Fun, they decided, was whatever you could build together that kept you both present and kind.… When the old glossaries began to fall apart, fun didn’t die — it split open. Kai was eight when the first classroom “fun audit” arrived: a school district questionnaire that asked not whether kids had recess, but how they felt about the ways they lost and regained attention. The survey was built on two ideas adults had only recently accepted as true: that “fun” is less a fixed thing and more a cognitive event, and that a generation raised on always-on feeds would learn to curate what they let into their heads. Generation Alpha — the kids born between about 2010 and 2024 — were already the largest cohort on the planet and the first to grow up with smart assistants, AR glasses, and lightweight AI tutors at their elbows. Kai’s idea of fun had three layers. The first was old and nearly universal: the flow of doing something that matched skill to ch...