What’s Fun, but a fleeting, cheap emotion? I suppose this post could also be called “I CAN Get MORE Satisfaction”. Now, before you roll your eyes heavenward, do you think I am against having fun? No, not at all! I just think that having a great sense of satisfaction is a whole lot more fun than fun! I am starting to get acquainted with gamification. A little late, I realize, but perhaps at the right time. It seems to me that a whole lot of focus is on having fun in frivolous activity that generates no genuine value and which cannot satisfy our need for air, water and food. Sure, gamification by itself is neither good nor bad, it simply recognizes the different ways people want to be involved in this thing called gaming. It recognizes the fact that instant gratification is somehow to be preferred over intrinsic value. It shows that people will actually eschew what they know to be good in order to satisfy a craving, even if they know that what they crave for is actually detrimental to their overall health and well-being. It is bringing us closer to the scenario painted so vividly by, supposedly, the Red Indians:

Only after the last tree has been cut down

Only after the last river has been poisoned

Only after the last fish has been caught

Only then will you find

That money cannot be eaten.

It has been said that “…religion is the opiate of the people…”. I wonder if it ever was. I wonder if that opiate has, all the while, been this obsession with instant gratification, with a never-ending, frivolous fun? Which, like the opiate, leaves one with a silent, screaming famine in the which one may devour oneself.

Fun? Yes, if it’s genuine fun. I’ll skip the distractions and flimsy affirmation games. For once you’ve gotten them under your skin, then you’ll begin to make life “badder”, not better. Be wise. Choose satisfaction. If it happens to be fun as well, bonus!