Type II fun is miserable while it’s happening but feels rewarding, even enjoyable, when you look back on it. It’s the sufferfest you swear you’ll never repeat, then sign up for again six months later. The concept comes from the Fun Scale, a three-tier framework invented around 1985 by Rainer Newberry, a geology professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who came up with it while teaching a field geology class. It spread through climbing culture in the 1990s and has since become a widely used shorthand in outdoor sports, fitness, and personal development.
The Three Types of Fun
The Fun Scale breaks experiences into three categories based on a simple question: when does it feel good?
- Type I fun is enjoyable while it’s happening. Powder skiing, a perfect day at the beach, a great meal. No explanation needed.
- Type II fun is unpleasant in the moment but satisfying in hindsight. It often starts with good intentions before things get harder than expected. Riding a bicycle across the country. Running an ultramarathon. Summiting a peak in freezing rain. You suffer through it, then find yourself proud of it afterward, maybe even eager to do it again.
- Type III fun is not fun at any point, not during and not after. You feel your life might be threatened, certain doom seems close, and afterward you swear you’ll never do anything that stupid again. Failed expeditions and harrowing rescues live here.
The key distinction is that Type II fun involves genuine growth or satisfaction on the other side of the suffering. Type III offers neither. The line between them can be thin, and it often only becomes clear after the fact.
Why Misery Becomes a Good Memory
There’s a psychological reason you can genuinely enjoy remembering something that was awful to live through. Your brain doesn’t store experiences as a continuous recording. Instead, it gives outsized weight to two moments: the emotional peak and the ending. This is called the peak-end rule, and it shapes how you evaluate almost everything after the fact.
Pain research demonstrates this clearly. In one well-known experiment, extending an uncomfortable medical procedure by a few extra seconds at lower intensity made people rate the entire experience as less painful, even though they technically endured more total discomfort. A similar study with horror movie clips found that viewers who saw the clip end at the scariest moment rated the whole experience as more distressing than viewers whose clip continued to a slightly calmer scene.
Type II fun follows the same pattern. The experience typically ends with relief, accomplishment, or a stunning view from a summit. Your brain latches onto that final emotional state and the most vivid peak moments, then compresses hours of suffering into a story that feels like triumph. The duration of the misery fades. What remains is the highlight reel.
Common Type II Fun Activities
Type II fun lives mostly in endurance and outdoor sports, but it shows up in plenty of other places. Classic examples include mountaineering, ultramarathons, marathon running, long-distance cycling, ice climbing, bikepacking, and alpine hiking. Kayaking long distances, bouldering, snowshoeing in harsh conditions, and CrossFit all qualify regularly. The shared thread is sustained physical effort that feels punishing in real time but builds a story you want to tell later.
It’s not limited to athletics, though. Learning a musical instrument, writing a book, launching a business, and tackling a difficult creative project all carry the same signature: long stretches of frustration punctuated by the satisfaction of having done something hard. Educational researchers use the term “hard fun” to describe the same phenomenon in children, where kids derive deep joy from tasks that push their limits and require real effort to complete.
What Type II Fun Does for You
Voluntarily choosing difficult experiences builds what psychologists call self-efficacy: the belief that your effort will pay off and that you can handle hard things. This isn’t just a feeling. Longitudinal research shows that people with high self-efficacy experience fewer stress-related symptoms, while those with low self-efficacy report more. Each time you complete something that felt impossible in the middle, you expand your internal evidence that you can push through the next hard thing.
The benefits extend beyond toughness. Researchers studying resilience training have found measurable gains in vitality, social functioning, sense of purpose, and personal growth among participants who regularly engaged with challenging experiences. The process helps people build what’s called a “resilient narrative,” a personal story rooted in real experiences of overcoming difficulty rather than in abstract optimism. Problem-solving skills sharpen too, because navigating unpredictable, uncomfortable situations demands creativity and adaptability that transfer to everyday life.
The Bonding Effect of Shared Suffering
Type II fun becomes even more powerful in groups. There’s a reason your closest friendships often trace back to something you survived together, whether that’s a brutal hike, a chaotic road trip, or a grueling work project. Shared hardship accelerates social bonding in a specific way that ordinary shared pleasure does not.
The mechanism involves how people process difficult experiences socially. After going through something hard together, people naturally talk about it. But research on trauma recovery shows that simply recounting the facts of what happened doesn’t create much of a bonding effect. What actually strengthens the connection is sharing emotions: the fear, the doubt, the absurd laughter at the worst moment. This emotional sharing triggers the release of oxytocin, a hormone that promotes trust and closeness. People who share how they felt, not just what happened, form deeper and more lasting bonds from the experience.
How to Use the Fun Scale
The Fun Scale isn’t just a joke for climbers. It’s a genuinely useful lens for choosing how to spend your time. If your life is all Type I fun, you’re comfortable but probably not growing. If everything feels like Type III, something needs to change. The sweet spot is a life that includes regular doses of Type II fun: challenges that stretch you, that you might dread in the moment, but that leave you more capable and more satisfied on the other side.
A practical starting point is choosing activities slightly outside your comfort zone. That could mean signing up for a race longer than anything you’ve run before, learning a skill that requires months of clumsy practice, or planning a trip with enough uncertainty to make you nervous. The key word is “slightly.” Type II fun requires enough difficulty to be genuinely uncomfortable, but not so much that it crosses into Type III territory where the experience offers no reward at all.
Building Type II fun into a regular routine, rather than treating it as a rare special event, compounds the benefits. Each experience adds to your reservoir of self-efficacy, expands what you believe you’re capable of, and gives you better stories to tell. The misery is real. So is the payoff.