"The ceiling on my appreciation is high, but the floor is high, too"

Sasha Chapin wrote about How to like everything more, and it made me think about how important it is to cultivate appreciation.

A lot of the modern online experience is designed to polarize and perplex, so it takes active effort to resist those tendencies. There's a lot to be grateful for, and there's a lot of enjoyment to be found in the things and experiences we already have available to us.

I appreciated the reminder. Here's what I highlighted:

It’s not that I don’t have critical judgement, or favorites—the ceiling on my appreciation is high, but the floor is high, too.

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.” I think this is a suggestion to adopt what meditators call “one-pointed focus,” a form of concentrated, narrowed attention on a small portion of conscious experience. 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.

Move your attention beyond the part that you immediately focused on...Works miracles for gustatory and olfactory experiences—a good broth or perfume will have layers beyond the one that is loudest, teasing them apart is gratifying.

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.

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?

A good portal into this practice is to viscerally imagine what it took to make the work happen. Feel the determination of the vocalist pouring their heart into the perfect take, imagine the hours the writer spent at the desk—mentally step into their shoes, even if you can only blurrily, notionally do that.

If you don’t have any vocabulary for a medium, then the film or song or dish simply appears as a blur of impressions, it’s hard to draw lines and isolate the particular areas and causes of enjoyment. So, having a better vocabulary for a given medium doesn’t just make you sound smart, it increases the resolution of your enthusiasm.

Much can be revealed through a slightly longer interval of judgement than is habitual.

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”? How do you feel about the song that represents you so well it’s almost personally violating? Can you be grateful for the person who reminds you of all the annoying tendencies you try to repress in yourself? These are all genuine forms of enjoyment to be cultivated and savored alongside the cleaner kinds.