I spend a lot of time thinking about the idea of enjoyment. Maybe that's not the right word. Then again, maybe it is, to be in joy? There's definitely something there. Maybe dividing it into positive and negative is a better way to think about it.

Taste

Let's start with the positive.

I spend a lot of time trying to enjoy things. It's often successful. I used to have a very narrow taste in music. Through exposure I've gotten to the point where I enjoy most music. I've done this with parties, dancing, and various other things. There's always been a nagging worry about this 'technique' that it dilutes my experience of the things I've always enjoyed. That doesn't seem to be true thus far. I often wonder how far I can take this. Taste as defined in how much you enjoy art is entirely subjective, and the thing about subjective experience is it's pretty pliable.

I have on my notes app the quote "it implies their beauty is fully in them, whereas really it's mostly in you." I cannot for the life of me find where it was from. I'm pretty sure it was something I read on Substack about dating. It's one of those cliché-sounding quotes that's both true and entirely useless to 90% of people while being impactful for 10%. In this case, I'm in the 10%. I find it useful to view beauty as a primarily internal experience. I've gone from hating Taylor Swift to having Anti-Hero on repeat to being mostly ambivalent. Taylor Swift hasn't changed. She's about as constant a force as you can get out of a human being. I'm pretty sure I'll be dying of heart failure and Taylor Swift will still be selling out stadiums. It's quite clearly a change in me, and there's always been a part of me that thinks if I can change, then I can change myself. Is that healthy? Who the hell knows, not me.

Growth and Decay

My attempts at broadening my tastes are most likely an outgrowth of my natural obsession with growth. Like most people, I'm a big fan of progression. I orient my goals towards gradual self-improvement. Making tomorrow better than yesterday. This is a broadly positive mindset that has one glaring issue: I really hate decay.

My stock answer when asked my greatest fear is the slow death that comes to all things. I don't even remember when I decided on that exact phrase. I have seemingly always been disturbed by the idea of decline. Late in high school, I realized that I had forgotten much of calculus. The idea terrified me. For a while, I was even unable to bring myself to study to see what I had remembered and what I needed to relearn. Like many things, the reaction to the problem was worse than the problem itself.

Suffering

What follows is my best working model of what breaks when I do.

Patterns of thought are akin to rivers. They mostly flow where they've been before, they're reinforcing, and at times they feel uncontrollable. There's a branch of the river that enjoys the song Hallelujah, there's a part that is just muscle memory for Waltzing, and there used to be a part that worried about forgetting calculus. The thing about all of these streams is that the more I flow down them, the easier the flow gets. This is great when learning math, kinda terrible when worrying.

It is sometimes said that suffering is a reaction to pain. In my experience, this is partly true. However, the real issue is that suffering is also a reaction to suffering. Much of my anguish comes from flowing down the streams of suffering I've been down before. At this point, I occasionally have fear of my future reaction to my current reactions. Some call this trauma. I like to think of it as psychic damage from a video game.

Intention

While I haven't yet figured out a great way to close streams (mental blocks don't entirely sound like a healthy idea), I've had a decent amount of success consciously creating positive ones. I used to dislike music in public places; now I dance to it, and after smiling every time I go outside, I now have somewhat random positive reactions to weather.

There was a time last semester when I was mildly giddy for around 2 weeks after playing around with this kind of thing for a while. I'm not sure if that's the optimal outcome, but as a whole, it's definitely been beneficial to make an effort to change how I instinctively react to things.

TLDR

Consciousness flows; make the path of least resistance nice.