Snakes and Ladders and Butterfly Kisses

What sets the philosophy of enjoyment apart is the will to enjoy. It’s an application of willpower to enjoyment. Willpower is normally used to deny immediate gratification for a long-term goal. We force ourselves to do things that we don’t want to do – not enjoy dessert, not enjoy a drink, not spend money – or we make ourselves do things we’d rather not do – run on a treadmill, work late, eat bran flakes. This “will to enjoy” is the opposite of that.

People think that with enough willpower they can improve their lives, but results from the American Psychological Association’s 2011 Stress in America Survey shows that a lack of willpower is the No. 1 reason for people not making healthy lifestyle changes (see: What You Need to Know About Willpower: The Psychological Science of Self-Control). People blame faulty willpower for their imperfect choices, but is willpower to blame?

What if you turned willpower on its head? Instead of willing yourself to not do things that you want to do or to do things you don’t want to do, step out of self-conflicts and will yourself to do what you want. Force yourself to enjoy! Does it take an effort to do what you want?

Enjoyment is subtle. It’s so simple people miss it. We focus on big stuff like long term goals and on more of something when it’s actually less that we need. It’s the butterfly kiss of happiness that we miss. Less is more (more or less).

If you enjoy ice cream, does it take willpower to make yourself have some? No. It’s what you want! Be reasonable and force yourself to enjoy ice cream! Use willpower to do what you want and it doesn’t take an effort.

Optimize every scrap of enjoyment. Be enjoyment strategic and remember that too much ice cream isn’t enjoyable. It’ll make you sick. If you understand the fragile nature of enjoyment, you’ll know how to play it. Enjoyment is a game of strategy.

According to John P. Carse in the book Finite and Infinite Games there are two kinds of games. There are finite games where the object is to win and there are infinite games where the object is to continue playing. The suggestion here is that you make wholesome enjoyment your infinite game.

Note the word “wholesome.” In this infinite game things that bring pleasure (i.e., things we enjoy) can be muddled with pain. Eating chili peppers or running marathons, for example, can bring a strong pleasure, but too many chili peppers and marathons can become painful!

When we enjoy something, we want to experience more of that something, but it’s important to separate the source of that pleasure from the state of feeling pleased. Chocolate cake can be a source of enjoyment, but if you eat chocolate cake all the time you can get sick of it. A source that brought you pleasure in the past can become a source of pain (see: Wholesome Pleasure).

The world isn’t necessarily a friendly place. It doesn’t owe you happiness. What does it mean to force yourself to enjoy? It means to make a choice to enjoy and to use willpower to generate a fighting spirit. With a fighting spirit, take every annoyance, every pain, every discomfort, every sickness, every humiliation, every horror, every fear as all in a day’s work in the infinite game of living. Play to continue playing. Enjoy to continue enjoying.

Picture unhappiness as a woman determined to be unhappy. She’s your personal antagonist and her breath is not good. Now, imagine playing a game of Snakes and Ladders (aka Chutes and Ladders) with her. Will it be enjoyable? Most people would think not, but for a philosopher of enjoyment, it’s a challenge.

The game is considered by some as a metaphor for life. On the board of Snakes and Ladders there’s a grid of numbered squares with pictures of snakes and ladders each connecting two board squares. The object of the game is to navigate your piece according to die rolls from the bottom to the top helped by ladders and hindered by snakes.

Historically, the ladders represented virtues (positive emotions) – they take you up – and the snakes represented vices (negative emotions) – they take you down. The trick to winning is to get lucky and have more virtues than vices.

If you are going to enjoy the game with a sad halitosis friend, you have to roll with what happens. It’s beyond your control anyway. Accept what you get. Look for ladders and avoid snakes. Enjoy both the ups and downs. Have a conversation with yourself. Encourage yourself to enjoy. Be a good companion to yourself and kind to your unhappy friend. Offer her a mint and your own enjoyment. Enjoyment is like laughter, it’s contagious.

The only thing you control is the way you think. Win or lose, it doesn’t matter. Enjoy Snakes and Ladders like you’re ten years old and it’s 1927. Imagine the enjoyment and you have it! Play the music and fly baby fly! Help others by helping yourself. When you defy depression and enjoy yourself, you win even when you lose.

Roll the die before it’s you.

The Art of Day-dreaming

The Philosophy of Enjoyment combines the sensibilities of a Walt Whitman or Leonard Cohen – poetical – with a Charlie Chaplin or Jerry Seinfeld – comical. The basic idea is to experience life sensuously (like a poet) and lightly (like a comic). Life and enjoyment are synonymous, but just because you’re alive doesn’t mean you’re enjoying it. For some people death isn’t hard: life is.

