shame of simple pleasures

Hello, I have been contemplating the shame of simple pleasures. This is a quote from a friend. I have not yet grown wise enough to deeply enjoy simple things. We are all terrible accountants of our own joy.

Most of us only accept deposits when the transaction is sufficiently large: the day we get married, the night we play the main stage at Glastonbury, or the moment the business sells for $100 million. Anything less, and the entry does not even make the ledger.

We treat small pleasures like counterfeit currency. That thing made your day; that small moment made your week. How feeble, how desperate, how limited your life must be to be thrilled by something so unimpressive. You must not have a lot going on. We roll our eyes at the tiny events that others get excited about, as though joy must be proportionate to scale. And yet, life is made up of little things, exactly like this.

Not once in a while, but always, your life is constructed out of moments so small they would not even register as an event on anyone's calendar. So, why can't something small be something great? Sometimes I feel things more deeply than I should, including the shame at feeling things more deeply than I should. Also including the shame of being delighted by little things more than I think I should, as if taking pleasure in something tiny reveals the smallness of my life.

But perhaps that's exactly backward. Maybe the true richness of a life is how much joy you can harvest from the smallest possible patch of soil.

And here's the payoff: when you lower the threshold for joy, you don't just get more of it, you get it now. Who is truly the more impressive person: the one who requires a huge cathedral of fanfare and galactic accomplishments in order to get the slightest flicker of pleasure, like some masochist demanding car batteries be clamped onto his nipples before he can even get started, or the person who can do it with a good coffee and a fresh breeze? I wrote.

Chris Williamson | #Repost @kngstoic • • • @chriswillx reads his essay 📄 on ‘Shame’ with @theschooloflifelondon We are all terrible accountants of our own... | Instagram

23K likes, 200 comments - chriswillx on December 12, 2025: "#Repost @kngstoic • • • @chriswillx reads his essay 📄 on ‘Shame’ with @theschooloflifelondon We are all terrible accountants of our own...