Don't Dismiss It.
On the value of keeping an open mind.
Something I have been reflecting on a lot recently is how many things I enjoy today that I had previous said “I’ll pass” on. To give you some examples —
A Safety Razor
Meditation
Yoga
Pistachios
Various Musicians
Linux
Long Walks
Therapy
Suffice to say, I’ve had some big personal policy reversals over time. I think this is an interesting discussion, and something I know other people around me have experienced — I mean, people obviously change — but, I think there’s a dynamic here that’s worth really reflecting on. When we dismiss something which we later come to love, we miss out on potentially years or decades of enjoyment. Since the things we enjoy often build on one another, we also might be robbing ourselves of even more sophisticated pleasures down the road.
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Initially when writing this post, I was going to go in a more philosophical direction, and I’ll still probably end on this note, but I think it’s also really interesting to interrogate why exactly I needed to come back to some many things. What was it that made it so that I didn’t enjoy it the first time? How could I change those conditions and better appreciate things? I’ll discuss the details of some of these things and my experiences with them, and then think about the meta.
The Safety Razor
This one is pretty simple — fear. I remember cutting myself the first time I ever borrowed a razor from my father, and a safety razor seems way more likely to cut you. The reality though is that while I have cut myself with my safety razor, it doesn’t feel particularly more likely to knick than any other razor.
I think on this one it mostly comes down to not understanding something, and making a decision about it based on my outward perception rather than a lived experience. Possibly cutting yourself is an unpleasant thought, but this introduces one of the through lines in so many of these: we know a lot of people use safety razors and we know people generally don’t want to cut themselves. This wisdom of crowds concept is one that I think comes back time and again: if something is generally popular it might be more trend than substance, but I mean the whole reason trend before substance is interesting as a concept is that its an exception that cuts against the grain. Something which is popular probably just has something to it! Looking to history and more deeply at language can also help. A safety razor is literally called that because it made shaving much simpler than a straight razor — something you do not see a lot of people using.
Meditation
I have tried meditating various times in my life, but until my most recent experience with it, I’ve mostly always dismissed it as sort of superstitious mumbo-jumbo. I as a sort of scientifically-minded person love things that are quantifiable or that we at least have the language to describe in great detail, but talking about meditation, which inherently requires talking a lot about subjective human experience makes that hard.
Part of me coming around to this has been the wisdom of crowds thing. Too many people talk about meditating and how meditation is good for you for it to be some sort of weird hoax. At the same time, I was just misunderstanding what meditation is, or at least can be. Probably because of exposure to mainstream media that colours meditation as this very religious or spiritual thing — something which I long wrote off immediately; I think I basically thought meditation was something like prayer. But, now I see meditation as quite the opposite of prayer or almost anything else that requires conscious thought — mind you, I mostly engage in what people often call mindfulness, but the experience is not really about doing something, but becoming aware of your thoughts, sensations and emotions, how they interact, and the texture of how they feel.
Another problem is just that I did not try enough, or with enough gusto, I think in general it’s easy to put in a half-hearted effort and then write something off, but nowadays my immediate response to feeling something isn’t what was promised is questioning whether I just gave up to easily. I think it’s also the case that my values have shifted, I think I’ve come around to respect spirituality and look at it differently than I did when I was a teenager, I also just understand that its hard to explain things about the way humans feel and think in a particularly hard scientific way. Part of that is from experience, but experience ties into so many of these. Once you see a sort of behavioural antipattern once, you see it more and more, and you ideally learn to address it. That’s experience.
Perhaps the biggest thing though is just motivation. Meditating was something which in the past I would have done because I had heard of it, or because I liked the idea of having enlightened thought, but more recently practicing meditation has really been about getting me out of my own way, improving my mental health, and literally being mindful about whats going on in my head. When you’re motivated you have the sort of inertia to get through rough patches and ruts.
Pistachios
I had nuts here and there as a kid, and it was never an experience I really enjoyed. I had nuts in chocolate, which felt like a bad distraction from the main attraction, as well as of course lots of nuts in granola bar type things. Peanuts in particular I can remember never liking the taste of, and even things like hazelnut felt like they actively made things worse, not better. I think nuts also didn’t look particularly appealing to me, and the idea of shells seems inconvenient at best, and kind of weird at worst.
But honestly, I never really gave nuts a try by themselves. That makes some sense I think: if you hate chocolate that has a small amount of peanut in it, you’re really going to hate raw peanuts, but honestly I don’t think I hated all nuts, I just didn’t really seek out something which I just didn’t hate.
This changed when in August I took what was probably the last big step forward in my diet and started having a lot more nuts, pistachios among them — largely because they have lots of good fat, fibre, and protein. Honestly, I was quite skeptical going in, but now I’d say nuts are some of my favorite foods. I still don’t like peanuts, but lots of other nuts are good. Pistachios in particular feel very mild, they don’t have a super strong taste, and the taste they do have feels a bit like a baked good or a cracker to me, with a very filling feel probably due to the fat and protein. I think this is mostly a story of three things. One is that you should question preferences formed in childhood — your brain wasn’t fully developed, you probably were sick (I’ve learned kids are sick all the time since becoming a parent), your tastes were immature. Another is that you need to be way of wrongful association: just because you don’t like one thing doesn’t mean you won’t like another, even if its’s from the same category of things or someone has previously told you it’s similar. There are a lot of things that people say “taste just like chicken!” that I’ve no interest in eating. And then finally, it’s motivation again — I had my first pistachios because the nutrients were appealing, and you know what, the taste was ok, but not something I loved. But, it was ok, and over time ok turned into something I enjoyed.
Exercise
I have a complex relationship with exercise. Growing up, I walked and cycled and swam lots, but the idea of working out in a gym never really connected with me. It was uncomfortable, and I didn’t really see results.
It wasn’t probably until my first summer of university when I started running fast 5K’s on our basement treadmill that I think I started to get it. To some extent, the discomfort and exhaustion of exercise can smoke out your mental health issues (like missing your girlfriend from across the country). And as far as the results go, I was just giving up too easily; the reality of working out is that when you’re really pushing to make progress, as opposed to doing maintenance, you are going to be uncomfortable. I think if anything has trained me that when you know something should be good for you, and should provide positive results, but hasn’t, then you just need to persist. Of course, like with so many other things, motivation plays a big role. The discomfort is more bearable when you know it’s making you stronger, and more attractive, and for me most of all more healthy.
Of course, the things you might be dismissing can be broad. It can be people (one which can be particularly painful for everyone involved), it can be places, and counter-intuitively it can be the things you take for granted. It can be trends, but also social movements. I remember hearing about low- and zero-waste products for years and years, and it wasn’t until the last few years where something clicked in my brain and I went “You could just try and not contribute to the world’s problems in this way!”
I think the main reason I’m writing this is to try to help you vaccinate yourself against this. We know about the dangers of boasting, and of misinformation, and of pretending we know more than we do, but I don’t think we think often enough that we might be dismissing something quite important. I think too that this tendency to dismiss often has unsavoury passengers, when something that most people tell you is good seems bad, you could have some special insight and be surrounded by idiots, but the more measured response is probably that you’re missing something.