharp way because I hadn’t built “solid enough ties” with any specific group or community of “shared fun” to somehow last or weather the pandemic: with the current restrictions and limitations on the number and ways that we can safely interact with each other, people are instinctively spending time, including “fun time”, only with their closest ones, with their tightly-knit “social bubbles”. Although before the pandemic I was fortunate to enjoy shared fun in the company of several different “social bubbles”, now I’m not easily included in any of them anymore. And once again, I’m not sure how much of this is caused by my own behaviors or internal conflicts and how much of it is instead due to some bias in our society.
This might seem like a minor problem, and certainly there are much bigger issues! But I also believe that life without shared joy is alienating and, fundamentally, sad — while joy can be an incredible drive and motivation for so many wonderful things!
The Little Prince and the Fox 