Are We Having Fun Still?: Essays on Whether We Still Enjoy Entertainment

Are We Having Fun Still?: Essays on Whether We Still Enjoy Entertainment

The essay collection for you if you've ever spent forty minutes scrolling for something to watch, then watched nothing—this book is your intervention. Joseph Blackhurst has written the modern cultural autopsy we've all been avoiding: a hilarious, uncomfortable, deeply researched examination of why we no longer enjoy the entertainment we can't stop consuming. Think Chuck Klosterman meets your most brutally honest group chat—equal parts pop culture criticism, personal confession, and existential crisis. In the vein of But What If We're Wrong? and The Nineties , Blackhurst dissects: • Why you've listened to 300 hours of a podcast hosted by millionaires complaining about success • How TikTok rewired your brain so thoroughly you can't finish a three-minute comedy sketch • The exact moment sports betting apps turned Sunday football into an anxiety disorder • Why you own 418 video games but have only finished five • What it means that you'd rather watch someone else go hiking than go hiking yourself From algorithmic rug-cleaning videos to the death of movie theaters, from fantasy football group chats to feral cats (yes, really), Blackhurst maps our collective descent into consumption without enjoyment—and he's not afraid to implicate himself in every chapter. This isn't a book about how technology ruined everything. It's about how we're all complicit, exhausted, and still clicking "next episode" at 2 AM. For fans of cultural criticism that's as funny as it is unsettling—and anyone who's ever wondered if they actually like the things they spend their free time doing.