The Great American Fun Shortage

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Big Take – "The Great American Fun Shortage"

Date: July 17, 2026
Host: Sarah Holder (Bloomberg News)
Guest: Ben Steverman (Bloomberg, Economic and Social Trends Reporter)

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Episode Overview

In this episode of the Big Take, host Sarah Holder invites Bloomberg reporter Ben Steverman to explore the idea of a "fun shortage" in America—a growing disconnect between Americans’ desire for shared, joyful experiences and the actual availability and affordability of such opportunities. While both Sarah and Ben describe their own efforts to enjoy summer in New York, the discussion quickly broadens into unsettling national trends: declining access to fun, its social and political consequences, and the critical importance of fun for individual and societal well-being.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining "Fun" (04:23–05:00)

• Ben Steverman’s Definition:
  “The fun that really makes a difference in our lives is shared fun... Shared experiences that get you out in the world with other people, whether that’s going on vacation with your family, going out to nightlife, or a concert with your friends, even, like, small talk with a stranger in your community.”
  (Ben Steverman, 04:23–05:00)

• Screen Time vs. Real-Life Interaction:
  Amusing digital content (e.g., scrolling TikTok) is not a substitute for genuine shared experience.

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2. The Decline of Shared Fun (05:00–06:37)

• Less Face-to-Face Time:
  Americans are spending more time at home and on screens, with Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing a significant drop in direct socializing and a rise in solitary, digital activities.

• Shrinking Venues and Opportunities:
  There are fewer places (e.g., nightclubs, bars, arts and sports venues) available, and those that remain are more crowded and harder to access.

  “We basically haven’t kept up with population, we haven’t kept up with demand. It makes it harder to get a tee time at a golf course... The walls are kind of closing in on us and we feel like we can’t get out.”
  (Ben Steverman, 05:55–06:37)

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3. Factors Behind the Fun Shortage (06:37–07:47)

• Population vs. Venues:
  The population has grown without a parallel increase in places to gather. In some cases, the number of venues has decreased due to:

  • Regulatory barriers (e.g., strict local licensing)
  • Rising costs (construction, real estate, operations)
  • Long-tail effects of COVID (permanent closures, frozen development during recession)

• Aftereffects of COVID:
  Recovery has not kept pace with the renewed demand for out-of-home experiences post-pandemic.

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4. Fun and Inequality (07:09–08:14)

• Stratified Access:
  Rising wealth at the top has driven up prices for limited experiences (concerts, vacation rentals), pushing out the middle class and upper-middle class from opportunities they used to enjoy.

  "A huge segment of the middle class and even the upper middle class can feel locked out of these experiences they used to do."
  (Ben Steverman, 07:22–07:47)

• Wealth Accumulation and Access Gap:
  Accelerated wealth at the very top coincides with scarcity, scaling prices further out of reach for most.

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5. Behavior of the "Fun Industry" (08:14–09:57)

• Limited Supply Expansion:
  Rather than creating new destinations, many operators (e.g., concert promoters, theme parks) simply boost prices and add premium experiences.

  “If you want to have like the experience you used to have a decade ago, you need to pay more and more and more.”
  (Ben Steverman, 08:23–09:07)

• Obstacles to New Entrants:

  • High construction and land costs (example: building a new summer camp)
  • Limited availability of properties suited for fun venues

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6. Why Fun Matters (12:29–14:29)

• Not Just a Luxury, but a Necessity:

  • Fun is fundamental to happiness, mental health, and social connection.
  • Social isolation and lack of communal fun can lead to higher mortality.
  • Political polarization can result: European studies show closures of local gathering places correlate with rises in nationalist/right-wing voting.

  “It’s important to how we feel about each other and our politics... People who are socially isolated are much more likely to die younger.”
  (Ben Steverman, 12:46–14:11)

  • Boredom from excessive digital engagement further accentuates dissatisfaction.

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7. Unmet Demand for Fun (14:29–15:34)

• Persistent Hunger for Shared Experience:

  • Despite inflation, high travel costs, and screen addiction narratives, Americans continue to prioritize travel and outing-related spending.
  • For many, digital entertainment is a fallback when real experiences are financially or logistically out of reach.

