Do You Make a Chore Out of Pleasure?

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I was thinking about buying my good friend Nina a novel as a Christmas gift, as she loves to read. Many recently published novels leaped immediately to mind, but I had to rule out a few of them straight away. Nina doesn’t like any of her fiction to be ‘long.’ Anna Karenina or War and Peace, forget it. Even 400 pages is too much of an ask for her.

“Can’t be doing with it!” says Nina, in a no-nonsense voice. It is not that Nina is pushed for time. She is comfortably retired and, alongside her social life and other interests, loves nothing more than snuggling up with a book for an hour or more at a go. But she also wants to get it read and get onto the next one. She wants to tick it off the to-do list. A pursuit intended to be pleasurable morphs into a chore. A delicious diversion becomes a duty. (Book club members might sometimes identify with that, too.)

I think many of us may pervert simple joys in this way. For instance, take Wordle, the deceptively straightforward word game devised by software engineer Josh Wardle to entertain his girlfriend during COVID-19 lockdowns, and now offered free online every day by The New York Times.¹ Some people routinely start their day by playing it. Sometimes one can be lucky and hit on the day’s word quickly; other times it can be baffling. I have known people to be unable to move on to other things until they have ticked it off their list; if they don’t get the answer quickly, they become extremely frustrated. A fun brainteaser leads to anguished clockwatching. (I prefer to do it at the end of the working day, to ease into the evening. Then it doesn’t matter if it takes a while.)

But I have my own unhelpful must-get-it-done attitude towards a supposedly enjoyable activity. Having enthusiastically signed up for free digital magazines on subjects that interest me, such as psychology and philosophy, I feel irked when, with tiresome regularity, they pop into my email inbox. If I save them to be read later, I sense the weight of their reproving presence until I have given them attention. Instead of reading at leisure with interest, I skim and bin.

Maybe you have your own version of this experience. Perhaps a revitalising walk through the autumn leaves gets subsumed by how many steps you have taken. Or you can’t luxuriate for more than a moment in a relaxing bath. Perhaps exercise, sport, or dance has to be sandwiched in and executed efficiently, instead of given ample, rolling space, a welcome chance to have fun and feel free. Ironically, the very activities that are a wonderful antidote to anxiety and stress become a source of stress themselves.

The human givens practitioner commonly promotes the benefits of being more in the moment; of lifting attention up and outwards to notice the bigger vista: to letting go of what doesn’t matter, without making a must and ought out of the very things meant to help us weather the difficult things that do matter.

A classic example of flipping from one thing to another without taking time to discern and absorb is an obsessive need to scroll continually through social media feeds, leading to mental exhaustion rather than satisfaction. Recent research showed that when participants in a study were prevented from switching between digital media on smartphones (they had to watch a 10-minute unskippable video), they rated their experience as more satisfying, engaging, and meaningful than those who had the freedom to skip at will between seven five-minute videos. When switching was not an option, people paid more attention,² finding something to catch their imaginations, perhaps. And that brought its own rewards.

It has long been known that savouring small pleasures can enhance our health. Over 35 years ago, psychologist Ed Diener asked men and women to record their moods for six weeks. The sense of well-being, he found, sprang from how much of the time a person felt good, not from momentary peaks of ecstasy.³ And what counts here is the ordinary stuff – the pleasures of simple activities and natural views, smells, tastes, textures, and sounds that can be enjoyed even while engaged in other necessary actions, such as collecting children from school or raking up garden leaves.

This uplifting understanding found its way into verse over a century ago:

“ What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night …
A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.”⁴

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Appreciating the Life We Have

Ultimately, just getting pleasurable things done is far less satisfying and less meaningful than truly relishing the doing.