How to like everything more

on the skill of enjoyment

I believe that one of my skills is that I’m good at liking things. I intensely enjoy many of my experiences, whether we’re talking about music, art, people, food, places, books, movies, anything. My wife, glimpsing me reacting to a Fiona Apple song, once said: “I wish everyone could enjoy something as much as you’re enjoying this right now.” She’s also noticed that when I eat a good meal, I appear so emotionally affected that she confuses my verklemptitude for sorrow or anger. The variety of my enjoyment is notable, also: I like a tremendous number of cuisines, locales, styles of architecture and visual languages, et cetera. It’s not that I don’t have critical judgement, or favorites—the ceiling on my appreciation is high, but the floor is high, too.

Part of this is personality makeup, but I believe enjoyment is a skill that anyone can improve at. I learned out of necessity: my childhood was unpleasant, and as a coping mechanism, I tried to love, hard, the passably pleasant moments. Later, my enjoyment ability was rewarded and reinforced in college, when I learned that I could channel my adoration for a work of literature into an essay about its positive qualities—you can’t be an academic this way anymore because of the abominable state of the humanities, where everyone is committed to ineffective activism, but you can make it through school.

In my experience, high-level enjoyment, like a sport, is composed of many interlocking micro-skills that must be trained individually, but which reinforce each other. This is not how enjoyment is taught—the only tip people typically receive re enjoyment is to “be mindful.” I think this is a suggestion to adopt what meditators call “one-pointed focus,” a form of concentrated, narrowed attention on a small portion of conscious experience. It’s a mediocre suggestion for a couple of reasons. First, this is hard to do well, even for seasoned meditators. Second, it is far from the only enjoyment-producing mental motion.

In this post, I’ll attempt to catalog the other enjoyment micro-skills that are most familiar to me.

Look at the other part

Move your attention beyond the part that you immediately focused on. This is especially easy and helpful with music—Visions of Johanna and You Oughta Know both feature spectacular bass parts that you might under-notice if you’re focusing on the attention-grabbing lead vocal. But it also works with people you’re talking to (what is fetching about their outfit or pronunciation), a de Chirico painting (what’s the deal with the cube), watching theatre (what do the actors who are listening look like when they’re listening), and basically anything else. Works miracles for gustatory and olfactory experiences—a good broth or perfume will have layers beyond the one that is loudest, teasing them apart is gratifying.

Slightly trickier, but you can also do this with writing, by noticing the frame of the writer, their implied social presence. Are they trying to appear as a trusted friend, an antagonist, a trickster, or an authority? How are they creating this impression, what words specifically create the tone?

Let the intensity in

People typically don’t enjoy heavy metal because they absorb the grunt of metal vocalists as an assault. Often they don’t enjoy opera for similar reasons—the piercing vibrato is seen as personally invasive. But you can reprogram that reaction. Interpreting a stimulus as an assault involves a reflexive mental clenching against it, a form of active resistance. Dropping that lets you experience powerful stimuli as intense rather than annoying. See if you can hear the screaming in this song, for example, as an attempt to convey the intensity of romantic engagement. Get curious about the voice’s texture, its qualities as an instrument, instead of rejecting it immediately—curiosity instantly inverts resistance. You might be surprised by how much internal variation the vocalist uses from phrase to phrase if you can get past just hearing it as “scream scream scream.” If you dare, try the same trick with the onslaught presented by this piece of music.

The same trick of dropping resistance and adopting curiosity will also work for: spicy or pungent foods, humor that initially strikes you as too crass, avant-garde paintings that seem aggressively ugly, and conversationalists who are difficult.

Become an amateur synesthete

I am not synesthetic like Daniel Tammet, who immediately knows that the number 7 is purple and out to kill him, or whatever. But I know that Dylan Thomas’ poetry reminds me of creosote bushes, that this song is the temperature of warm bathwater, that many Rothkos emit simmering fury. I am making this up, but it doesn’t feel arbitrary, more like I’m allowing myself to have an enriching looseness of association, a form of enjoyable mental instability. I think that’s what imagination is? Try it.

Develop a crush on the creator

Allow yourself to be transiently infatuated with the person who produced the work. Adore the steady hands of the sushi chef, the piercing gaze of the portraitist, the erudition of the author. How is it possible that the universe contains such people? This can have anywhere from below zero to a lot of sexual dimension—I would not make out with Khabib Nurmagomedov even if this were somehow offered, but I have a warm, personal appreciation for his steely determination and approach to MMA wrestling. You know this is really working when you feel pride for the success of the creator, like they’re a friend and you earnestly want to send them an email thanking them for what they’ve done. (Note that you can also do this, almost nobody receives too much thoughtful fan mail.)

