Having Fun Yet? Lessons from “Good Will Hunting”

Have you seen the 1997 movie, “Good Will Hunting?”

Matt Damon plays a troubled, self-educated genius (Will Hunting). He falls in love with a Harvard student played by Minnie Driver (Skylar).

In one scene, Will and Skylar are having coffee at an outdoor café. Will stares lovingly at Skylar who is absorbed in her organic chemistry book. She really needs to study, she tells him, because she wants to get into medical school.

Will asks if he can help and Skylar asks if he has ever read about organic chemistry. “A little,” Will replies. Skylar thinks he’s joking. “No one reads organic chemistry for fun,” she says. Will doesn’t reply.

It occurs to me that Will might be thinking, ”Of course some people read organic chemistry for fun. I do.”

Indeed, some people study calculus for fun. Others have fun reading English or French literature. What one person finds boring another finds to be a blast. I had the insight that fun, as well as every other emotion we experience, is created, not discovered. Reading organic chemistry is fun if one chooses to see it that way. There is nothing inherently boring or exciting about anything. Anything.

Consider the possibility that this is true of all our experiences. We think that one experience is inherently more fun or enjoyable or exciting than another. Just the opposite is correct. We create the feeling and then attach it, incorrectly, to the experience.

That night, I had a conversation with a woman who was worried about money because she had less money than she would like and she was suffering because of it. She dramatized her worries by saying she was “in survival.” Her circumstance of having less money than she would like describes the condition of every human being on the planet no matter how much money they have. She chose to call this condition being “in survival.”

I’m not saying poverty is preferable to riches (or that riches are preferable to poverty). But consider what becomes available if we accept that our happiness is independent of our circumstances and that we can be happy no matter our circumstances. Not because those circumstances are inherently happy or unhappy but because we choose how we will be in the face of our circumstances.

We think our circumstances have to be great for us to be happy. This is a trick we play on ourselves to keep us trying to fix our circumstances and then wondering, with each fix, why we aren’t yet happy (certainly a new car, new house, new relationship, new job will change everything. Right?).

Until we recognize that our happiness is independent of our circumstances, we are doomed to live the saying,”The more things change, the more they remain the same.”