  “People are kind of desperate to get off a screen. It’s just that sometimes you have no alternative because you can’t afford to do anything else.”
  (Ben Steverman, 14:47–15:34)

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8. Potential Solutions & Policy Innovations (15:34–17:05)

• Easing Regulatory Burdens:

  • Example: New York and Boston relaxing liquor laws and issuing new licenses to encourage more nightlife venues.
  • Recognition among policymakers of the need to foster community spaces and excitement.

• Community-Driven Initiatives:

  • Free or low-cost public activities (e.g., group singing events in parks)
  • Grassroots organizing required, but can be sustainably rewarding

  “There’s some groups in New York where people get together and they sing together and they all study the music... it’s completely free except for the time of the person who has to organize those things. And that’s a lot of work. But it can be really satisfying...”
  (Ben Steverman, 16:28–17:05)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On What Makes Fun Fun:
  “My definition of fun is shared experiences that get you out in the world with other people.”
  (Ben Steverman, 04:23)

• On Inequality:
  “A huge segment of the middle class and even the upper middle class can feel locked out of these experiences that they used to do.”
  (Ben Steverman, 07:22)

• On the Social Necessity of Fun:
  “I think it’s why we’re alive. It’s sort of the point of life in some ways... The consequences of [not having fun] are profound.”
  (Ben Steverman, 12:46)

• On Community and Politics:
  “Shortage of kind of community fun activities is shifting politics to the right and also making people feel like they're left behind.”
  (Ben Steverman, 14:11)

• Optimistic Close:
  “Maybe someone listening will create their own free fun in their community.”
  (Sarah Holder, 17:05)

  “Let’s hope so.” (Ben Steverman, 17:10)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:43 – Conversation begins
• 04:23 – Defining “fun”
• 05:00–06:37 – Decline in the availability of shared experiences
• 07:09–08:14 – Impact of income inequality on fun access
• 08:23–09:57 – How the “fun industry” and high-entry barriers shape scarcity
• 12:29–14:29 – Why fun is essential for individuals and society
• 15:34–17:05 – Policy responses and ideas for expanding access to fun

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Episode Tone & Style

The conversation is friendly yet informed, blending relatable personal anecdotes with up-to-date research and reporting. While a sense of frustration and urgency about the “fun shortage” persists, the tone is solution-oriented, ending on a note of possibility for community and grassroots action.

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Transcript

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[Sarah Holder]

Bloomberg Audio Studios podcasts Radio News Ben, welcome to the studio.

[Ben Steverman]

Thank you.

[Sarah Holder]

Have you been having a fun summer so far?

[Ben Steverman]

I've been having an amazing summer.

[Sarah Holder]

Thank you. An amazing summer. What have you been up to?

[Ben Steverman]

Well, last weekend I was at the beach with my family. And then the weekends before that we had amazing Pride weekend in New York. And then before that I was on a boat, on a dance party, on a. On a boat in the Hudson river when the Knicks won the NBA championship.

[Sarah Holder]

Electric.

[Ben Steverman]

That was stuff happening in the city.

[Sarah Holder]

Absolutely. I've honestly been having a really fun summer too. I've been traveling a little bit, but mostly like enjoying being in New York, going to the beach. Now I'm watching a lot of soccer at bars in my neighborhood. I've been having a lot of fun. But Ben, you've been reporting on this depressing reality that nationwide fun is actually on the decline. Some of this fun we're having is very hard won.

[Ben Steverman]

Yeah, I've. I've been thinking about this a lot over, over the last few months. And thinking about this summer as a summer of scarcity, in some ways, fun is harder to find. It's more expensive, it's less available. It's a depressing sense that either you can't afford to do the things you want to do, or it's just like you have to think, like, way in advance and do a lot of planning and. And the roads are full, the parking lots are full, the concerts sold out. Like, there's a lot of. There's a lot of angst about it, I think, out there.

[Sarah Holder]

And that sucks at a personal level, but that can't be good at a societal level either, right, Ben?

[Ben Steverman]

So when you look at happiness in America, like, the United States is like the place on the globe where their happiness has gone down the most. The World Happiness Report is this comprehensive look every year, and it really looked this year at, like, why people in the United States are getting less happy. Why are they less satisfied with their lives? And it can't be the Internet because other countries are at least as online as we are. But, like, there's something else going on with America. And I'm positing, I believe, believe that it is something to do with our availability of fun and shared experiences.

[Sarah Holder]

This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. Today on the show, in the US There's a mismatch between fund supply and fun demand. I talked to Ben Steverman, who covers economic and social trends for Bloomberg, about what's driving the fund shortage in America and what can be done about it. I'm wondering if we could just start with a definition here. What is fun?

