> Bad art is always with us, but any given work of art is always bad in a period way; the particular kind of badness it exhibits will pass away to be succeeded by some other kind. It is unnecessary, therefore, to attack it, because it will perish anyway... The only sensible procedure for a critic is to keep silent about works which he believes to be bad, while at the same time vigorously campaigning for those which he believes to be good, especially if they are being neglected or underestimated by the public.
In other words, most bad things will be forgotten eventually anyway; the tragedy is when a good thing is also forgotten. So, it's more useful to call attention to what you like rather than waste time spotlighting what you don't.
In my own life, I noticed that, no matter how much I like something, I'll forget 95% of it after a year anyway. Most movies I've seen, most books I've read, video games I've played, whatever: I can tell you the outline of the plot, and a couple things I found interesting. Everything else, all the little details, are gone. Over time, I've just learned to accept that frailty, and now I focus only on spotting the few interesting things I want to take away from a work, whether or not I liked it as a whole. Those things are, in effect, the work's legacy for me. And if a work gives me one interesting new idea, or new image, or whatever, then it was worth my time in the long run.
I also think that, at least some of the time, when we say we don't like something, we're trying to tell people something about our identity and affiliations. We're really saying "I'm not the kind of person who likes this thing". So, the review is not of the work itself, but of what we view as its larger semiotic or cultural position, with respect to our own. We get caught up in proxy wars, and sometimes make unfair evaluations of works of art based on characteristics they can't be blamed for having. Grading them on a test they didn't know they were taking.
I mostly agree with the quote, in fact, I occasionally see bad works of art that would otherwise get quickly forgotten become more famous because of the negative criticism.
On the other hand, when I read reviews I always go for the negative reviews because I want to be warned about the thing's potential flaws. Even if I disagree with the critics I still learn so much about my favourite works of art thanks to those opinions.
Also, if a critic claims that everything is excellent, then I have no way to act on their recommendations because I don't know what's their standard or taste unless I can compare it with something they didn't like.
> We're really saying "I'm not the kind of person who likes this thing"
A friend of mine often makes the comment "x is not for me". I like it and have adopted it. I appreciate the lack of negativity. Too often people will just say "I hate x" when really hate is not what they mean.
Hanging out with people who like stuff is generally a lot more rewarding than hanging out with people who don't - who are endlessly cynical or negative and love to explain why they don't think things are any good.
So defaulting more towards liking thing can make you a more fun person to be around.
The book “Learned Optimism” (Martin Seligman, PhD at the forefront of the discovery of learned helplessness in the 60s-70s) explores the impact of explanatory styles and how those styles are indicators that reliably predict depression/stuck-ness on the one side and resilience/achievement on the other.
I think your instinct is right on, and highlights both sides of this effect: people like being around people who are optimistic. This has implications for both optimistic people and pessimistic people.
Pessimism reinforces itself (No on wants to hang out with me, I’m unlovable), and optimism seems to have the opposite reinforcing effect.
Cultivating qualities of optimism in yourself seems to be powerful because it not only changes your own outlook for the better, but actually leads to real world improvements in your relationships, which in turn gives you more reasons to feel optimistic.
For most of my life, I spun my own default-to-pessimism as just part of my identity and occasionally useful in certain work settings.
But I’ve recently come to realize where this pessimism came from (drilled into me during childhood), that it doesn’t need to be permanent, and can be replaced by better patterns of thought.
Mix this with a bit of mindfulness/zen meditation, and the world looks like an entirely different (better) place.
I just picked up this book recently in the hopes of achieving an outcome like you have, nearly finished with it. I'm also going through a self-guided therapy of DBT, which seems to go hand-in-hand with Learned Optimism (although I haven't seen anyone else make an explicit connection yet).
I haven't tried DBT, but I have had very good success with talk therapy/CBT with a trauma-aware therapist. I realized that much of what I had been working on in therapy was covered by the book, but the book revealed some areas where I was still on the very side of pessimistic, and I'm now taking more active steps to address those areas.
