Enthusiasm

I don't love things the way I did when I was little

I don't love things the way I did when I was little. I don't love movies the way I did when I was little, I don't love stories the way I did when I was little. I tried to read several fantasy books this summer, and even the ones that were well-written I just couldn't become invested in them. My mind would wander as I read. There was none of that old sense of being captivated by the story. I couldn't fall into it. I love that feeling of falling in, whatever it is. Falling into a story or falling in love.

Maybe it has something to do with the general flattening of emotion that accompanies adulthood. I don't know why this flattening happens, but I'm going to go way out on a limb and guess it has something to do with brain development. Any case, I'm not concerned with its causes here, but its effects, and for me, this flattening has on the whole been a good thing. I'm calmer than I used to be, and I'm not so angry, and I fall asleep almost immediately on an almost regular basis. But I have this theory that all feelings, positive or negative, enter us by the same channel. So if negative feelings have less of a hold on me than they used to, it only follows that positive ones do, too. If my capacity for fear is reduced, then so is my capacity for joy.

So what happens is you spend all this time trying to shut out of the bad emotions while having no idea that you're also blocking out the good ones:

We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster that we go bankrupt and have less to offer everything we start with someone new.

Right now there's sorrow. Pain. Don't kill it, and with it all the joy you've felt.

James Ivory, Call Me by Your Name. The line is delivered by Michael Stuhlbarg. I don't know if the line appears in the novel by André Aciman.

Then you get older and start to wonder why you don't feel things so strongly as you used to, and after thinking about it you realize what you've done and have to start working the other way, to open the channel again.

So how do you do that?

Being more emotional?

Does it mean wearing your emotions on your sleeve all the time? Because that can be inappropriate and regressive. What do we call people with no emotional regluation? Children.

Maybe a better path is realizing that those negative feelings don't really matter so much. Nothing has really changed, after all, if you do get rained on, other than that you're a little wet.

But can we have it both ways? If we say the little negetaive things don't matter, don't we also have to say that the little positive things don't either?

Drugs

I think getting high or taking mushrooms returns you to something like a childlike state in that senes and emotions become much more powerful. For example, a child can't tell the difference between a real dinosaur and an animotonic one. That's why that T-rex in South Dakota scares the shit out of so many kids. The part of their brain that can tell fiction from reality hasn't developed yet, and so to them the dinosaur is very real, or at least more real than it is to grown ups, who are able to look at it and laugh.

Share the things you love

Another solution to this is to share things you love with people. Just as we glom onto characters in stories, we glom onto people that we care about and so experience things through them. That's why if your girlfriend isnt' having such a good time at this concert, you aren't going to either, even if you love the music. Because a part of you is her, and that part of you (her) doesn't like it. So that's why when you watch a movie you've seen a thousand times with someone you love, assuming they've never seen it, a part of you (the part of you that's them) epxeriences it for the first itme.

So this might be one argument for having children. I've never though that having children for the sake of having children, or to save a marriage, is a good idea. But there might be something to idea of having children in order to reinvigorate your enthusaism for living. Because you get to epxiernece life all over again, through their eyes. I don't know if that's a reason to have kids in itself, or just a happy and deeply meaningful side effect of doing so. Or maybe it's our built in incentive to have kids in the first place. Maybe it's a little trick nature is pulling. You lose your ability to enjoy life as you get older, so you have kids in order to reclaim it, to feel that again. Which would mean that desire is pretty strong.

Other thoughts

But on another note, what does it mean to work to enjoy something? What does it mean to try to be enthusaistic about something? If you have to try, are you really all that enthusaistic about ti? Do you really like it all that much to begin with? And if you don't like it, why bother trying to get excited about it in the first place?