How to Enjoy Life

I don’t know about you, but whenever I’m a guest at a holiday get-together, once dinner is over and we begin to appreciate the scale of the impending cleanup, I’m always relieved to be given a clear job to do: collect all the wine glasses, wipe down the table, corral the recyclables.

Even scrubbing a stubborn roasting pan is a welcome assignment, at least partly because it relieves you from the alternative, which is to sit there feeling unhelpful while your host does everything. But even aside from that, there’s a certain pleasure to be found in the doing of a task, if you’re not determined to hate it.

Yet in other contexts, similarly basic tasks can seem annoying and unpleasant. Sometimes, out of protest, I leave a stack of stray books on the bottom stair for three days, or a basket of laundered socks unfolded until my sock drawer runs low.

Why not take the same pleasure in those little jobs? It’s all context I suppose—if life’s menial tasks could somehow all be part of a dinner party cleanup effort, every day would be a chain of small pleasures.

The habit of taking even mild pleasure in such tasks would be life-changing, because most of what we do during a typical day isn’t done for enjoyment’s sake: laundry, exercise, office work, dishes, dusting. We do these things because they make life better in some less immediate sense; they’re rewarding, but not necessarily as you do them.

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, as the adage goes, and that means the majority of our lives are spent doing not-especially-enjoyable maintenance work (cleaning, earning, fixing, organizing) in order to support the especially-enjoyable stuff (leisure time, meals, get-togethers, creative endeavors and personal projects) we do with the remaining minority of our time.

We all want to enjoy life, and not just a fraction of it. But if you Google “How to enjoy life,” most of the images you’ll see are symbols of those exceptional, peak-enjoyment activities: hammocks, beaches, candlelit dinners, and scenic hikes.

Clearly the vision we have of enjoying life has nothing to do with the way we actually spend most of it: doing necessary but unremarkable things in front of desks, stoves, laundry baskets, sinks, and grocery store shelves. Sometimes this pile of necessary but unremarkable activities seems so great that there’s little time left for the enjoyment-and-relaxation type activities.

This is a false dichotomy though. Life’s enjoyment isn’t all locked up the things we want to do. There’s enjoyment available to us in almost all of the obligatory maintenance stuff too. It is possible to enjoy standing in line at the deli, sweeping the floor, turning the compost pile, sitting in traffic, and untangling Christmas lights—unless we see those parts of life simply as obstacles to the enjoyable parts, as we often do.

On some level we know that already. Even if it happens only occasionally, we all know what it’s like to enjoy unglamorous moments, such as the folding of a tea towel, the tying of a shoe, or the shining of a sink. But when we’re fixated on getting them over with, we tend to see our chores, obligations, and in-between moments as being devoid of enjoyability.

To the mind that’s looking for it, there is pleasure to be taken in the warmth of dishwater, the fresh air on a walk to the store, and the relaxing sensation of sitting in a chair, even if that chair is in the waiting room at the oil change place. We don’t do these things—or most things—for reasons of pleasure, but pleasure is available in most things.

There’s nothing tricky about finding this pleasure either, if the intention is there. A simple intention to enjoy the task or experience before you, no matter how dull it seems at first, is enough to illuminate its enjoyable qualities.

This hour you’re about to spend tidying the attic—what enjoyment can you find in it? Well, you might find that sliding the boxes into neat, right-angled stacks is satisfying. You might like the sensation of having cleared one side of the room so you can sweep the floor with ease. It may feel good just to use your muscles. Or it may just be a refreshingly quiet place to be working on something.

The enjoyable qualities in these tasks coexist with any difficulty or unpleasantness. Few of our obligatory tasks are purely difficult and unpleasant, but if we think of them that way, as we’re trained to by pop culture and many of the people around us, we’ll fixate on the crappy aspects and overlook the pleasure in it.

Quite often the tasks we regard as awful really only have one truly unpleasant part. Taking the garbage out, for example, only entails about five seconds I find objectionable: the moment at which I tie the bag shut, when my face is near the invisible stink-cloud that comes out. Everything else—carrying it to the door, putting on my boots, walking out to the back, depositing it in the bin, walking back—these are easy to enjoy, or at least not to resent.

There may not be as much enjoyment available in twenty minutes of waiting in line at the DMV as in twenty minutes of eating cake. But that doesn’t matter—given that we will spend most of our lives in those sorts of obligatory moments, we’re leaving way too much on the table by assuming enjoyment can only be found later and elsewhere.

All of this might sound ridiculous, or even desperate—trying to enjoy taking out the garbage or lint-rolling a sweater. But looking for enjoyment in unremarkable moments is no more radical than “Look for the good in people,” and is just as transformative. We just don’t hear it as often.

The pleasures you find may be mild, but the intention to find them makes a drastic difference to how it feels to do almost anything. You’ll probably discover that we have a natural appreciation for very subtle things—the click of a latch closing, the feel of laundered cotton, the evening din of a grocery store, the tiny punch of a thumbtack through notepaper—and that life offers hundreds of these pleasures daily. There’s even pleasure to be found in the simple motions of standing up, sitting down, and putting an object in its place.

The real transformative effect isn’t in the subtle pleasures you can find when you look (although they’re pretty great). It’s in the completely different way we’re aiming our minds in ordinary moments. We’re looking into our experience, not outwards from it, for interest and pleasure.

We can easily spend nine-tenths of our lives trying to appreciate the free time, hammocks, bike rides, and coffee breaks to come, or we can spend that time—which amounts to decades—appreciating what is already happening. And there’s nothing subtle about the difference it makes.

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Photo by Paweł Czerwiński

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