The human being is an enjoyment-seeking creature. There’s a reason people are always trying to restrain themselves from excessive eating, drinking, scrolling, and shopping. It’s perfectly normal to pursue these and other pleasures even to the point of serious problems and early death.
Even though we are born enjoyment-mongers, we tend to overlook the greatest and most reliable source of enjoyment, which is our ability to consciously enjoy the stuff that happens anyway. We barely even talk about it.
For example, you probably sit down in a chair or on a couch ten or fifteen times a day. You can easily enjoy each of these instances of sitting down, if you make a point of it. It can feel great to relax into any decent chair. But how many times do you sit down without relishing it even a bit?
The pleasure of relaxing into a chair isn’t as intense as the pleasure of chocolate-coated hazelnuts or rapid-fire video memes. But it’s still more than worthwhile, and it’s free. You don’t have to go out of your way to access this source of pleasure, and it doesn’t gradually kill you or make you depressed. (I suspect it does the opposite.)
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I'm David, and Raptitude is a blog about getting better at being human -- things we can do to improve our lives today.
The ice cream example made me laugh. Even getting exactly what we wanted can turn straight into reaching for the next spoonful. Using just one inbreath as the starting point makes this feel much more approachable than setting out to “be still for twenty minutes”.