The “Trivial” Things You Uniquely Enjoy

MTYL Memo #3—for those creating more freedom, purpose & possibility.

How well do you know what you actually and uniquely like? Not because it’s “cool,” or because all your friends like it, or because you “should,” but just because you do.

It’s worth knowing these things about yourself.

Years ago, I stumbled upon this brilliant quote in C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. For context, this treasure of a book is about a master devil (Screwtape) training his apprentice (Wormwood) to do a better job of tempting—making miserable—his “patient.” The “patient” is a man who’s newly converted to Christianity, but otherwise just an ordinary person making his way through life.

Screwtape says to Wormwood:

“I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue in them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust.

The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the “best” people, the “right” food, the “important” books.”

As I’ve simplified life, money, and work over the years, I’ve come to know my personal tastes—separate from those of people around me. Here are a few of those things:

• Hershey’s milk chocolate

• Motivational sports movies

• Gold jewelry > silver

• Rocks and birds

• Mary Higgins Clark mysteries

What seemingly trivial things do you just really and uniquely enjoy?

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