Relish Your Pleasures

Let them be a release, not requirements.

Key points:

• We may increasingly find ourselves shoehorning leisure activities into our lengthy ‘to-do’ lists.
• So antidotes to stress and anxieties start to become stress-inducing in themselves.
• Downtime needs to be enjoyed wholeheartedly.

I was thinking about buying my good friend Nina a novel for Christmas, as she loves to read. Many recently published novels leapt immediately to mind, but I had to rule out a few of them straight away. You see, 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 to snuggle 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. So 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 be unable to move onto other things until they have ticked it off their list, so, 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.

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