This an extension of a thought I had recently which was that I am way too focused on my own enjoyment of things instead of just enjoying them for what they are.
This new thought is related and very similar but distinct.
When I watch a show or read a book or experience just about anything, I feel like I’m still judging it. If I think something is corny, I’ll think about that and judge it. If I think it’s unoriginal or just bad, that’s what I’m thinking about.
And I think the underlying problem is that I’m not allowing myself to be fully invested in it. How can I get lost in an experience if I’m too caught up in my own experience to really enjoy it?
I’ve really been enjoying reading fiction books in Spanish for a while, and to a lesser extent, TV shows as well. And it took me this long to realize that I think it’s because I’m not judging anything.
I’m not asking it to be anything for me. It doesn’t have to be deep, or meaningful, or exciting, or thought-provoking. I only need it to be in Spanish.
And as such, I become much more immersed because I’m not judging it at all. I don’t care how “good” it is or any of the rest. Even if it’s terrible, I’ll still get my Spanish practice in.
As I’m writing this, I realize that this concept is extremely similar to one I noted years ago when I switched from dating with the intention of finding “the one” to dating more casually without any preconceived notions of where it would go.
I found myself enjoying it a lot more and able to just enjoy the other person.
In a regular relationship, I feel like there are all these expectations and you’re always searching for things you don’t like about the other person so you can ask the terrible question, “could I live with this forever?”
Now, I fully acknowledge that this mindset is problematic even if marriage is what you’re after. But I think it’s what pretty much everyone does. I would hope they’d realize this about themselves or, at the very least, stop asking questions like that and at some point simply accept their partner fully along with all their flaws.
But when I wasn’t dating with marriage as the “purpose”, things got a lot simpler.
I became far more patient of things that I didn’t like or would have deemed “incompatible” in the past. Because in the end, what does it matter? Nobody is perfect. And I probably wouldn’t have to deal with that problem forever since we won’t be getting married.
Once again, there is probably more to dig into there and my general attitude could certainly have been improved, but the important thing is the mindset shift.
Instead of focusing either on how the other person made ME feel or some nebulous concept of the future, I became someone who was able to just enjoy the company of another person without judgement.
To finally take the focus off of myself, and focus on someone else.
In my experience, it generally solves or even prevents almost all petty fights or even times where you’re just kind of annoyed at the other person. I learned that many (most?) of those are really just a judgement about the way the other person is. And that the thing they are doing, in isolation, isn’t even the problem.
It’s that the thing represents how they are, and the belief that this thing will keep happening over and over again.
Bringing it back to the original discussion at hand: it involves a shift from focusing on myself to focusing on external things.
I think that, as long as you maintain some level of focus on yourself and how you are feeling, you can never be truly invested in anything around you.
This means movies won’t be as exciting or moving, books won’t transport you to another world, and you’ll never fully enjoy the company of those around you.
Perhaps this is part of the appeal of some drugs; in particular: alcohol. Probably by way of simply decreasing the bandwidth of your brain (i.e. making you too stupid to focus on more than one thing at a time), you can stop focusing on yourself and instead focus entirely on something (or someone) external.
This could allow you to invest in and enjoy things much more.
I’m not entirely sure this is actually true but it seems plausible, at the very least.
I have heard that psychedelics completely dissolve the ego. This may allow you to completely immerse yourself in external things. I know this sounds counter-intuitive since they are usually used to go deeply inward and rework how your brain works.
But if you think about it, they seem to do it from a sort of third-party state. Like you’re looking in as a neutral party.
I’ve heard anecdotally that watching movies or playing video games, for example, is a pretty wild experience because it’s like you are in them. You become so invested that you truly experience everything as if it were real.
Which seems to lend credence to the idea that if you can just turn off the self-focus, you can become much more invested in everything around you and, hopefully, enjoy it a lot more.
And I think that I have increasingly lost the ability to do that and need to put in active work to get it back.
In general, I think I just sort of need to focus less on myself.