I Like Liking Things

There is something to be said about the social safety in not liking anything too much. Dislike can be delivered with a shrug. Enthusiasm has to stand there in full daylight and admit that something got through. You can dismiss a movie in six words and look discerning. Say you loved it, though, and somebody may immediately ask you to defend the screenplay, the ending, the casting, the historical accuracy, and possibly your education.

We have made being unimpressed look sophisticated. The person who rolls their eyes is presumed to have standards. The person who claps too hard may simply have been fooled. Cynicism gets to arrive already dressed as intelligence while delight is asked to provide references.

I am increasingly uninterested in that arrangement because I like liking things.

That does not mean I like everything. It does not mean taste is meaningless, criticism is cruel, or every piece of entertainment, food, music, art, technology, tradition, or human behavior deserves a participation trophy. Plenty of things are bad. Some are boring. Some are expensive nonsense with excellent packaging. Having preferences is part of paying attention.

Liking something and evaluating it are not opposing activities, you can see the seams and still enjoy the coat. You can know the joke is obvious and laugh anyway. You can understand that a song is engineered to be catchy and allow yourself to be caught. You can notice every flaw in a restaurant and still think about the meal three days later. Discernment does not require emotional refrigeration.

There is a difference between having taste and performing distance.

Distance is useful armor. If you never care too visibly, nobody can easily embarrass you for caring about the wrong thing. If you announce that everything popular is overrated before anyone asks, you have already protected yourself from being mistaken for a person who might have uncomplicated fun. Irony can serve the same purpose. Put enough quotation marks around your enjoyment and you never have to admit that you meant it.

However, enthusiasm is vulnerable in a small, ordinary way. To say “I love this” is to hand someone a tiny piece of evidence about you. This made me laugh. This moved me. This is beautiful to me. I look forward to this. I would like another one. None of those statements is intellectually impressive, and that is precisely why they are useful. They are honest telemetry from a person having an experience instead of auditing one.

We talk constantly about protecting joy as though joy were a rare woodland animal, then behave strangely suspicious when someone actually has some. Too earnest. Too excited. Too sentimental. Too basic. Too invested. Apparently the correct amount of visible pleasure is just enough to establish that you are alive but not enough to suggest that the thing mattered.

That sounds exhausting.

There is also a quiet generosity in liking things. Attention expands when you enjoy something. You notice what made it work. You remember the person who recommended it. You ask what else is like it. You tell someone else. You become curious instead of merely finished. Enjoyment sends little branches outward.

Dislike can do that too, of course. Criticism can sharpen perception. A strong negative reaction can reveal standards, values, or assumptions you had not named before. I have no interest in replacing cynicism with compulsory positivity. “Like more things” is not a moral command. Forced enthusiasm is just another costume.

The point is choice. I do not want to reject something merely because liking it would make me predictable. I do not want to downgrade pleasure because other people have already discovered it. I do not want to turn every preference into a referendum on my sophistication. Sometimes millions of people like a thing because the thing is pleasant. This is not necessarily evidence of cultural collapse.

Popularity can distort judgment in both directions. Some people assume the crowd must be right. Others build an identity around the crowd being wrong. Both positions outsource taste. The more interesting question is smaller: what happened when the thing reached you?

Did you enjoy it? Did it make the afternoon better? Did you want to hear it again, read another page, order the same dish, watch the sequel, learn the name of the artist, keep the ridiculous object on your desk? Then perhaps the experience has already completed the necessary paperwork.

We also underestimate how much life is made of these small approvals. Not the giant loves we build biographies around, but the ordinary ones: a chair that is surprisingly comfortable, a dumb joke that works every time, a particular pen, a grocery-store cookie, a song you have no intention of defending, the sound a screen door makes, a stranger's excellent coat, the exact mug you always reach for first. None of these needs to become important in order to be worth enjoying.

In fact, demanding significance from pleasure may be another way of ruining it. We are allowed to like things that do not improve us. They do not need to teach a lesson, optimize a routine, build a skill, signal a value, support a cause, or become part of a carefully curated identity. Some things can simply make the machinery hum more pleasantly for five minutes.

That is enough.

There are already many systems in adult life devoted to saying no. Budgets say no. Calendars say no. Bodies say no. Obligations, weather, geography, timing, common sense, and the astonishing operating hours of government offices all contribute. Reality has a very competent refusal department. I see little reason to volunteer for an unpaid shift there when something harmless makes me happy.

So I am keeping the exclamation point! I am keeping the song on the playlist, the recommendation delivered with too much enthusiasm, the sincere compliment, the embarrassing favorite, the thing everyone else decided was uncool six months ago. I am reserving the right to be delighted without first proving that the delight survived peer review.

Taste should help us find what we love, not merely document what we were clever enough to reject. 

I like liking things because it turns out there are worse ways to move through the world.