But if you practice the art of day-dreaming, even when life is hard, it’s still enjoyable. With a poet-comic sensibility, you can have ecstatic moments without having to do anything but relax, observe and chill. It’s a matter of practicing a few mental tricks.

The first trick is to focus on your senses. This goes back to earlier posts like “Getting Small: Concentrate” and “The Will To Enjoy: How to be more conscious“. Stop what you’re doing and ask yourself: What am I seeing? What’s that smell? (Is it me?) What am I hearing? tasting? touching?

Look from the periphery of your eyes. Go discreetly into a zone where you meet your surroundings. Beyond everything that you think you are, you’re still just a sensuous organic unit. People get a false sense of superiority. They let their senses get dull through lack of attention. Life becomes an abstract affair.

Look to the animals

Watch the way a dog or a cat sniffs the air (ignore how they sniff each other). Watch their ears. Watch the way a sparrow looks around and listens. Compare that to how people stare straight ahead or at electronic devices.Go outside or look out the window. Slip out of a miserable mock-reality into a real reality of secret thoughts that only you can have. Allow yourself to day-dream about nothing in particular.

You’ve had lovely sensations wafted upon you in the past. Remember those. Create those again. Feel yourself somewhere between boredom and bliss. Enjoy a thousand vague and delicious impressions.

Relish every morsel of food and drop of drink that enters your mouth. Relish every idle, dreamy and carefree thought that you have.

Work so you have time for leisure. Make introversion and loneliness your strength. Make weakness your strength. Experience every nuance of country-roads, gardens, old walls, leafy lanes, wood paths and twilight harbours.

Devour life and defy it to get in your way of enjoyment.

In situations with difficult people, study them from your observation post (yourself). Experiment with yourself. Imagine seeing out of their eyes. You don’t have to love them or like them, just be kind to them. Sympathize with them.

Everyone is doing their best to feel enjoyment. It’s just that some people don’t get it. They can’t laugh at themselves. Enjoyment eludes them. Help them. If you feel annoyed, ask: What’s funny about this?

Look at people with a comedian’s eye, not to be mean, vulgar or glib, but to help yourself enjoy them and yourself with them and they you.

Picture yourself as the Good Humor Ice cream man. Switch from serious to good humorous. Alter your default settings by first focusing on your senses and then tell yourself to lighten up. Do something silly. Be free. People really are quite funny especially when they’re not trying.

The grand trick is to never have a single day without impressing into your memory stuff like a particular road, a specific tree, a particular treat, flights of birds, gusts of wind, interconnecting rain-rings in a puddle, hot afternoon fragrances… whatever!

Don’t worry if annoying things happen. Of course they happen! Annoying things are always bound to happen. Train yourself to get beyond them and be amused by them.

Beyond your five senses, humour could be your sixth. There’s nothing unseen about it. It’s available to everyone. You can’t help seeing what you see, but you can shape how you see. Combine your Walt Whitman Song of Myself with your Charlie Chaplin A Dog’s Life.In an annoying situation, you have two options: You can get all serious and feel ill-treated (not enjoyable) or you can be light without care. Ill-treatment is nothing to you. What do you expect? Who are you anyway?

Nobody. You are just another body envelope. Why not be the light?

The trick is to be absolutely determined to enjoy yourself. Don’t take yourself or life too serious. You know how it will end. Force yourself to enjoy. Will it to happen. Play music that gives you a charge of courage to forge ahead.

Go Buster Keaton on everybody and sing, “Don’t Bring Me Down!” to yourself without caring if anyone hears. Let “Enjoyment!” be your battle cry. Plunge into the experience of living. The water’s fine, even when it isn’t, and when it isn’t: It’s even better.

Enjoy.

Will, Day-dreams & Selective Memory

Unless you’re dead, you’re a living organism. Like a bear, you react to living. You wake up in the morning and react to your surroundings. You have secret thoughts. They’re secret because no one else but you thinks them.

Your purpose is to enjoy living, but unlike bears, most humans substitute the lowest and most unimportant things for the real purpose of life. They get caught up in things like money, politics, religion and life-styles. They get so caught up in humanity, they lose their individuality.

Except for rare moments of personal peace, lots of people miss the real purpose of living which is to live and enjoy it. Not to do. Not to strive. Not to achieve. The purpose of a flower is to flower. The purpose of a bear is to bear. You’re like every other flower and bear. You’re purpose is to you. Enjoy it. Why not? What do you have to lose?

Imagine: Its a peaceful sunrise. A man wakes up. He looks at the sunlight spilling into his room. He hears birds outside. He sees a fragment of gray sky out the window.

