most mornings i wake early, long before the sun rises. for a while i resisted it, lying restlessly in bed in the vain hope that i’d fall back asleep. then, a few months ago, i decided to lean into it. instead of agonizing over how tired i was, i would make the most of this stolen time.
i found a new world, the world of six a.m. it looked more or less like the world i had known, but there was a different quality of light, a different set of rules. i learned that the rooftop on my building doesn’t open until six a.m., and that’s when the maintenance guys clean the grills and empty the trash. i learned that, from six to nine a.m., you can find more dogs than you can imagine running freely through the long meadow in prospect park. i learned the rhythms of the sunrise, which hit its earliest point in mid-june and then started easing its way back in time. at six a.m., places belonged to me in a way they didn’t when the city was fully awake.
today when i wake, i go to the rooftop and meditate or write, or i walk to the park. i savor the sensuous warmth of the breeze, the white-hot light of the sun blazing behind my eyelids. sometimes i just stay at home and drink my cup of tea and read as the sun rises, nestled in blankets and ambient music. i’m still tired, usually, but i’m not miserable in my tiredness. it turns out you can enjoy anything if you let its beauty to reveal itself to you.
enjoyment used to be this fragile state that required precise instrumentation and tuning. i’d always been a particular person—strong opinions, strongly held. i liked what i liked, and i didn’t like what i didn’t like. this kind of music, that kind of travel. these moral positions, those areas of academic interest.
there was a sureness to it; everything in which i could see value was good, and everything else simply wasn’t, for the many reasons that felt obvious to me. apparently in psychology they call that “naive realism.” even so, i enjoyed a lot because i experienced rapturous joy when i encountered the good and so oriented my life around finding more of it. but i was immovable when it came to everything else, baffled and incredulous that other people could enjoy it at all.
many of these opinions loosened and grew more nuanced over long periods of time (i even learned to like country music), but it was a process over which i had no control. it was more like glacial erosion. it happened to me, imperceptibly day after day, until i was reminded of what my landscape had once looked like and could suddenly see how much it had changed.
but what is it to dislike? it’s to experience discomfort. why do you experience discomfort during particular experiences? it sounds like a stupid question, but i don’t think the answer is obvious.
i think psychological discomfort usually comes from a delta between what you’re expecting and what’s happening. food is supposed to be x, and this cuisine does y. people are supposed to believe x, but this person is saying y. you’re off-balance, often with an anticipatory fear of what will be required of you in response to this divergence from your expectation, and then that registers as dislike. some people don’t hold much expectation—they go into the world and take everything as it comes. these people tend to like everything more. people who interface with the world with many rigid expectations, on the other hand, usually have a harder time.
disliking typically even goes one step further, before you’re interacting with the target of the dislike at all. i know i’m about to have an experience that i may not enjoy, and i brace mentally for it. the hope is that i make it bearable by preparing myself; the reality is that the bracing creates most of the pain.
i first came across this idea a year ago in this jonny miller tweet. how striking, the concept that the vast majority of suffering doesn’t come from direct experience, but rather our resistance to the experience.
it stayed with me, but it wasn’t until i went to the new bathhouse in brooklyn that i tested it in practice. i had entered the cold plunge and found it invigorating but also unbearably painful, immediately getting back out. but then i recalled the tweet and thought, hm, what if i don’t brace? this time i went back to the icy pool and didn’t steel myself at all against the cold. and it was great. i was wholly alive, nerves tingling, calm. this time i stayed for a few minutes. perceptual shift: all the pain had been in the anticipation of pain.
the release of expectation allowed me enjoy anything much more. it was like a magic trick. before, enjoying life had been this process of making sure every variable in my life was dialed to the right values. find the right people, the right job, the right interests, and only then can enjoyment thrive. internal experience depended on external circumstances, which meant my happiness depended on my ability to control the environment around me. seeing that that was an illusion was revelatory. i had the capacity to enjoy even the most painful experiences. not perfectly, not all the time, but even knowing it was possible meant i was no longer at the mercy of the circumstances of my life.
as reference points, here are some of the experiences i enjoy now that i used to instinctually reject before this past year.
improv. i think if you were to ask a lot of my friends an activity i would never do, improv was probably up there. i’m deeply allergic to cringe, i hate performing, and i don’t like not having a plan. but my friend kiera suggested it ahead of my first time raising venture capital, and i thought, you know what, why not? and turns out it was super fun. cringe loses its power in a welcoming and nonjudgmental space.
