Selling Type 2 Fun

There is a real concept, borrowed from the outdoor world, called the Fun Scale.

Type 1 fun is fun while it happens. Ice cream, a waterslide, a good movie.

Type 2 fun is miserable while it happens and turns into the best story of your life the second it ends. Climbers and marathoners and people who backpack in the rain live for it. It stinks in the moment, and then you dine out on it for a quarter of a century.

We don’t go looking for this at camp, but it crops up again and again and again.

This summer I (Doug) interviewed a bunch of K&E campers and alumni, looking for themes, stories, quotes, and just good old-fashioned camp stories.

Never asked anyone to rank their memories expecting a pattern. Got one anyway.

Three of the four people I talked to named the same thing, unprompted: the senior Mount Washington trip, where the kids hike and sleep on the mountain.

And in every version, the weather went sideways. It hailed, it sleeted, or they got turned around and sent back down before the summit.

One camper, eleven summers in, gave me her single favorite memory of all of it without a half-second of hesitation: freezing near the top in a hailstorm, everybody complaining, and making it up anyway. The hail was the whole memory.

(K&E even built a plaque for it. Climb it three years running and your name goes up, plus you get the shirt. Most of the kids go for it. The hard thing is the status.)

Most camp marketing sells the opposite of this. The brochure is wall-to-wall Type 1 fun. Blue sky, dry socks, a kid mid-laugh on the waterslide. It photographs beautifully, and it forgets fast, which is the whole problem.

The memories that make a kid beg to come back are almost never the perfect ones. They are the ones where something broke and everybody figured it out together.

Part of it is that shared hardship becomes a badge.

“You weren’t there the summer it rained every single day, so you just don’t get it.”

The kid who missed it is on the outside of something. Part of it is that the memory compounds. The more everyone retells it, the bigger it gets, until people who were not even there are fairly sure they were.

This isn’t an ultramarathon, and nobody is storming a beach. We are talking about wet socks, a closed lake, food nobody recognizes. The move is not to manufacture hardship. It is to quit apologizing for it, and to notice that when a day goes a little sideways, a core memory is probably being made.

This week, stop scrubbing the hard parts out of your story.

The next time something goes a little sideways in a session, and it will, put it in the parent update instead of hiding it. The rain day the staff turned into a dance party. The trip that got weird and became the story of the summer. Tell families, in about that many words, that a core memory is happening right now.

Then go ask your three oldest campers for their favorite memory of camp. I would bet real money it is one where the things didn’t go exactly as planned.

Doug & Jack