A good portal into this practice is to viscerally imagine what it took to make the work happen. Feel the determination of the vocalist pouring their heart into the perfect take, imagine the hours the writer spent at the desk—mentally step into their shoes, even if you can only blurrily, notionally do that.

Crank it up by 10%

Being in a state of absolutely perfect enjoyment is an arduous task, which might not be fun to attempt. But you can probably just choose to enjoy anything 10% more by just letting your guard down.

Notice how your body enjoys it

The commonly deployed phrase “toe-curling” indicates that a lot of us intuitively understand this one, but the faculty can be honed, simply by noticing. A good horror movie will have digestive effects: can you watch the movie with your stomach in mind, or appreciate the sweatiness of your palms? I get a cool tingle of intrigue in my midsection when I look at The Red Boy, how about you? When you’re hungry and you take a bite of food, can you notice all the parts of you that are relaxing — in your neck, or your lower body? Often, noticing that a person is making you feel warmhearted will increase the power of this warmhearted feeling, and, due to regular human telepathy, this will naturally make the interaction feel more sincere for the other person, too.

Predict where it’s going

You might get bored of a certain movie or song or book, finding it predictable, as if you could write the rest of it yourself. To this I would respond: oh, really? Can you? Test yourself by turning it into a game, see if you can project what unfolds. I habitually do this, and after years, I’ve gotten surprisingly good at anticipating twists in movies—I enjoy it when my predictions are correct, but it’s also a great surprise when they don’t. (All of Denis Villeneuve’s movies pre-Dune have eluded me in this respect.) Likewise, I have a pretty sophisticated feel for pop music structure at this point, which makes it all the more fun when I encounter a band like Young People who seemingly never did anything expected.

I will note that this can make certain highly formulaic art forms less enjoyable. Reading Save the Cat will make the skeletons of Hollywood movies almost intolerably visible, although I find that this has simultaneously increased my respect for films that are still satisfying even when the mechanisms of satisfaction are entirely comprehended, like Legally Blonde.

Absorb or create a critical vocabulary

If you don’t have any vocabulary for a medium, then the film or song or dish simply appears as a blur of impressions, it’s hard to draw lines and isolate the particular areas and causes of enjoyment. So, having a better vocabulary for a given medium doesn’t just make you sound smart, it increases the resolution of your enthusiasm. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys undirected study, simply browsing glossaries of terminology can help. But a more approachable way to do this is absorbing the work of a respected critic re: material you already enjoy. Alan Pollack’s incredible notes on The Beatles were a revelation to me, as was the book Perfumes: the Guide, and On Food and Cooking.

I also recommend, highly, developing a few items of idiosyncratic personal critical vocabulary. I think of certain perfumes as “photocopier musks” and certain songs as “straight shots” and certain people as “downward portals,” and it helps me isolate categories that are internally meaningful even if nobody else would understand them.

Notice changes

Here’s a refreshing, electric mode of attention that you can choose at any moment: notice every beginning—like, every new drum hit, or every new color that hits your eye when you scan a scene. Try to keep your attention hovering on that horizon where stimuli emerge from nonexistence. This is wonderful for music with a lot of abrupt changes. Better for more regularized music is the opposite, “noting gone,” a meditation technique advocated by Shinzen Young, where you pay attention to every instance of a sensation dropping out of view—this is a less fluttery form of attention that creates a tighter embrace with the present moment. You might accidentally have a mystical experience doing either.

Get lost in a tiny detail

I could probably literally scream about the moment in Ulysses when Joyce describes a bird of paradise as a “little mite of a thing with a heart the size of a fullstop.” I find it so clever and so wrenching at the same time, how he allows you to understand the fragility of this miniscule exotic being using the most common punctuation mark as assistance. Moreover, it’s amazingly clever that in one of the most verbose novels in human history, Joyce figures out how to describe something by making one of the ink marks on the page into a diagram, rather than reaching for another adjective. I’ve been excited about that passage for about sixteen years. And I try to make a habit of developing similar micro-obsessions: when I love a piece of work, I drill into it and find a few small details to worship. I find it multiplies my feeling about the larger piece.

Be a time traveler

Take a second to wonder how an artist from the distant past or future would regard the work you’re observing. This is an exercise in futility—you’re not aiming to succeed at it, you’re just using a fanciful mental frame to bring a bit of strangeness to the familiar. Would Prokofiev find anything to admire, or even recognize, in the better Kanye beats? How would a nomadic herder from the Mongolian steppe from 100 years ago react to a bougie neighborhood in LA? What would they like and dislike? How does some Midjourney output look if you regard it as a touchingly quaint example of an antique style? My friend Milan has a related but slightly different move, where he imagines explaining or sharing something in the present with someone in the past—apparently every time he flies, he takes great enjoyment in daydreaming about the wonderment of an astounded Isaac Newton sitting next to him.

