The Free Press
I’m good at liking things. Whether it’s art, people, food, places, books, movies—when I enjoy something, I enjoy it intensely. When eating a good meal, I appear so emotionally affected that my wife sometimes confuses my expression for sorrow. My wife once said to me, after watching me react to hearing a Fiona Apple song for the first time, “I wish everyone could enjoy something as much as you’re enjoying this right now.”
But I believe they can.
Enjoyment is a skill that anyone can improve. I learned it out of necessity. My childhood was unpleasant, and as a coping mechanism, I tried to love, hard, the moments of beauty and pleasure and focus. But everyone could benefit from honing the skill of enjoyment, especially because the world has gotten a little harder to enjoy. Things are generally getting blander—and also multiplying at the speed of light, all vying for your attention.
So how do you learn to enjoy things more?
The only tip people typically receive is to just pay attention, which is unhelpfully unspecific. In my experience, high-level enjoyment, like a sport, is composed of many interlocking micro-skills that must be trained individually, but that reinforce each other. Below, I’ve tried to compile a list of the micro-skills that are most familiar to me.
Look at the Other Part
Move your attention beyond the part of a thing that first grabs you. A good broth or perfume will have layers beyond the one that is loudest, and teasing them apart is gratifying. But this works especially with music—so many songs feature spectacular bass parts that you might not notice if you’re focusing on the attention-hogging lead vocal. It also works with people you’re talking to. Ask yourself: What is fetching about their outfit, or pronunciation? And it works when you’re watching theater: What about the actors who are not talking?
Get Lost in a Tiny Detail
I could probably literally scream about the moment in Ulysses when James 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 minuscule exotic being using the most common punctuation mark as assistance. Moreover, it’s amazing 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 16 years. And in that time, I’ve tried to develop 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.
Let the Intensity In
Do you find you don’t enjoy heavy metal because you hear the grunt of the vocalists as an assault? Or that you don’t enjoy opera because the piercing vibrato feels invasive? You can reprogram that reaction, overcome that moment of resistance, and learn to experience powerful stimuli as intense rather than annoying. Get past just hearing a heavy metal song as scream scream scream. Get curious about the voice’s texture, its qualities as an instrument, instead of rejecting it immediately. See if you can hear the noise as an attempt to convey the all-consuming nature of romantic engagement. 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 difficult conversationalists.
Notice How Your Body Enjoys It
A good horror movie will have physical effects: Can you watch the movie with your clenching 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?
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? A good way 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. 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 could also do this; almost nobody receives too much thoughtful fan mail.)
Enjoyment Isn’t Always Straightforward
Life is so dull if you just “like” or “dislike” everything, if you engage only with things you straightforwardly enjoy. 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 see that it’s “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.
Find a Vocabulary
Talking about something you enjoy almost always enhances the enjoyment—especially if you talk about it well. On the other hand, if you don’t have any vocabulary to express your experience of a thing, then it lingers only as a blur of impressions. Having a better vocabulary to talk about what you like 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. The way the wind whistles through Thomas Hardy’s poems? That’s onomatopoeia. But a more approachable way to expand your vocabulary is to read a book by a respected critic about the 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 highly recommend developing a few items of idiosyncratic personal critical vocabulary. I think of certain perfumes as “photocopier musks” (warm but industrial) and certain songs as “straight shots” (monotonously high energy). Certain people are “downward portals”: They pull you into their energy rather than broadcasting their identity. These phrases help me sort my experiences in ways that are internally meaningful even if nobody else would understand them.
Notice Changes
Here’s a refreshing, electric mode of attention: 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.
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. Would Sergei Prokofiev find anything to admire, or even recognize, in the better Kanye West 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? My friend Milan does something similar: 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.
What’s the 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 what they’re drawing from or commenting on.
Of course, the advanced level of this is reading biographies and interviews, and that can be deeply rewarding. But even the laziest version can add color and complexity.
Comparison helps, too. 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 onto the scene, it becomes more admirable. 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 contemporaries.
Memorize
In my mind, this is the only real way to enjoy poetry. It takes time to reveal all the intricacies woven by a poet as good as, say, John Berryman, 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. Look at letterforms you’re particularly fond of—the ampersand in Goudy Oldstyle is slick—until you can clearly see it in your mind. Try closing your eyes and mentally floating around a building you remember fondly.
Ever since I did 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, in order to archive a memory. Recently at a celebratory dinner, I had a fish crudo with oatmilk, jalapeño, snow, and mint that somehow wasn’t disgusting, and I can access a medium-fidelity impression of it now, for a few free happiness points, because I took a mental snapshot then. Every snapshot you take enhances your future ability to do this.
Pretend You Are a Buyer
This tip is stolen from Tyler Cowen, but it’s 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 see art more clearly if you stop thinking you have to respect it as something hanging in a gallery, and start thinking of it as something you could own. This also works great for appreciating restaurants and buildings. Would you want to be in charge of them? If you were, what would you do?
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, but I find that if I love something deeply, I end up loving it all the more if I locate its weak points, if I find the necessary points of trade-off 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 things about them and the wonderful things are fundamentally intertwined.
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A version of this essay first appeared in Sasha’s Newsletter.