walking. it sounds silly to say now, but i used to hate walking. i would resist walking anywhere farther than, say, fifteen minutes. it felt wildly inefficient, a waste of time when time was already so scarce. i couldn’t savor the process of it. when i learned to do it, the whole world opened up so much more. i’d be struck by a perfect sunflower growing out of the sidewalk, a tree knot in the shape of an eye, the dappling of light between leaves in a tree. i walk a few miles on average every day now.
hiking mountains. in the same vein, i didn’t like the arduousness of hiking up and down a mountain. i appreciated the view you could get at the top, but everything before and after that felt like a huge inconvenience. but this past year i’ve had three profound spiritual experiences that came in the ascent up a mountain: first at nanshan in chongqing, then at cangshan in dali, and most recently in the catskills this past weekend. this last time, we made our way through a dense, muddy forest during a severe thunderstorm with zero rain gear, got lost multiple times, and nearly gave up. but, fully soaked, we made it. it’s the kind of hardship i once would have resisted with every fiber of my being. even a month ago i think i’d have been disappointed that the trip was ruined by traffic and rain and bailed out of our plan. but having the capacity to be open meant that nothing could be ruined. what did happen was freed from what i had wanted and could become so much more.
ambient music. it used to be boring to me. i didn’t appreciate the subtlety of it because i needed (or, rather, expected) music to be much more forceful in capturing my attention. but you can just embrace the boredom, and then after a while it vanishes, and you’re able to start perceiving the overwhelming granularity of everyday experience and just how interesting that is.
weightlifting. this one is recent! i had always gravitated toward femme-coded forms of exercise: barre, pilates, spin, yoga, and so on. weightlifting was obviously not for me. i can’t even really say why, except that it felt like an endeavor for men, i had zero attachment to the kinds of psychological reward i thought men got out of it, and it looked... hard? but no, my take now is that weightlifting is exercise for lazy people. it’s so easy. everyone should do it. i was suffering doing a thousand one-inch pulses in barre until total muscle fatigue (i’m kidding, i still like barre), thinking that that was a less intense form of exercise, when i could have just been lifting a heavy bar, like, twenty times with long breaks in the middle and then going home. also, it’s just cool to know i can deadlift my body weight.
traveling alone. i thought i couldn’t do it for longer than a week or two, that i would be too lonely. and frequently in my china travels last year i was lonely. but it wasn’t the kind of annihilation i expected it to be. i think i had feared the solitude of my own thoughts, keeping myself surrounded by friends and absorbed in media. but my mind is a pretty fascinating place, and i hadn’t given it this kind of focused attention in a long time.
emotional pain. i had no idea how much i avoided emotional pain before. i had an infinite recursion of russian nesting dolls for keeping myself distanced from difficult feelings while believing i was engaging with them. it’s taken a long time to start to enjoy it. a terrible month where you feel like every part of you is dying will come and then go, and you’ll become hyperaware of the beauty of what’s still in your life, and then another phase of emotional death will come, and that’s fine, too. you can savor all of it.
spirituality and self-help. i was pretty suspicious of most of this space; anywhere you have a lot of people seeking guidance, you encounter charlatans. even outside of that, i saw the communities built around spirituality and self-help as having this self-absorbed fragility—how they spoke, how they saw themselves. instinctively i felt that many people simply needed to become more resilient to deal with life. and sometimes that’s true, certainly. spirituality can be a mechanism of avoidance as much as anything else. but even so i’ve come to see it as a natural and necessary dimension of human life that contains so much joy and meaning.
fulfilling obligations. this one is the most amorphous and the most important, probably. for a long time, much of what i did followed a predictably cursed pattern. i would have an idea, a delicate, shimmering flight of fancy, be really excited about it, and decide to do it. and then suddenly it would morph. now it was a “plan,” and, thus, an obligation. i was no longer chasing this flight of fancy; i was on a death march to reach an endpoint. some of that was some level of demand avoidance, but some of it was also me bracing myself against the possibility that i wouldn’t enjoy it enough to bring to fruition without force. the same went for obligations toward other people—loved ones, work, etc. the knowledge that i needed to do something made it much harder for me to enjoy it. but i’ve since learned to unearth the part of me that wants to fulfill these obligations. in fact, they aren’t “obligations” at all. they’re choices i’ve made about what matters to me. and what could be more enjoyable than living the life you’ve chosen?