The Joy Crisis: Why Sustainability can’t be serious and fun at the same time?
Sustainability efforts often feel overly serious, educational, and dry — leaving joy out of the equation. But if we want sustainability and low-carbon lifestyles to truly resonate, we need to make them fun. Treating fun as optional isn’t just a missed opportunity — it’s a design flaw. Fun matters, and irreverence, creativity, and playfulness might just be the secret ingredients our sustainability recipe has been missing.
It’s summer now (well, at least in the Northern Hemisphere), and this is the time when many people take some time off and, in general, try to enjoy summertime and have fun. This got me thinking about one thing that you usually wouldn’t associate with fun: sustainability.
At its core, sustainability is very serious — it explores fundamental questions about our ability to flourish in the era of climate crisis. But does that necessarily mean it can’t be fun at the same time?
Fun is missing from far too many sustainability efforts — especially those people interact with. From joyless sustainable alternatives to boring corporate messaging to guilt-driven activism, we’ve somehow made sustainability in general and low-carbon lifestyles feel like a chore or homework. That’s not just a missed opportunity — it’s a design failure. If sustainability is ever going to be normalized at scale, it can’t just be serious. It has to be desirable. And for that, fun isn’t optional — it’s essential.
Sustainability = Purpose without pleasure?
Vacation is a good example. A while ago, I listened to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Climate One, which focused on staycations — sharing stories and highlighting the benefits of taking a vacation close (or even very close) to home. I agree with everything that was said in praise of the staycation. But the reality is, most people want to travel and explore new places — not their own backyard.
The data supports this: more Americans, for example, are planning to travel this year, with strong demand for international trips. So while the staycation may be a far more sustainable vacation option, for most people it’s not something they’ll actively choose — because, no matter how you look at it, it’s just less fun. In reality, it’s something people might settle for if they have no other option, usually because of economic constraints. At the end of the day, like many other sustainable alternatives, the staycation simply doesn’t offer the same kind of fun as the more carbon-intensive vacation it’s meant to replace — so how can we expect people to go for it?
In his book, FUN!: What Entertainment Tells Us About Living a Good Life, Alan McKee suggests that “fun is pleasure without purpose.” Sustainability, by contrast, may have become the exact opposite: purpose without pleasure. This feels especially true in the era of climate crisis, given the strong connections between fun, capitalism, and consumerism. As Richard Wilk puts it: “The problem of climate change is overwhelmingly serious, and in discussing solutions we want to set off alarms about consumerism, not celebrate its many pleasures. Nor do we want to open ourselves to accusations of frivolity, taking a problem lightly.”
That is a valid point. How can we talk about, or even prioritize, fun when our house is on fire? Isn’t that a dangerous distraction from the serious and urgent work on climate action? This kind of thinking draws from a long-standing critique, especially among thinkers like those of the Frankfurt School, which, as Wilk suggests, were particularly negative about fun, and believed that “a good life requires resistance to capitalism, not surrendering to the temptation of fun.”
However, with all due respect to the serious philosophers and scholars, who turn their nose up at fun, I find this dichotomy to be flawed — and certainly not helpful to anyone genuinely interested in promoting sustainability. Just look at Solitaire Townsend’s excellent list of “26 Ways to Ruin a Sustainability Story,” which (satirically, of course) echoes this same suspicion of fun, and you’ll get a clearer sense of how absurd it is to downplay joy, humor, or playfulness when confronting serious issues.
Will more fun fix everything that’s not working with sustainability? Of course not. But here’s the thing: you can’t fight fun with just facts, dire forecasts, or bland talk about the upside of meeting net-zero targets. It’s not working — and it’s unlikely to work, no matter how right the case we’re making is. To counter the fun (real or perceived) people get from unsustainable activities, we need to inject a healthy dose of fun into our sustainability recipe, generating solutions that are joyful and don’t feel like homework. We need to fight fire with fire or otherwise, most people will continue to ignore it.
When Sustainability Gets Playful: Oatly, Lush, and Beyond
It’s not that the current landscape is completely bleak. There are some examples out there that offer inspiration on how to create a more productive balance. Take, for example, companies like Oatly, whose marketing strategy — centered on fun, irreverence, and not taking itself too seriously — helped turn it into a successful brand that also promotes serious issues, from its core product (a milk alternative) to carbon labeling. Another example is Lush, which has adopted a fun and cheeky approach to promote packaging-free cosmetics, or “naked products,” as it calls them — helping normalize the idea that packaging is optional, not necessarily a must. And it’s done all of that without (almost) any social media activity in recent years, due to concerns over safety and data usage — demonstrating that seriousness and fun can go hand in hand.
I believe repair cafés are also a good example — and some might even consider the surprise bags from Too Good To Go, with their gamified approach to food waste reduction, as another. Activism offers some interesting examples as well: in its early years, Extinction Rebellion used creative, often theatrical, and fun approaches to promote nonviolent civil disobedience in the fight against climate change, based on the idea that rebellion should be fun to attract more people and gain more attention. A more recent example can be found in Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in NYC, which showed how to address serious issues while taking a creative, and often fun, approach to communicating them.
While these examples show that combining seriousness and fun in sustainability is possible, they’re still the exception rather than the rule. And that needs to change — not just for the sake of having more fun with sustainability, but to meet people where they are and open their minds to what sustainability can offer, using fun as a lubricant for engagement, action, and behavior change. I’ll emphasize again: fun is not a magic bullet. I’m not sure, for example, if it can make staycations truly desirable. Some solutions simply won’t work — no matter how much fun you add — and need to be replaced with better alternatives.
Ultimately, as Wilk puts it, “making consumer culture more sustainable requires that we take fun seriously.” Hopefully, this understanding pokes some holes in the way-too-serious, too-little-fun approach we’ve taken so far — sooner rather than later.
Raz Godelnik is an Associate Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons School of Design — The New School. He is the author of Rethinking Corporate Sustainability in the Era of Climate Crisis. You can follow me on LinkedIn.