He feels happy as he contemplates cozy sheets, birds, skies and trees, but then it happens. He gets bombarded by mental troubles and jobs to do. Demon-like thoughts attack his enjoyment. It’s an assault.

He worries about the past and the future, he worries about the state of his finances and his health and his relationships – good, bad and ugly. He worries about things he did or didn’t do. He’s no longer a cozy island of solitude lulled by sensuous feelings and thoughts of trees, birds and sunshine.

Our poor sod who’s enjoyment has been so robbed needs to take the Philosophy of Enjoyment‘s three-pronged approach. First, he needs to engage his fighting spirit and will to enjoy. Second, he needs to go seriously into day-dreaming. This isn’t a time for half-hearted measures. Third, he should grab hold of little fond memories.

It’s a trick of one’s will to have the thoughts that you think so use your will to expunge unpleasantries. Defiantly will yourself to oppose misery. Focus on your surroundings. You are here. You are alone inside your head. What are you going to do? Nothing.

Slip into those long thoughts called day-dreams. Go blank for a bit. A life revolving around “work” and “pleasure” is not a life. Unless work implies freedom of mind and pleasure lets you slip into lazy day-dreams, you’re wasting your time by not wasting time.

Rationality, efficiency and human practicality ruins the magical happiness felt in being alive and geared to enjoyment. Get back to that magical happiness. Day-dream with abandon like a kid would. Imagine what you want. It’s your world. Go ahead and fly if you want. Wishful thinking isn’t a bad thing!In the midst of willing, day-dreaming and sense-experiencing, chew the cud of happy memories. Go cow for awhile. Imagine your face is a cow face. It shouldn’t be hard to do. Stare out of yourself. Don’t soil the flooring, but observe your surroundings as a cow would. Literally make yourself forget the cares and annoyances that crowd waking hours. Say, “Forgetaboutit” like a New York gangster-cow would.

Go into a secret trance and convert computer screens into fields of green, turn cement walls into pastures. Your supposed jailers are airy nothings.

Humour is critical here. Don’t be afraid to smile at yourself and secretly laugh at the silly things people do – including yourself.

The Philosophy of Enjoyment is perfect for weaklings. People who are idle, eccentric, lazy and neurotic love it. They can live a personal life that defies the modern command to turn humans into metal-jacketed electronic ants. An escape from the horrors lies in yourself. When you dive into a gregarious practical chatty-filled life, your soul temporarily commits suicide.

Your purpose is to experience a peculiar sort of happiness. Have an attitude that gathers itself together and never ceases from enjoying life. Endure the blows of fate and thrill in the pleasure of simple things. Look around. It’s good to be you, even when it isn’t.

The First Step

Let’s face it, everyone wants enjoyment. The world turns on it. Maybe you’ve heard of Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and his philosophy, the “Will to Live“, or maybe you’ve seen inspirational quotes about the “Will to Succeed“—”never give up!” and “try, try try, try again! just one more time“— but have you heard of the “Will to Enjoy“? If not, well then, that’s what this philosophy is all about.

A Philosophy of Enjoyment maintains that the purpose of life is to enjoy it and if you’re not enjoying life, there are ways to force yourself to enjoy.

The first thing to remember is that this isn’t serious. People tend to be too serious. People who are serious get annoyed. They take themselves too serious. There are a lot of people who think they do perfectly fine without a philosophy “thank you very much,” but some people really could use some help because philosophy really can improve one’s outlook on life and make life a lot more enjoyable.

A Philosophy of Enjoyment is not for experts. It’s not academic or intellectual and in no way is it confusing. It’s a practical philosophy for ordinary people, living ordinary lives.

The message is: The secret of life is NOT to improve yourself or the world. That’ll happen naturally as you start enjoying.

The secret of life is to enjoy it in a certain way that is gentle and receptive. This certain way is characterized as follows: it is calm, it is funny, it is humble, and it is in tune with nature. It is NOT dependent upon excitement, on crowds, on machines, on rockets, on technology or in possessions.

A doodle.

The first step is ridiculously simple. The first step is: Determination.

It is to be determined to enjoy yourself. It is to say to yourself, “Be it resolved that I will enjoy myself.” It is the determination of a person willing to be happy regardless of external circumstances. It is to not let difficult external circumstances get in the way of enjoyment. It is wrestling life to the ground, pinning it down and saying, “I will enjoy myself!“

Take that first step: Decide to enjoy yourself no matter what. Be determined to enjoy. You can experience thrilling moments of ecstatic enjoyment right now no matter what the situation.

For more about what philosophy actually is, see the funny and enjoyable School of Life video, “What Is Philosophy For?”

Before Smokey the Bear got into fire prevention, he used to say, “Only YOU can Prevent Non-Enjoyment.”