Memorize

In my mind, this is the only real way to enjoy poetry. It takes time to reveal all the intricacies of what a poet at the level of, say, John Berryman, is doing, and the best way to participate in that revelation is to keep a poem going in your head at the grocery store. You don’t have to memorize whole poems, although that’s a fun challenge—you can just internalize little bits. I highly recommend spending some time with the last six lines of this poem.

It’s not just poetry, though—having an informal memory palace going can enhance everything. You could try letterforms you’re fond of (the ampersand in Goudy Old Style is slick), or architecture you want to privately revisit (if you’ve never played with how spatial memory is unexpectedly excellent, try it, try closing your eyes and mentally floating around a building you remember fondly).

Since doing some wine training in my early 20s, I’ve attempted to take a moment to internalize any really unusual smells or tastes, stopping to savor again in order to archive in memory. Recently at a celebratory dinner, I had a fish crudo with oat milk, jalapeno, snow, and mint that somehow wasn’t disgusting, and I can recall a medium-fidelity impression of it now, for a few free happiness points, because I took a snapshot then. Every snapshot you take enhances your future ability to do this.

Build a context

The music of Future Islands, to me, takes on another level of tragedy and interest when you think about how they’re based in Baltimore. Similarly, it’s interesting to think about Lana del Rey’s past as middling singer-songwriter Lizzy Grant—to me, that makes White Dress a better song. Sometimes, when I encounter creative work by someone from a location I’m not familiar with, I’ll go on Google Street View and take a poke around a neighborhood they’re from, or might be from. I feel like it gives me hints about the lived texture that they’re drawing from or commenting on.

This also works for historical context, not just geographical context. Cubism looks dull now because its innovations have become incorporated into the most banal graphic design, but if you richly imagine the visual context in which it burst into the scene, perhaps with the help of nearby paintings in a museum, it becomes more admirable. Grunge music is hardly fresh anymore, but you might be able to recapture something by listening to this incredible Hole demo right after some David Sylvian. But contrast isn’t always the point here: if you like a certain musician or artist, your appreciation for them can be deepened and detailed by checking out the less amazing work of their regional colleagues. For performance-based art specifically, you can get truly obsessive by building a context on a single work via looking at multiple recordings; this rendition of Born Under Punches is the clearest extant example of Tina Weymouth’s genius.

Of course the advanced level of this is reading biographies and reading interviews, and that can be deeply rewarding. But even the laziest version of this move can add color and complexity.

Pretend you are a buyer

Blatantly stolen from Tyler Cowen, but too good not to mention here. If you’re in a gallery and you’re bored, pretend you’re aiming to buy a piece of art. What would you purchase and for how much? Why? This can have a beautifully demystifying effect, you can sometimes see art more clearly if you stop thinking you have to respect it or restrict yourself to intangible measures of value. This also works great for appreciating restaurants and buildings. What are the trouble spots you’d want to improve?

Find another register of enjoyment

Life is so dull if it’s just “like” or “dislike.” Maybe the movie is riveting but you still hate it. Can you find “begrudging enjoyment?” You simply do not understand the outfit of that kid on the subway. Can you locate “would be compelling to someone who is not me”? How do you feel about the song that represents you so well it’s almost personally violating? Can you be grateful for the person who reminds you of all the annoying tendencies you try to repress in yourself? These are all genuine forms of enjoyment to be cultivated and savored alongside the cleaner kinds.

Just give it a second

The basic like/dislike reactions that blandify our existences can be subdued through meditation and therapy, to some extent. But you can also often just… give it a second, and refuse your internal compass’ direction to go somewhere else immediately when you have a knee-jerk reaction to a thing or person. If you have a strong negative reaction to the first scene in a movie, see if you can sit with that, let it pass, and watch the second scene as if the film has been newly exposed to you. I’m very glad I did this with Dogville, which pissed me off immediately—it ended up being one of my top 5 movies ever.

Of course there’s an art to this, your initial reaction isn’t always wrong, and the older you get the more calibrated you are. You’re probably kidding yourself if you’re on track 9 of a bad album and hoping that track 10 redeems the whole thing. But much can be revealed through a slightly longer interval of judgement than is habitual.

Find the one flaw

Sometimes after emerging from a film I enjoy, I’ll note the one or two things I didn’t find convincing, or mention what I would’ve modified if I were God and able to alter video files through instantaneous will. This is puzzling and annoying to some others, but I find that if I love something deeply, I end up loving it all the more if I locate its weak points. Often, this helps you find the necessary points of tradeoff that actually made the thing great. If conducted covertly, this particular mental habit allows you to love people more deeply and realistically, by noticing how the annoying thing about them and the great thing are fundamentally intertwined.