[Ben Steverman]

This is a little bit my own definition, but I think this is based on real happiness research that I've talked to scholars about. The fun that really makes a difference in our lives is shared fun. If you just look scrolling through TikTok like, okay, that's like, amusing, but it's not fun. My definition of fun is shared experiences that get you out in the world with other people, whether that's going on vacation with your family, going out to nightlife, or a concert with your friends, even, like, small talk with a stranger in your community. Like, that is also fun.

[Sarah Holder]

And what did you find in your reporting that showed that those kinds of fun, those collective shared fun experiences, are getting harder to come by?

[Ben Steverman]

Well, when you ask people, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually does an annual study of how Americans spend their time, we are spending a lot less time communicating face to face over the last 20 years, and we're spending a Lot more time interfacing with screens and computers. We're spending a lot more time at home rather than getting out. And in the world, we're seeing fewer, like, arts and entertainment programs, we're seeing less sports. The walls are kind of closing in on us and we feel like we can't get out. And I'm trying to figure out, like, what is the barrier that's preventing people from going out and having more fun.

[Sarah Holder]

One of the factors that you identified is that the number of ven for having fun has been declining. What's behind this scarcity?

[Ben Steverman]

One thing that's happening here is that the US population has gone up and the places to have fun have not. In some cases, they've gone down. Like, it is so hard to open a new nightclub or bar in America because of a lot of local regulations, because of rising costs, the sort of geographic constraints in a lot of popular destinations. So we basically haven't kept up with population, we haven't kept up with demand. And it just makes it harder to like, get it. Get tea time at a golf course or the waiting list at your local country club is even longer because everybody wants to join. Sort of everywhere you turn, there's just less available for you.

[Sarah Holder]

Does any of this have to do with the long tail of COVID where a lot of spaces for IRL gathering close down, or is something else going on here?

[Ben Steverman]

I think that's absolutely the case. When you think about like local nightlife and local live music venues, that was like a really challenging time. The other thing that happened, I think is like that recession during COVID meant that we kind of stopped building new stuff in that, in that period of time. And now demand is roared back and those places aren't available.

[Sarah Holder]

An important point that you write about is that not everyone is experiencing this fund shortage in the same way. Right. How does income inequality exacerbate ways that people are having a harder time accessing fun?

[Ben Steverman]

If you look at what's happened with the stock market, it's. We've gone up so much. What happens is some people can afford to bid up the prices of that vacation rental. Other people, we're stuck making a salary, we're still saving for retirement, we can't afford it. And like a huge segment of the middle class and even the upper middle class can feel locked out of these experiences that they used to do.

[Sarah Holder]

How new is that dynamic though?

[Ben Steverman]

I think that the wealth creation over the last decade in the United States is really significant, like, is really record breaking, especially at that higher end. And so that enables people to spend more. The other thing is that it coincides with this lack of supply. And those things are coming together.

[Sarah Holder]

And the fun industry is contributing to this dynamic too. Right. How are businesses and institutions designed to serve up fun, responding to the shortage?

[Ben Steverman]

Well, one way you would think to respond to this is that you create more supply. You create new destinations, new beachfront resorts, and there's a little bit of that. But a lot of what's happening is that if you are the major concert venue, if you are running a major tour of an artist, like you're the only game in town, you can charge more and more and more. Even if like the actual ticket, the sort of the base ticket hasn't gone up that much. You create these experiences whether at a concert or at a theme park or in an airplane or in a hotel, where if you want to have like the experience you used to have a decade ago, you need to pay more and more and more.

[Sarah Holder]

And you mentioned this idea that it's not so easy to just like open up a new concert venue, open a new sleepaway camp that, that is expensive. Say more about that. Like, why aren't there new opportunities for entrepreneurial fun makers to, to get into the business right now?

[Ben Steverman]

The cost of construction really soared. Tariffs haven't helped. Like you look at summer camps for kids. One of the main reasons is like building a new dining hall with a brand new industrial kitchen, like, and buying

[Sarah Holder]

all the food for all those mouths.

[Ben Steverman]

Buying all the food for all those mouths. That's the important, that' expensive thing. You can put up a cabin and put some bunks in there. It's really about the infrastructure. It's also about finding those special properties, like a lot of those special properties where you might put a summer camp or even a hotel or vacation resort, like it's already bought up by somebody else.

