(2024-12-30) Chapin How To Like Everything More

Sasha Chapin: How to like everything more.I believe that one of my skills is that I’m good at liking things. I intensely enjoy many of my experiences, whether we’re talking about music, art, people, food, places, books, movies, anything.

Part of this is personality makeup, but I believe enjoyment is a skill that anyone can improve at. (skill issue)

In my experience, high-level enjoyment, like a sport, is composed of many interlocking micro-skills that must be trained individually, but which reinforce each other. This is not how enjoyment is taught—the only tip people typically receive re enjoyment is to “be mindful.”

It’s a mediocre suggestion for a couple of reasons. First, this is hard to do well, even for seasoned meditators. Second, it is far from the only enjoyment-producing mental motion.

In this post, I’ll attempt to catalog the other enjoyment micro-skills that are most familiar to me.

Look at the other part.
Move your attention beyond the part that you immediately focused on. This is especially easy and helpful with music.

But it also works with people you’re talking to (what is fetching about their outfit or pronunciation), a de Chirico painting (what’s the deal with the cube), watching theatre (what do the actors who are listening look like when they’re listening), and basically anything else. Works miracles for gustatory and olfactory experiences

Let the intensity in.
People typically don’t enjoy heavy metal because they absorb the grunt of metal vocalists as an assault. Often they don’t enjoy opera for similar reasons

Interpreting a stimulus as an assault involves a reflexive mental clenching against it, a form of active resistance. Dropping that lets you experience powerful stimuli as intense rather than annoying.

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 conversationalists who are difficult.

Become an amateur synesthete...
that many Rothkos emit simmering fury. I am making this up, but it doesn’t feel arbitrary, more like I’m allowing myself to have an enriching looseness of association, a form of enjoyable mental instability. I think that’s what imagination is? Try it.

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? This can have anywhere from below zero to a lot of sexual dimension.

A good portal into this practice is to viscerally imagine what it took to make the work happen.

Crank it up by 10%

you can probably just choose to enjoy anything 10% more by just letting your guard down.

Notice how your body enjoys it

The commonly deployed phrase “toe-curling” indicates that a lot of us intuitively understand this one, but the faculty can be honed, simply by noticing.

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?

Predict where it’s going

You might get bored of a certain movie or song or book, finding it predictable, as if you could write the rest of it yourself. To this I would respond: oh, really? Can you? Test yourself by turning it into a game

I will note that this can make certain highly formulaic art forms less enjoyable.

Absorb or create a critical vocabulary

If you don’t have any vocabulary for a medium, then the film or song or dish simply appears as a blur of impressions

If you’re the kind of person who enjoys undirected study, simply browsing glossaries of terminology can help. But a more approachable way to do this is absorbing the work of a respected critic re: material you already enjoy

I also recommend, highly, developing a few items of idiosyncratic personal critical vocabulary. I think of certain perfumes as “photocopier musks” and certain songs as “straight shots” and certain people as “downward portals,” and it helps me isolate categories that are internally meaningful even if nobody else would understand them.

Notice changes

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.

Get lost in a tiny detail

I could probably literally scream about the moment in Ulysses when Joyce describes a bird of paradise as a “little mite of a thing with a heart the size of a fullstop.”

I’ve been excited about that passage for about sixteen years. And I try to make a habit of developing 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.

Be a time traveler.
Would Prokofiev find anything to admire, or even recognize, in the better Kanye beats? How would a nomadic herder from the Mongolian steppe from 100 years ago react to a bougie neighborhood in LA?

Memorize.
In my mind, this is the only real way to enjoy poetry. It takes time to reveal all the intricacies of what a poet at the level of, say, John Berryman, is doing, 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.

having an informal memory palace going can enhance everything.

Since doing 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 again in order to archive in memory

Build a 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.

This also works for historical context, not just geographical context. 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 into the scene, perhaps with the help of nearby paintings in a museum, it becomes more admirable.

But contrast isn’t always the point here: 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 regional colleagues

Pretend you are a buyer.
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 also works great for appreciating restaurants and buildings. What are the trouble spots you’d want to improve?

Find another register of enjoyment

Life is so dull if it’s just “like” or “dislike.” 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 locate “would be compelling to someone who is not me”?

Just give it a second.
Give it a second, and refuse your internal compass’ direction to go somewhere else immediately when you have a knee-jerk reaction to a thing or person

Find the one flaw.
This is puzzling and annoying to some others, but I find that if I love something deeply, I end up loving it all the more if I locate its weak points. Often, this helps you find the necessary points of tradeoff that actually made the thing great