The Great American Fun Shortage

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Sarah Holder** (0:08)
Ben, welcome to the studio.

**Ben Steverman** (0:09)
Thank you.

**Sarah Holder** (0:10)
Have you been having a fun summer so far?

**Ben Steverman** (0:12)
I've been having an amazing summer.

**Sarah Holder** (0:13)
An amazing summer. What have you been up to?

**Ben Steverman** (0:16)
Well, last weekend, I was at the beach with my family, and then the weekends before that, we had an amazing Pride weekend in New York, and then before that, I was on a boat, on a dance party, on a boat in the Hudson River when the Knicks won the NBA Championship.

**Sarah Holder** (0:30)
Electric. That was the best feeling.

**Ben Steverman** (0:32)
A lot of communal stuff happening in the city.

**Sarah Holder** (0:34)
Absolutely. I've honestly been having a really fun summer too. I've been traveling a little bit, but mostly enjoying being in New York, going to the beach. Now, I'm watching a lot of soccer, at bars in my neighborhood.
I've been having a lot of fun. But Ben, you've been reporting on this depressing reality that nationwide fun is actually on the decline. Some of this fun we're having is very hard won.

**Ben Steverman** (0:55)
Yeah.
I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few months and thinking about this summer as a summer of scarcity in some ways. Fun is harder to find, it's more expensive, it's less available. It's a depressing sense that either you can't afford to do the things you want to do, or it's just like you have to think way in advance and do a lot of planning and the roads are full, the parking lots are full, the concerts sold out. There's a lot of angst about it, I think, out there.

**Sarah Holder** (1:28)
That sucks at a personal level, but that can't be good at a societal level either, right Ben?

**Ben Steverman** (1:33)
So when you look at happiness in America, the United States is the place on the globe where their happiness has gone down the most. The World Happiness Report is this comprehensive look every year. And it really looked this year at why people in the United States are getting less happy, why are they less satisfied with their lives, and it can't be the Internet because other countries are at least as online as we are. But there's something else going on with America. And I'm positing, I believe that it is something to do with our availability of fun and shared experiences.

**Sarah Holder** (2:14)
This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. Today on the show, in the US, there's a mismatch between fun supply and fun demand. I talked to Ben Steverman, who covers economic and social trends for Bloomberg, about what's driving the fun shortage in America, and what can be done about it.
I'm wondering if we could just start with a definition here. What is fun?

**Ben Steverman** (2:42)
This is a little bit my own definition, but I think this is based on real happiness research that I've talked to scholars about. The fun that really makes a difference in our lives is shared fun.
If you're just scrolling through TikTok, okay, that's amusing, but it's not fun. My definition of fun is shared experiences that get you out in the world with other people, whether that's going on vacation with your family, going out to nightlife or a concert with your friends, even like small talk with a stranger in your community, like that is also fun.

**Sarah Holder** (3:19)
And what did you find in your reporting that showed that those kinds of fun, those collective shared fun experiences are getting harder to come by?

**Ben Steverman** (3:26)
Well, when you ask people and the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually does an annual study of how Americans spend their time, we are spending a lot less time communicating face to face over the last 20 years.
And we are spending a lot more time interfacing with screens and computers. We are spending a lot more time at home rather than getting out in the world. We are seeing fewer arts and entertainment programs. We are seeing less sports. The walls are kind of closing in on us and we feel like we can't get out. And I am trying to figure out what is the barrier that is preventing people from going out and having more fun.

**Sarah Holder** (4:05)
One of the factors that you identified is that the number of venues for having fun has been declining. What is behind this scarcity?

**Ben Steverman** (4:14)
One thing that is happening here is that the US population has gone up and the places to have fun have not. In some cases, they have gone down. It is so hard to open a new nightclub or bar in America because of a lot of local regulations, because of rising costs, the sort of geographic constraints in a lot of popular destinations.