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I ask this question often, and the answers are illuminating. Not because laughter is a good thing and more of it is better. But because the quality of a life's laughter — when it happens, what produces it, whether it is still possible — tells you something important about the life.
The person who cannot remember the last time they laughed at something genuinely funny — not politely, not performatively, but in a way that surprised them — is a person whose life has, in some important way, become too defended. Not serious in the sense of meaningful. Serious in the sense of not allowing the unexpected to arrive.
Genuine laughter is, structurally, a kind of surrender. Something arrives that you did not plan for, and you lose control of your response for a moment. This is the opposite of the managed, defended way of being in the world that most people have developed.
Think about your last genuine laugh. What was it? What made it possible? What does it tell you about where you are?
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