What if the things you're doing for fun are, you realize, in fact, work?

The saddest thing about this question is that when I googled it, the top hits were advice to people who were stymied by the question, What do you do for fun? Doing things for fun isn't an end in itself, but an intimidating line of inquiry en route to something else you want.

So, from the eHarmony blog:

Have you ever given your dates a blank stare when they asked, “What do you do for fun?” Yes, it sounds like the simplest of questions, but it can be the one of the most stressful to answer.

Maybe you think back to what you did last Sunday, and you come up with this list: Snacking. Napping. Surfing Facebook. “You can’t tell your date that!” you scold yourself. “You’re supposed to be doing something interesting!”...

It's not that they want to do something interesting (other than have a successful date), but that they're afraid another person will view them as uninteresting.

This helps me a little with the question I'm trying to answer. I'm thinking: Perhaps when things you think you're doing for fun are, honestly, work, you've been looking at yourself from the imagined viewpoint of others and hoping to seem interesting/attractive/fun-loving to them, and you've lost track of how you really feel.

And here's some advice for people doing job interviews and anxious about the question — worded exactly the same way as it was on the dating blog: What do you do for fun? The advice, as you might imagine, is to have something specific to say that makes you seem like an active and constructive person. And leave out the illegal stuff! I'll quote this because I laughed out loud:

The point is that you enjoy things outside of work and that you have some way of communicating that enjoyment to other people, even if they don’t share that interest themselves. Or even if that interest is something societally disruptive and objectively unfun. Like cycling....

Back to my question in the post title. I invite you to talk about the realization that the things you've been doing for fun are, to be honest, work. Have you had this realization? When? What did you do with it? Did you abandon the activity or change how you did it or how you thought about it? You can also resist the question with ideas like: 1. "Fun" shouldn't be an important organizing principle, 2. The idea of "fun" is a substitute for something more meaningful that should be discovered and forefronted, and 3. Thinking in terms of "fun" ruins fun.*

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* And that's why we laugh at the comic strip with the line "Are we having fun yet?"). From the Wikipedia article on Zippy the Pinhead:

In regard to Zippy's famous catch phrase, at the 2003 University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, Griffith recalled the phone call from Bartlett's:

When Bartlett's approached me in—I forget what year, five or six years ago—I got a call from the editor. And he was going to give me credit for the "Are we having fun yet" saying, but he wanted to know exactly where Zippy had first said it. I did some research (I had no idea), and I eventually found... the strip "Back to Pinhead, the Punks and the Monks" from Yow #2 in 1979... That's the first time he said, "Are we having fun yet?" Certainly not intended by me to be anything more than another non sequitur coming out of Zippy's mind.

Zippy's signature expression of surprise is "Yow!"

I have Yow #2 somewhere in this house. I know because I show myself buying it on Page 13 of my Amsterdam Notebooks. (The Dutch salesman at the comic books store pronounces "Yow" as we say "Yo," and I'm delusional enough to think he'd like to hear a 42-year-old American lady riff on the "yow"/"yo" distinction in English.)

But I don't need to look for my copy of the book to find that ancient strip. Here.