The Duty to Enjoy

A colleague of mine was talking for a long time about joining the Pilates class at the gym. After she finally made it (to the one class I missed), I asked her how it was. "I'm not going again", she said. "I didn't enjoy". What a novel idea, I thought, enjoying an activity right from the beginning, before you get to a certain level.

In a TV interview about private high schools, a middle-class father explains: "my daughter didn't enjoy going to the [public] school, so I moved her here". I never thought about high school as an enjoyable experience. You go because you need education and because your parents expect it from you.

Our jobs are not merely a means to survive, we enjoy our challenging tasks and status at work. Life is short and we want to enjoy as much as we can right now, not later, after we finish our duties.

With this inflation in enjoyment, sometimes I wonder what happened to good(?) old sense of duty.

The ascetic blogger.