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.)
As far as I can tell, virtually every moment offers many such sources of enjoyment, if you can learn to enjoy things consciously and voluntarily. You can, if you intend to, enjoy the dappled light on the breakfast table, the gentle hug of your socks on your feet, or your smoothly-running vehicle — any aspect of the moment you recognize as welcome, helpful, pleasant, or beautiful.
Indulging in these pleasures does not require a special sentimental mood, or the conditions of your life to feel favorable in general. They only require a moment of voluntary appreciation for a single good thing.
You already know how to do this: you know how to enjoy a good stretch, to bask in the sun, to savor the smell of fresh bread. But we don’t make great use of this talent, for some reason. I think there’s something about our modern consumer-brains that regards pleasure as a thing to be acquired and consumed, often in such concentrated doses that conscious intention isn’t needed. Chocolate cookies, social media notifications, and Scotch whisky are so intensely dopaminergic that they dominate your attention the moment they enter your experience. The pleasures offered by the other 99% of life – the gleaming sky, the softness of your mattress, the hug of your scarf – have to be attended to on purpose or they usually don’t register.
Sometimes life’s more subtle pleasures do force your attention this way, because of the circumstances of the moment. If you come in from the cold, and someone offers you a steaming cup of tea, it’s hard not to notice how great it is. Everything about it seems wonderful: the rich color, the scent of bergamot, the bloom of steam that warms your face when you take a sip.
A cup of tea always offers these same pleasures, but in most circumstances they won’t grab you by the lapels like that. In such a case, it only takes a small but conscious intention to look for its rich color and feel for the bloom of warmth rising up your face. The tea’s gifts are there already, awaiting your attention.
This sort of latent enjoyability often gets revealed whenever you slow down your consumption speed. I’ve remarked before on how elastic the enjoyability of food is, for example: if you eat at half the speed and pay more attention, you get far more enjoyment out of the same amount of food.
Enjoyment always requires attention. It’s just that some pleasures force your attention to them, and most don’t. Depending on these attention-forcing sources of pleasure leads to a preoccupation with the more intense ones, which tend to be sugary, intoxicating, mind-rotting, or costly in some other way.
Every moment offers pleasures
When you learn to cultivate enjoyment voluntarily, you don’t need to depend so much on those intense and costly pleasure sources. That’s because literally every moment offers many sources of enjoyment, if you’re looking for them.
Bare sense pleasures are a more obvious kind – the warmth in the room, the caress of clothing, the bright sky, the heat of fresh coffee. But you can also appreciate more subtle aspects of the moment in the same way: the presence of a person you trust, the great selection of books on your shelves, the full water bottle you have with you, your ability to read and write, your back being free of pain today. Even though they are subtle, they are concrete experiences that can be noticed and enjoyed, and they are abundant at all times.
How to enjoy things all day long
Here’s one reliable way to practice voluntary enjoyment. This was the most popular exercise in the recent Raptitude Field Trip group:
At any moment you can ask yourself: what is happening here and now that’s pleasant, beautiful, or helpful?
Don’t just identify it. Find the experience itself — the actual sight, sound or feeling, and consciously enjoy it.
This might sound like another dull gratitude exercise, but it’s not. You’re not just identifying a “positive” thing and telling yourself you’re lucky to have that. You’re locating the good feeling on offer in the present, and enjoying it on purpose.
Again, you already know how to do this. You know how to let the sunlight massage your skin. You know how to relish the feeling of pulling a blanket around your shoulders. You know how to appreciate the presence of a loved one.
You can do the same thing with ten thousand other things: your ability to stand up without pain, the multi-monitor setup that makes work so much easier, the walls keeping out the cold, the Zenlike presence of your cat, the incredible gang of smart colleagues in your Rolodex, a deep breath, a photograph on your wall, a window in your line of sight, and countless other gifts.
I reiterate that identifying these gifts is not enough. After you recognize one, you then consciously experience and enjoy it. You really can enjoy that you have a cup of water next to you. You can enjoy having clothes on your body. You can enjoy that you could text Jim any time and he’d try to help you.