I think it cuts both ways. If you're a connoisseur of something — film, music, novels, food, wine, etc. — it's not necessarily fun to hang around people who have no taste in that thing, lack discernment, and think everything is great. That can quickly get boring and tiresome.
It feels to me that there's a kind of inauthenticity to the author's approach, and it's possible to perceive that inauthenticity in others. Fake enthusiasm can be as bad as or worse than lack of enthusiasm.
I understand what you’re saying, but I’d argue that what you’re describing is not the other side of the same coin, but a different set of considerations to examine when assessing the health of your social life. Not every friend will share every interest, and that’s perfectly ok. I connect more with some friends on some topics, and more with other friends on others. Their likes/dislikes are only one set of properties, and my ability to nerd out about some specific thing is limited to the friends who share that deep interest.
The message I took from the writing wasn’t “like everything indiscriminately”, but closer to “stop making hating stuff a part of your identity”. The difference is subtle but critically important.
Among the people I know who have wide ranging interests, that range is not synonymous with a lack of discernment, but rather a lack of inexplicable and unnecessary hatred/dislike.
> It feels to me that there's a kind of inauthenticity to the author's approach, and it's possible to perceive that inauthenticity in others.
I’m curious why you feel this way? I didn’t take this from the writing at all, and writing is often the least reliable way to detect a lack of authenticity.
I mean this with all respect/love, but we often find what we look for, and if that’s your default mode, such findings can become pervasive and color all experience.
> Fake enthusiasm can be as bad as or worse than lack of enthusiasm.
From the perspective of whom? For the person who lacks enthusiasm, faking it for a time can be the key to unlocking the real thing. Unlocking the real thing can lead to a much better life.
It seems the only situation where it could be worse, would be for observers who find the concept distasteful. But now we’re back to “maybe don’t get so invested in disliking things”, and ultimately we’re each responsible for our own reactions.
> The message I took from the writing wasn’t “like everything indiscriminately”, but closer to “stop making hating stuff a part of your identity”. The difference is subtle but critically important.
I'm not sure where you got that from the article. The author seemed pretty clear: "Perhaps it’s a passionate interest of someone you care about, and you’d enjoy having common ground there. Or maybe it’s something you have to do for social or societal reasons, and you’d prefer that it wasn’t such an unpleasant experience for you."
> I’m curious why you feel this way? I didn’t take this from the writing at all, and writing is often the least reliable way to detect a lack of authenticity.
For example: "With TV shows I don’t want to watch — which is almost all of them, because I’m really not a TV person — my focus is on lighting design, and shot framing, and blocking." So the author doesn't really learn to "like" (in the real sense) the content of the TV shows, maybe not even appreciate (the author's synonym for like) the content of the TV shows. He's just looking at them in some kind of anthropological way, it seems, as a detached scientific observer.
> From the perspective of whom?
From the perspective of people who have real enthusiasm and can sniff out fake enthusiasm.
> For the person who lacks enthusiasm, faking it for a time can be the key to unlocking the real thing.
I don't know. I'm not convinced that this is a real psychological phenomenon.
Having said all that, it's of course important to be supportive of the interests of your loved ones, don't complain about them to your loved ones, and be willing to spend mutual time participating. That's just plain common sense and doesn't need a long-winded article. None of this requires that you must "like" (appreciate?) the thing, or even fake enthusiasm for it.
> and you’d prefer that it wasn’t such an unpleasant experience for you. In these sorts of circumstances, the challenge is to find a way to like the thing that you don’t already like.
To your point, he also speaks about wanting to like things for other reasons, but in my experience, the reasons people often don't do that still boils down to aversion. Admittedly this is not universal.
> He's just looking at them in some kind of anthropological way, it seems, as a detached scientific observer.
