One of the most valuable and least tangible skills you can learn in business and life is good judgement.
Here’s an example. When they start out, an entry level analyst at a venture fund finds every deal tremendously exciting. The next Spotify! We can transform humanity! Unadulterated bliss begins to fade with loss of ignorance, or knowledge. As the analyst evaluates more startups, they become familiar with the signs of good investments and bad ones. With the threshold for them to be impressed rising, the analyst becomes skeptical and jaded. That’s why partners scoff at most deals, why Andreesen Horowitz rejects 99.3% of prospects. The partners poke holes in theories the analyst thought to be bulletproof.
Insofar as you continue to learn, you continue to develop better judgement. It happens in every area of life, from investing to relationships. As you learn more, you refine your judgement, and the ‘threshold’ that needs to be crossed to…find a company worth pursuing…or a company worth applying to…or a friend worth making…rises.
That’s judgement developing over time — a good thing.
The problem is when judgement comes with a cost. What’s the cost? Losing the ability to enjoy the simple pleasures in which one previously indulged — like when homemade food doesn’t satisfy because you’re used to eating out, or the person who goes yachting no longer enjoys sitting in their backyard.
Now that is a major problem.
Why?
It’s basically the loss of one’s ability to have fun. To enjoy oneself.
And the ability to have fun is the most important thing to be happy in this world.
I think it’s pretty simple. The ability to have fun — enjoy oneself, if you prefer — determines whether a person is happy or not.
I’ll admit it, I’m not great at having fun, at least not the light, casual way. I need to be doing something — speaking with someone, or reading, or doing push push-ups. But as I was writing this, I thought, that’s okay. For me, fun is doing stuff, not doing nothing. Anyways, I think that’s true for lots of people — that creating is more satisfying in the long-term than consuming; investing more than splurging. For the sake of this essay, I’m not going to define fun and instead say, you know it when you feel it. You know when you’re having fun.
But fun, really?! That’s what determines a person’s happiness level?! The truth is, no. The famous decades-long Harvard study showed the close human relationships were the single greatest predictor of happiness in the long term, not some abstract ‘ability to have fun.’
Other values are important too. Being a giving and generous person — crucial. That creates meaning. Empathy — essential, if you want people to like you. So on and so forth.
But consider Pascal’s famous quote, all human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.
What did he mean?
Here’s my take. People do bad things because they lack the the ability to enjoy themselves. Without the ability to have fun, they get bored. When they’re bored, they do bad things to fill the gaping holes in time and meaning left in their lives — i.e. crime, drugs, TikTok addiction, etc.
I don’t think ‘fun’ or the ability to have it is some lofty value. It doesn’t make you a good person or a moral one.
But it means you’ll enjoy your life. It means you’ll be happy. And without happiness, what’s the point?
One of the reasons I am in love with Tel Aviv (and Israel) is because people know how to have fun. It sounds simple, like playing backgammon. Having fun?!
But think again. As I wrote last week, so many people are just sad. They are lonely, anxious and depressed. With our culture of Netflix and notifications, emojis and entertainment, it’s hard. We’ve raised the bar. The required dose keeps getting higher and higher. “In the last decade, sadness and anxiety has increased for every teenage demographic in every state,” wrote Derek Thompson last year. “This is the greatest failure of American society,” wrote a Twitter user. Check out the data, it’s startling. In 2017—pre-COVID—a whole one-third (36.7%) of high schools students reported feeling “persistently sad or hopeless.”
But in Israel, oftentimes…this just doesn’t seem to be the case. People seem to know how to have fun.
Picture this. I just walked outside. It’s 11:30pm on a Tel Aviv night, cool air, stars, bars bustling, people talking to each other, some drinking, some smoking, very, very few on their phones. That’s Tel Aviv at 11:30pm on a Monday. It’s also Tel Aviv at 11:30am on a Tuesday. And 2:30pm on a Thursday. It doesn’t matter. Anytime of day, you see people talking, tremendously present, laughing, crying, having fun…
Ok, that’s just my city. And anyways, what does it have to do with anxiety and depression? Let’s look at the data. According to numbers from Maccabi, Israel’s second-largest healthcare provider, the incidence rates of depression for Israeli adolescents between the ages of 12-17 was 4.0 per 1,000 in 2017 (pre-COVID) and 5.7 in 2021. I wanted to publish this article as soon as possible, so I didn’t have time for further research, so if you have other data that confirms or contradicts these statistics, please send me. But if these numbers are true, the difference in rates of depression between the US and Israel is stunning. That’s not to say Israel doesn’t have its fair share of issues, of course, and people are sad everywhere, but the overall trend tells a story that, at the very least, people are happier in Israel, and my conclusion is that one of the reasons that’s true is because they are better at knowing how to have fun.
Today we live in a fractured world. People are angry, about the rising cost of living, political leaders, social policy. You name it, they’re angry about it. And they’re fighting. They take to the streets of Twitter, the pages of the New York Times, the broken roads of Ukraine.
I see all this and you know what I wonder?
What if it’s all because people don’t know how to have fun anymore?
I mean, it sounds silly. Wars and conflict have existed as long as humans.
But something about Pascal’s quote rings so true and poignant. All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.
Let’s have more fun.
Some golden nuggets that came to mind in writing this piece but didn’t quite fit:
This is Water - David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement address
This quote from Rules of Civility by Amor Towles:
My father was never much one for whining. In the nineteen years I knew him, he hardly spoke of his turn in the Russian army, or of making ends meat with my mom, or of the day that she walked out on us. He certainly didn’t complain about his health as it failed. But one night near the end, as I was sitting at his bedside trying to entertain him with an anecdote about some nincompoop with whom I worked, out of the blue he shared a reflection which seemed such a non sequitur that I attributed it to delirium. Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee. Only decades later I would realize that he had been giving me a piece of advice.
Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane—in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath—she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger. What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the conclusion of his own course, was that this risk should not be taken lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.”
You are an incredibly gifted writer, Andy. More articles like this please.
Nice piece