Notice that your ability to appreciate these gifts does not depend on mood, or on any other condition being favorable in your life. You are always surrounded by countless favorable conditions that can be relished and enjoyed, regardless of the presence of unfavorable ones.
When you do this exercise, don’t try to appreciate every single favorable thing (not that you ever could). Just enjoy one or two of them and move on. It takes seconds.
But do it frequently. Become this more skillful kind of pleasure seeker, an enjoyer of the stuff that happens anyway. Never go to bed without properly basking in the glorious pleasure of lying in a bed under the covers. Everything is like that, all day long.
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You can still join Raptitude Field Trip 2 if you want to learn this and other Raptitude exercises. The main group has finished but you can do it on your own. The forum is still open and some of us are always hanging around.
I'm David, and Raptitude is a blog about getting better at being human -- things we can do to improve our lives today.
{ 24 Comments }
I find it somewhat amusing that the first example of an act one can consciously choose to enjoy is the act of sitting down. I say this because the first act that came to my mind is standing up from a seated position.
I bring this up because I make a little extra effort when getting up, to do so without using my hands to assist the ascent (except perhaps as counterweights at the end of my arms). Because it requires this little bit of extra effort, that effort consistently draws my attention to the fact that I still have the capacity to stand up hands-free (and am not too tired, or trying to do it on a train car that’s lurching and jerking about, or…), and once my attention is there, I’m effectively reminded to enjoy it.
I probably should have mentioned that all of these experiences and their enjoyability are particular to the person. Some people don’t like tea, some people do have back pain today, etc.
In any case your example shows how vital attention is — when you have to pay attention to something, its goodness will be noticed. Most of the good conditions that happen in our lives don’t require attention and so escape our gratitude. But we can bring attention to those conditions voluntarily.
Thanks, I was also hinting at the fact that a little bit of difficulty can also be a great tool for bringing our attention to something. In my case, the standing example is just difficult enough that I need to pay attention to it in order to do it, but easy enough that when I give it my attention, I can reliably pull it off without struggling.
I don’t think that it’s quite difficult enough to be capacity-building (in contrast with e.g. lifting weights), but I’m left wondering if it builds enough of an association between difficulty and enjoyment in my mind that it furnishes me with more of the appetite for difficulty that helps me actually do the capacity-building things.
For many years, I commuted daily by two local city buses. It wasn’t great, but it was one place I often saw the same people day-to-day, and though we rarely became “real” friends, those people were a kind of friend, as there was often a moment of recognition, and sometimes we DID become real friends.
I especially enjoyed seeing the same bus drivers, and i learned a lot from them about what their work was like, good and bad. Cut to the pandemic, when I permanently moved to work from home. I remember the last bus ride home from my office very clearly. I was the only passenger, and at that point no masks were on offer. The driver looked terrified, and I wasn’t too happy myself. During the ride we talked (at a distance) about the mystery that had suddenly engulfed us all, and as I left the bus, I wished him good luck. I don’t know what became of him, but I often think of that last moment of direct human contact before we went into months of isolation.
I retired during the pandemic, and I only ride the bus by choice now, although it’s still multiple times a week. I’m less likely to see the same people daily, but I do see the same drivers on the route I take most often. I always say “hi” and “bye.” I have no idea if I make an impression on them, among their thousands of riders, but I see them, anyway, and the familiarity is a gift. The schedules change a few times a year, so do the drivers, and when one returns, it’s always a pleasure to be enjoyed to see an old familiar face.
Your comment highlights another knock-on effect of this practice. Attention leads to recognizing good, and recognizing good is gratitude, and gratitude can lead to expressing thanks, which starts the whole cycle in another person.
I’m always so floored by how strongly a kind word said to me affects my whole day.
Oh man there are times when i snuggle into bed and i revel in its comfort. Never had such a great mattress.
It’s one of life’s great pleasures. I sometimes do an exercise where I picture the bed disappearing from beneath me, then the floor and then the whole house, dropping me into the wet leaves outside. Then I notice where I actually am, in bed, and it’s basically the greatest place ever.