That's one way to interpret it, but what he describes also sounds closer to Buddhist and similar philosophies that encourage a more direct experiential outlook on life instead of an existence controlled/clouded by thoughts and concepts. Put another way, there is beauty to be found in even the lowest quality TV shows when viewed experientially instead of critically/intellectually. The experiential view stems from a more fundamental reframing of what you see around you, and is the opposite of an anthropological/detached stance.
I could be reading too deeply into what he's saying, but detachment isn't the only way to interpret this advice.
> From the perspective of people who have real enthusiasm and can sniff out fake enthusiasm.
What is the purpose or utility of doing so? If the enthusiasm benefits the individual practicing it, it seems the ultimate conclusion of such a stance is self-defeating.
There are various studies that explore the effects of one's mentality and how it can modulate experience [0]. As someone on a long journey out of a depression fueled by a lifetime of learned pessimism, there is a stage of the journey in which one must choose how they feel, and persist in those choices until they start to become real. This happens in conjunction with other forms of therapy, and CBT plays a big role in rewiring the problematic thought patterns.
The placebo effect lives somewhere in this realm, as do notions of learned helplessness and the opposite mode of an optimistic mindset and the resulting cascades of positive and negative effect that are left in their wake [1].
I think the use of the word "fake" is really the issue. It brings notions of wrong-ness to the forefront whether or not such notions actually make sense. If you find that you cannot tolerate enthusiasm that doesn't meet certain criteria, that's understandable, but I'd caution strongly against the inclination to rail against it, especially when to do so is purely at the expense of the happiness of others.
> it's of course important to be supportive of the interests of your loved ones, don't complain about them to your loved ones, and be willing to spend mutual time participating. That's just plain common sense and doesn't need a long-winded article
As someone who grew up in an environment that is the opposite of what you describe, and having spent years undoing the damage of that environment while meeting countless folks who lived through a similar experience, the prevalence of the kinds of problematic behavior an article like this tries to discourage is much higher than you may realize.
I feel you're projecting things from yourself into the article that aren't there.
> the reasons people often don't do that still boils down to aversion.
I'm not sure what you intend by this, but the author says, "Often in life, you’ll find yourself in the position of either disliking something or just not having strong feelings about it. That’s normal and fine."
> That's one way to interpret it, but what he describes also sounds closer to Buddhist and similar philosophies that encourage a more direct experiential outlook on life instead of an existence clouded by thoughts and concepts.
Well, the author never mentions Buddist and similar philosophies, so I don't interpret it that way.
> I could be reading too deeply into what he's saying
Yes, I think so. :-)
> What is the purpose or utility of doing so? If the enthusiasm benefits the individual practicing it, it seems the ultimate conclusion of such a stance is self-defeating.
I'm confused by this whole discussion. The article suggests that the reason to "like" things is social, to fit in with your loved ones or maybe just business associates. Not as some kind of journey into self-improvement or recovery from prior trauma. So again, it seems that you're projecting and reading a lot into this that's not in the article.
I saw kernels of advice that seem relevant to people who tend to struggle with some aspects of social life (like me). Trauma is just a single factor that tends to complicate social life, but is far from the only reason someone might find value in the advice.
You concluded that the article didn't need to be written, which suggests that perhaps the content is just not relevant to you. But that's the value of discussion threads like this - to reflect back what we heard, to read each other's reflections, and to take those into consideration as we contemplate the content and decide how valuable and relevant it is to each of us, individually.
Sometimes perspectives will differ, and within those differences you'll find the entire value of a discussion thread.
> You concluded that the article didn't need to be written
That's my opinion, but we can legitimately disagree about that. I have no wish to argue it.
My argument with you was with your interpretation of the article:
> The message I took from the writing wasn’t “like everything indiscriminately”, but closer to “stop making hating stuff a part of your identity”.
You may have taken that message from the article, but you apparently already had that idea before you read the article. As far as I see, there's nothing in the article text that says anything like that.
