On ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’, and why ‘Fun’ is still radical.

While the Lynx Africa-scented fug of the manosphere saturates socials, hearing Cyndi Lauper’s 1984 classic ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ in my local coffee shop this week felt like a palate-cleanser. Of course, it’s a banger in and of itself – but also, like all the best bangers, it’s a banger with meaning.

As the song suggests, ‘Fun’ is a privilege. Fun isn’t experienced by everyone equally – in fact, it’s a scarce commodity: one might argue, even more scarce in 2026 than it was in 1984. Lauper’s line, ‘when the working day is done’ is probably one to which a lot of people would respond ‘…and when exactly is that?’.

The life of a worker doesn’t neatly finish at 5pm, by any stretch of the imagination. Alongside the day job, there’s household and caring labour, and we all know this weight isn’t fairly divided. Parents, too, have less access to fun, unless you really vibe out on 12-minute snatches of conversation between your child’s last and next grievous calamity. Everyone is witnessing world events, and feeling their impact. Taking all that together, many – if not most - of us are running on a major fun-deficit.

What is fun, in 2026?

Let’s say you make time to have some fun – your working day is done, just like Cyndi’s, and you’re off to walk in the sun (I accidentally typed ‘work in the sun’ there first: make of that what you will). Where are you going to go for it? You’ll probably want to meet friends, but that will be harder to schedule if you or they are shift workers. You might decide to get some food, but that can be expensive, and it’s tricky to find somewhere that works for everyone. Maybe you’re going to go ‘out out’ – but again, how much does entry cost, how much do drinks cost, and how much do you want to drink if you aim to dodge the anxiety tomorrow – or, what about if you’re sober?

This stressful little paragraph above shows just some of the complications around fun today, and makes the privilege piece even more visible: if none of the concerns I listed affected you, you’d be much more able to go out and get that good hit of fun. If not, you’re back in the fun deficit, thwarted by the barriers of this inequality.

Without fun, what happens?

So, maybe you can’t get much fun in your life at the moment – does that matter? Unsurprisingly, I believe fun matters a lot (it would be quite the plot twist if I didn’t!) – and therefore, I think pushing back on the inequality of fun is essential. Why is this? Of course, fun is fun – life is better if you’re able to enjoy parts of it (obvs). But how do we dig beyond that, and understand what exactly fun is - and why it’s such a big deal?

Perhaps we could identify two major factors behind fun’s importance: what we gain from a) the ingredients required to generate it, and b) time in the environment it creates. That’s a bit of a garbled thought so far, so let me flesh it out:

The recipe for fun

If you’re going to stir up an infusion of fun, the number one ingredient you need is safety. You can’t have proper fun unless you feel safe – it’s impossible to enjoy yourself while being stared down by a group of Reform voters, for example. Two more essential ingredients for fun are acceptance and trust. Feeling judged or walking on eggshells snuffs out fun immediately. Likewise, you have to put some trust in others in order to have fun – if you’re holding yourself back, you’re not sufficiently relaxed. Fun demands letting yourself out, and letting others in: trusting someone enough to be silly with them is crucial for fun, and for all good relationships.

Safety, acceptance and trust are big-hitters when it comes to creating a fulfilling life for ourselves. If we are able to regularly find them, it will significantly impact our life experience. So, just being able to access the ingredients necessary for fun means a lot, before we even get to the fun itself. But, there’s more! We’ve got the recipe to concoct the fun environment – what happens once we’ve brewed it?

While we’re having fun, we’re also enjoying a few excellent by-products. We’re connecting with others, and forging a shared history together. We’re also connecting to our own identity – what gives us fun also gives us a sense of who we are, both in and of ourselves and in relation to the group we’re in. There’s creativity, too: fun means play, and play is an excellent facilitator of creativity. Whether it’s a long-running in-joke, re-telling the story of your week for the audience of your friends, or plotting to take over the world together, there are many ways in which we are at our most creative when we’re having fun. So, fun also facilitates connection, identity and creativity - again, three massive contributors to our sense of fulfilment and life satisfaction. Clearly, fun isn’t frivolous – it’s fundamental (one for the pun fans there).

How does fun fit in therapy?

People often have an idea that therapy is strictly a place for melancholy – and, of course, the therapy room houses lots of complex and heavy emotions. However, therapy is here for all aspects of life, and all aspects of you – and as fun is a big part of that, it’s just as welcome as anything else that’s on your mind. In fact, as we’ve seen, fun may be an even more pertinent and radical subject to explore now – especially if you lack the privilege of easy access to it. Perhaps we could say, it’s time to start taking fun more seriously – after all, as our gal Cyndi knows, that’s all we really want…