Now that, is an incredible way to feel grateful for everything we have!
Really loved this, David. Thanks. On Monday I had a blood test. My veins are small and they roll, have had some chemo so…often it’s painful and they have to put the needle in my hand which is a drag. Anyhow, Yanna, the young phlebotomist, found a vein in my arm painlessly and I have no bruise. I thanked her a lot and told her she was amazing. She said “you made my day”…I also acknowledged her on the Life labs site. It felt so good. A few health matters don’t feel so good…but this changed my day for sure in a good way.
Sharon, your comment spoke to me. I have blood tests often because, among other reasons, my sodium levels tend to be low, and if they get too low it is dangerous. I always thank the phlebotomist and tell them, truthfully, how painless it was and how much I appreciate that. It turns an inconvenience into a good moment in my day.
This is excellent advice and I find myself doing it often as my default. One thing I am grateful for is that I am ABLE to do this practice. People who are depressed may find this exercise literally impossible – which is pretty much a definition of depression.
This reminds me of the old blog 1000 Awesome Things, written by Neil Pasricha. He began it when he was at the lowest point in his life. He was depressed, his marriage had ended, and then his best friend took his own life. He could not “be happy” but he found he could pay closer attention to small, encouraging details of life that were always there, and find a bright spot. As long as he didn’t look at the bigger picture he was fine.
I related to this post so much! I am always winking at the moon, delighting in the breeze, feeling happy to see the same spider at the window, reveling in how nice it feels in my body to sit up straight in my chair after morning exercise. It’s part of my personality that I tend to enjoy many small delights that others might ignore, but I have yet to embark on this practice as a *conscious project* like you are recommending. I absolutely love what you are saying. Thanks to your inspiration, I’m going to go further with this intentional enjoyment thing. I know you are right that there is much enjoyment going unsummoned!
“Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things; the sublime is not hiding in distant landscapes. The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It is transformed by our deliberate attention. It becomes valuable when we value it. It becomes meaningful when we invest it with meaning. The magic is of our own conjuring.” – Katherine May
Yes small joys – I am big on’em. Interesting write up. Thank you
“Enjoying the feeling of pulling on my go-to hoodie that long ago lost its drawstrings and is fraying at the cuffs.”
Thanks, David.
This reminds me of the feeling when I fall asleep with a headache. At some point I just close my eyes, reopen them, and as if by magic the headache is completely gone. The absence of a headache feels SO GOOD. My body and brain were present the entire time, only my awareness went away for a little bit. It would be nice to tap into that great feeling of “the absence of a headache” any time.
Theoretically, we could enjoy non-headache-ness all the time, but the contrast certainly helps. More and more as I get older I am more conscious of being free of pain in my joints and back, which is a real experience you can notice all the time. It’s just much easier to locate when you have just experienced relief from pain or some other part of you is experiencing pain.
How lovely, and a perfect companion to a recentpost about “nowstalgia’ (missing the present) https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/is-it-possible-to-miss-the-present-introducing-the-concept-of-nowstalgia
Very well said. I practice this in many ways in life, and now I will be more mindful of it which is priceless. So thank you for that. As always, very much appreciated.
Wonderful article, David, really! Points the mind in such positive ways to the whole idea that instead of using the world in service of our happiness, we can instead use our happiness in service of the world! Looking for love, peace, happiness outside ourself is like a character in a movie searching for the screen, when it’s already the very substance of their existence. This writing is so full of mindfulness it reinforces my recognition that we are vastly more richly blessed than we often realize! Thanks for that. Namaste!
Raptitude post showing up in my inbox… I experience enjoyment in the anticipation of reading your work. I appreciate the perspectives you have and am never disappointed in what you write— instead, I think, isn’t it great that David Cain started this blog? You inspire me.
Raptitude has become my favorite blog. Thank you for writing blogs and for creating Field trip. I really enjoyed it.
I have been reading Raptitude for years now and the wisdom here has helped me in more than one days. Every new post still has something to teach, I still find it fresh and worth coming back again and again! I am grateful that we have this little corner of the internet.