Type 2 Fun

I recently learned about the different levels of fun.

It turns out this isn't something someone made up online. It traces back to a geologist. In the mid-1980s, a University of Alaska geology professor and mountaineer named Rainer Newberry coined what became known as the "fun scale" while doing fieldwork in terrain that stayed frozen nine months of the year (Iaccarino, 2024). He never wrote it down or published it. It simply passed from one friend to the next until climber Kelly Cordes popularized it years later, and it eventually made its way into Matt Samet's Climbing Dictionary in 2011 (Samet, 2011). Today it's common language among climbers, trail runners, and anyone who spends real time outside.

In terms of fun there are three levels. Type one, type two, and type three.

Type one fun refers to any kind of experience that is enjoyable in the present moment and remains pleasant to remember afterwards as well. Think of an easy trail run on a clear morning. You enjoy it the whole time, you like remembering it, and you would happily do it again. It is fun, but it does not ask much of you.

On the other end of the spectrum is type three fun. These experiences are not fun at all in the moment nor in recollection. This is rolling an ankle miles from the trailhead and limping the whole way back. It is the kind of thing you never want to happen and never want to repeat, and there is little to no growth waiting for you on the other side.

Type two fun is where things get interesting.

These are the experiences that only become fun in retrospect. In the moment they might involve discomfort, some stress and suffering. These times can be very difficult and push us to our limits. This is grinding up a long climb with your legs on fire and your lungs screaming, certain the summit is never going to come. However, when they are over and the fear wears off, what we are left with is actually a fondness of the events which unfolded. These are often referred to as "character building experiences" and allow us to see ourselves step into a greater version of ourselves.

There is a reason the memory outlasts the misery, and it is not just nostalgia.

The psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman spent years showing that the self who lives through an experience and the self who remembers it are not the same. The experiencing self feels every second of the strain. But the remembering self keeps only a summary, and that summary is shaped by two moments: the most intense point, and the end (Kahneman, 2011). He called this the peak-end rule. The hard middle fades. What stays is the peak and the finish, and the version of you that got there.

There is a deeper layer to it as well. Psychologists separate two kinds of well-being. Hedonic well-being is about pleasure and comfort, the easy morning run. Eudaimonic well-being comes from meaning, growth, and effort in pursuit of something that matters, and it tends to line up more closely with a genuinely fulfilling life (in-Training, 2020). You might not feel joy every second while you are in it, but the effort still builds something.

Type two fun is very fulfilling and leads you to becoming a more capable human being.

Aim for type two fun.

References

Iaccarino, A. (2024). Ground truth: Geology and the origin of Type 2 fun. ridj-it. https://www.ridj-it.com/single-post/ground-truth-geology-and-the-origin-of-type-2-fun

in-Training. (2020). Flourishing and the well-lived life: The differential impact of hedonia and eudaimonia on our experiences. https://in-training.org/flourishing-and-the-well-lived-life-the-differential-impact-of-hedonia-and-eudaimonia-on-our-experiences-18760

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Samet, M. (2011). The climbing dictionary: Mountaineering slang, terms, neologisms & lingo. Mountaineers Books.