#268: The 3 tiers of fun

According to Molly Young

May 17, 2026

Today I’m welcoming an esteemed guest writer in the form of Molly Young! Maybe you’ve read Molly’s work in places like the NY Times, New York mag, or N+1. Perhaps you subscribe to her charming newsletter, The Life and Errors of Molly Young—I marvel at her post ideas, like this list of available New York vanity license plates. Maybe you purchased her irreverent pregnancy zine, Privacy, which I recommended in 15 things last July (she loves zines). Often when I read Molly’s writing, I think: No one could have written this but her. A rare quality these days.

Molly was one of the first people I asked to get coffee with in 2019 when I was preparing to leave Man Repeller and go freelance. I’d always admired her work and shouldn’t have been surprised to find she was extremely sweet and generous, too. When the pandemic foiled my freelance plans, she was also the one who told me to join Substack. And look at us now! Our toddlers have the same puffer coat.

Today she’s done me (us) the honor of breaking down the three tiers of fun, which she didn’t invent but expands for us as a curious messenger. Years ago, she mentioned the tiers offhandedly somewhere on the internet, and it made such an impression on my brother that he still refers to it sometimes. Today she’s giving the topic its full due. Read on if you, too, think “fun” is an overly general term in need of some diversifying.

The three tiers of fun

Don’t you love when folk wisdom is ratified by science? It makes my heart pitter-pitter when a medieval practice or indigenous custom is later “proven” to be effective at treating fever or parasites or whatever. Not because I am a paragon of rationality but because the congruence of intuition and peer-review demonstrates anew how wily and creative humans are, and have always been, in our attempts to soothe suffering.

If you are reading this you are probably suffering in one way or another. Aren’t we all! In an optimistic mood you might believe that suffering makes you wiser. In a pessimistic mood you might think, simply: “I can’t go on.” Perhaps, like me, you toggle between the modes daily.

I’ve invaded Haley’s newsletter today to suggest a third way to think about suffering. Not as a replacement for the above binary, but as a devious addition. It was 2019 when my friend Lake told me about the “Tiers of Fun,” which emerged—from what I can tell—from outdoor adventure / endurance sports culture of the late 20th century1. The schema goes by many names— Levels of Fun, Types of Fun, the Fun Scale.

Here’s how Lake explained it to me:

Tier 1 is when you do something, and it is fun.
Tier 2 is when you do something, and it is not fun at the time, but it is fun in retrospect.
Tier 3 is when you do something, and it is not fun at the time, nor in retrospect—but it is fun or funny to tell your friends about.

As with any informal taxonomy, the specifics vary regionally. And while I am not an avid birdwatcher (tier 1?) or triathlete (tier 3?), the utility of the system immediately struck me as transferable to any lifestyle.

Here’s how mine populates:

Tier 1: Bubble bath. Picnic.
Tier 2: Surfing in cold water. Practicing piano. Snaking a clogged drain. Assembling furniture.
Tier 3: Being dumped in an unusual fashion. Expelling a tapeworm. Walking around in public with a fresh period stain on pants.

Mileages vary, of course. One person’s wacky anecdote is another person’s trauma. The first thing I want to know when I meet someone is: how do you populate your tiers? Are you more terrified of physical hardship or emotional humiliation? Do you value novelty over comfort?

What is easiest to laugh at in retrospect? What is never funny to you?

The efficacy of any folk remedy (including a psychological one) exists independent of any understanding about how it works. That is the beauty. And yet it is tempting to speculate about why the Tiers have been so helpful to me, and perhaps also to you, at laundering certain forms of suffering into good or worthy experiences.

Take Tier 2. Many classic Tier 2 activities, it turns out, map onto research about how our brains process dopamine. Anna Lembke has written about the way that forcing your body to undergo a tolerable spell of discomfort—strength training, ice baths—can trick your brain into releasing compensatory dopamine rewards afterward.

Tier 3, meanwhile, brings to mind the classic Nora Ephron line that “Everything is copy.” Ephron was succinctly positing that a shitty experience can be rendered valuable by the mere act of narrativizing it. We can also, why not, read a tenet of Buddhism into Tier 3 experiences. To transform pain into “a story” imposes a process of detachment, which alleviates suffering. Or so they say…

I’m being a little reckless with language here. There’s a chasm between an experience that is “not as acutely painful” and an experience that is “fun.” But I believe this is where the charm of the ToF system originates: its imprecision is also its facility at narrowing the chasm into a manageable—a leapable!—gap.

Finally, we shouldn’t overlook the social uses of the Tiers. How many vacations and first dates and honeymoons are ruined over flawed assumptions about someone else’s taxonomy? Group activities—by which I mean anything from “dinner with friends” to “being in a marriage”—might become more harmonious if we shared our stupid little charts with each other and held animated discussions about which forms of suffering are redemptive and which forms irredeemably miserable.

Above all, we must establish with absolute certainty whether “surprise birthday party” counts as Tier 1 or Tier 3 fun in the hearts of those we love most. So much depends upon that.

Thank you, Molly!!

Maybe Baby

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