In any case, my original comment wasn't arguing with you but rather with someone else: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35122226 You replied to me, but I don't think your reply was very relevant to mine.
Yes, sometimes people pretend to like something just to be polite, and that can be disappointing. I don’t know if it’s worse than a lack of enthusiasm? I think as a performer you’d rather have polite applause than none at all. But it can be more confusing.
Assuming that’s what they’re doing seems like a bad habit to get into, though. Someone who’s experiencing something for the first time is going to have enthusiasm for things that are old hat to an expert, and in that case cynicism just kills the moment. (See: https://xkcd.com/1053/)
I think you just need to learn to live with ambiguity.
This is like, the secret to life. If you can enjoy exercise, healthy eating, working on your relationship, and challenging impactful work, spiritual inquiry, etc. you are set
Can't tell if serious or not, but this sounds like Homer Simpson. Granted he's got a family, but he's seemed to be fairly neglectful towards his family's actual needs, talking past them and hearing only what he wants to hear in light of his family members' literal words spoken lol.
Interestingly, James Williams points out in his book Stand Out of Our Light that the technology of the "attention economy" doesn't does distract us from our immediate goals and into internet holes, but over time diverts us from wanting what is good for us.
Exactly. And they get away with it precisely because we believe in this wrong notion of freedom.
We’re still stuck at the 2nd stage of the three transformations that Nietzsche outlined back in the 1980s. Which is essentially to think we’re free only because we get to reject people who outright tell us what to do.
He said, “Free though callest thyself? Free of what - what do I care about it. But free to do what? That is what thy gleaming eyes shall tell me!”
It also helps that no one is paying any attention to BF Skinner anymore. It’s not the people who tell you what to do that you should fear. It’s those who know how to make you do it voluntarily.
I wish I could upvote this twice - the folks I know who have cultivated the skill of liking stuff have been some of the most productively creative people I’ve ever known. Learning how to like stuff is a superpower for people who want to make things worth making.
4000 weeks in a nutshell… just try to be in the moment enjoying what you are eating seeing hearing feeling, seeing yourself while doing mundane tasks, being present when with friends and family, active listening,… reads like platitudes sorry. But it works.
Esp here, where the default is to shoot things down and find the fatal flaw that someone overlooked. Critique has its place, but all forms of No are a thought terminating action. Questioning and exploration cease. I think of it more as a pervasive curiosity, and how can we encourage that in others.
Be charitable, stay curious and encourage those traits in others.
> Bad art is always with us, but any given work of art is always bad in a period way; the particular kind of badness it exhibits will pass away to be succeeded by some other kind. It is unnecessary, therefore, to attack it, because it will perish anyway... The only sensible procedure for a critic is to keep silent about works which he believes to be bad, while at the same time vigorously campaigning for those which he believes to be good, especially if they are being neglected or underestimated by the public.
In other words, most bad things will be forgotten eventually anyway; the tragedy is when a good thing is also forgotten. So, it's more useful to call attention to what you like rather than waste time spotlighting what you don't.
In my own life, I noticed that, no matter how much I like something, I'll forget 95% of it after a year anyway. Most movies I've seen, most books I've read, video games I've played, whatever: I can tell you the outline of the plot, and a couple things I found interesting. Everything else, all the little details, are gone. Over time, I've just learned to accept that frailty, and now I focus only on spotting the few interesting things I want to take away from a work, whether or not I liked it as a whole. Those things are, in effect, the work's legacy for me. And if a work gives me one interesting new idea, or new image, or whatever, then it was worth my time in the long run.
I also think that, at least some of the time, when we say we don't like something, we're trying to tell people something about our identity and affiliations. We're really saying "I'm not the kind of person who likes this thing". So, the review is not of the work itself, but of what we view as its larger semiotic or cultural position, with respect to our own. We get caught up in proxy wars, and sometimes make unfair evaluations of works of art based on characteristics they can't be blamed for having. Grading them on a test they didn't know they were taking.