[Sarah Holder]

So the supply side of fun looks pretty bleak. After the break, we'll talk more about the demand side, why Americans still want to have fun and how to address the shortage. That's next.

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[Sarah Holder]

So Ben, unlike a shortage of gas or food or housing, a shortage of fun sounds like manageable for a society. Maybe fun is a nice to have, not a need to have. But fun is actually really important. Why is it so important that people have fun?

[Ben Steverman]

I think it's why we're alive. It's sort of the point of life in some ways. It's important to our mood. It's important to how we feel about each other and our politics. And it makes people incredibly unhappy if they feel like the only thing they're doing is working and staring at a screen. And in fact like studies have looked at like how do people feel about like digital tools and using digital tools and like what is it? It often makes people even more bored. Like you think you're having fun and like actually the opposite is happening. And it's not just boredom, although the boredom is really important. It's also the fact that you're not connected with your neighbor or your family. Or your friends. The consequences of that are profound. People who are socially isolated are much more likely to die younger. And the other thing is our politics. There's been really interesting studies coming out of Europe looking at what happens when a local gathering spot closes down. In the UK, they've looked at pubs. In France, they looked at bar tabacs, which are like local sort of betting. You can kind of place a bet, buy a newspaper, buy some tobacco, have a drink, coffee, whatever. Thousands of these have closed down. And both of those phenomenon in a small town predict voting for nationalist parties in those countries. So I think that there's a reason to think that a shortage of kind of community fun activities is shifting politics to the right and also making people feel like they're left behind, especially in small towns and places where fun is less accessible.

[Sarah Holder]

And I mean, we were talking a lot about the fact that fun is harder to access. It's also getting more expensive. But still there's this demand in America for fun. Despite the rising cost of living, despite inflation, despite, despite high interest rates, Americans at least are spending on travel. Why is that?

[Ben Steverman]

When we write about this sometimes, and I think I've been guilty of this in the past, there's a sense of like, oh, Americans are addicted to their phones and they like, they, they're, we're antisocial now and nobody wants to get out and do anything. And I actually think the opposite. When you look at the evidence out there, like people are desperate to get out. When we had gas prices spikes earlier this year because of the war with Iran, it barely dented travel demand. You look at number of people passing through airports, you look at travel spending generally. You look at national park visitors like we're at or very near record levels. People are kind of desperate to get off a screen. It's just that sometimes you have no alternative because you can't afford to do anything else.

[Sarah Holder]

Ben, are there efforts being made at a government level, at a policy level to address this challenge? What can be done?

[Ben Steverman]

One idea out there is making it easier to create new places for people to gather and have fun. New York State, for example, has very strict liquor laws like, like most of the country does. It's very hard to open a new venue. A lot of those rules, though, have been relaxed in the last few years. Same thing is happening in Massachusetts. In Boston, they've made it much easier to open new bars by just creating a bunch of new liquor licenses. I think there's sort of a recognition, at least on the nightlife side of things, that those regulations were a little excessive. I think maybe there's a recognition among elected officials that you need to create excitement in places and you need to give people a reason to feel connected to their community and that that's one of the things that nightlife can do. There's other ways to sort of create fun for local communities, like free events in parks. There's some groups in New York where people get together and they sing together and they all study the music. They connect on the Internet beforehand, but then they get together in some spot and they all sing the same piece of music. I think things like that are really cool because it's completely free except for the time of the person who has to organize those things. And that's a lot of work. But it can be really satisfying to kind of create that kind of fun collectively.

[Sarah Holder]

Maybe someone listening will create their own free fun in their community.

[Ben Steverman]

Let's hope so.

[Sarah Holder]

Ben, thank you so much.

[The Hartford Representative]

You're welcome.

[Ben Steverman]

This is fun.

[Sarah Holder]

This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. The show is hosted by me, David Gura and Juan Ha. The show is made by Aaron Edwards, David Fox, Jeff Grocott, Paddy Hirsch, Rachel Lewis, Christie, Emma Munger, Lauren Newcomb, Naomi Ng, Julia Press, Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, Alex Sugiura, Julia Weaver, Yang Yang and Taka Yasuzawa. Our executive producer is Nicole Beemsterbor. To get more from the Big Take and unlimited access to all of bloomberg.com, subscribe [e-mail] podcastoffer thanks for listening. We'll be back on Monday.

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