Your inner Manic Dream Pixie

A popular trope in fiction for young men is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a kind of fun hyperactive bonne vivante character who snaps the brooding protagonist out of his ennui by showing him how to enjoy life again. Of course, it's not just fiction aimed at men; you can see similar characters in How Stella Got Her Groove Back and other divorcée-goes-overseas-to-find-herself movies.

The Manic Dream Pixie is a lazy storywriting technique, an easy plot device to drive character growth, a kind of joy ex machina. If you can't find a way for the protagonist to discover meaning in their own lives, just make a character who's a literal personification of fun. They can come in, show the main character how it's done and, afterwards, disappear to a special pixie reservation or something.

Yet this shallow archetype is still somehow compelling, and I think it speaks to a need that often goes unmet. Sometimes life doesn't seem very fun, either because you're not making the effort to appreciate what's fun about it, or because there genuinely isn't much to appreciate. When that happens, the resultant feeling isn't "oh, I should go find the joy in my life", it's "my life sucks and I suck". The impetus to find that joy would need to come from the very same person who is demotivated because it isn't there. It would be so much easier if some external joyous force could just sashay in and fix it!

Unfortunately, real life is short on Manic Dream Pixies. Someone with that profound invigorating joy for life might well be out there, but why would they find your disaffection endearing as opposed to dull and depressing? The critical issue with the trope is that the character doesn't make sense; there's no way to write an internally coherent motivation for that kind of behaviour without the pixie having a massive and cloying messiah complex.

Instead, the place to look for the Manic Dream Pixie is inwards. The trope wouldn't appeal if there wasn't a part of you that wants to go dance in the rain or ride a Vespa up the Amalfi Coast. The problem isn't that you need someone else to show you how to have fun. Your inner Manic Dream Pixie knows already, it's just being ignored.